In an otherwise perfectly fine post about white resentment, Ezra Klein writes:
Ending slavery meant destroying a lot of privilege, and it created a war.
That’s half right. Ending slavery did mean destroying an awful lot of white privilege. Cry me a river. But what caused the war was the South’s effort to expand slavery into new territory, and the unwillingness of the Republican Party — and especially its leader, Abraham Lincoln — to compromise on that issue. Now sure, one can make the case that if slavery didn’t expand, it was doomed, that eventually the balance of power in the Senate would tilt toward the free states. That’s a fine argument. And maybe that’s what Ezra meant. But that’s not what he wrote.
Why do I call him Ezra? I have no idea. And why can’t I leave well enough alone? Because when an ostensibly progressive pundit starts suggesting that the Civil War started because Yankees (I assume) destroyed the institution of slavery, well, I’m not able to get to sleep. If that makes me this guy, so be it. Really, Civil War memory has been a major issue throughout this campaign season: from Ron Paul’s suggestion that the war was a mistake, to Mike Huckabee’s courageous defense of the Confederate flag, to Barack Obama’s heritage. And so it behooves progressives to fight the good fight, not give aid and comfort to the slaveocracy. [/pedantry]*
* Probably not.
15 comments
August 7, 2008 at 12:29 am
andrew
The free states in the North managed to end slavery without creating a war.
August 7, 2008 at 12:30 am
andrew
(Just trying to be extra pedantic.)
August 7, 2008 at 2:09 am
albiondia
Seems to me that blaming a frustrated, expansionist-minded slaveocracy for the Civil War is still pretty limiting; ie, it doesn’t explain WHY war came. For that, I think, you need to inject a hefty dose of (progressive) evangelicalism and decided sense that the Union – and more fundamentally, an election result – was worth enforcing at great cost.
Wouldn’t it be fair to suggest that the suvival of slavery appeared as threatened by the prospect of a non-sectional Republican Party – a Southern arm composed of Clays and Helpers – as it was by Northern opposition to the westward expansion of slavery?
And you don’t need to defend your getting heated on Civil War memory. (a) it’s your job; (b) this is your (pretty awesome, by the way) blog; and (c). this stuff matters. Especially when people started using ‘way of life’ as lazy shorthand for the history of the entire (antebellum and postbellum) South.
August 7, 2008 at 5:27 am
jim
I’ll probably get accused of parsing too closely, but, while I wholeheartedly agree that the attempted expansion of slavery caused the tensions that led up to the war, the actual proximate cause of the war was the purported secession of the southern states and subsequent acts of armed rebellion by agents of those states against the US government. Secession is a multivalent act, but one of the things that it constituted was, surely, a formal abandonment of attempts to extend slavery within the United States :).
August 7, 2008 at 5:43 am
Vance Maverick
I would cut Ezra a few coils of slack. He’s not such a careful writer (nor blogs such a careful medium) that we should beat him up over a word choice. He could easily have written that ending slavery “cost” a war.
This is not to say, of course, that you ought not to correct him; just as albiondia says. Is there a way to correct him lightly, without relaunching the last battle of the war? (Jim’s comment, for example, doesn’t bear on Ezra at all, but returns to the old fray.)
August 7, 2008 at 7:16 am
ari
Ezra’s (there I go again) terrific. I read him every day. So I think you’re right, Vance. And I tried to to say as much in my post. Still, given that there’s been so much discussion about the war in recent months, and given that someone was wrong (or not careful enough with his choice of phrasing) on the internets, I couldn’t stop myself.
As for the substance, jim and albionda, there are plenty of ways to discuss the coming of the war that make at least some sense. But I think we can all agree that saying that ending slavery created the war gets the chronology and causation wrong. Right?
August 7, 2008 at 7:26 am
Vance Maverick
Right!
August 7, 2008 at 7:50 am
albiondia
Yep, no qualms there.
August 7, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Charlieford
Among the most disturbing trends out there is the degree to which Northern Aggression and New Deal=Socialism are becoming the new conventional wisdom. Propogating through home- and Christian-school curricula (often deriving from the South), it’s linking up with libertarianism at formal (most obviously thru Lew Rockwell and the von Mises Institute) and to a lesser degree, informal levels (through the somewhat knee-jerk libertarianism/anarchism popular with adolescents and young folk). Or so it seems on some days.
August 7, 2008 at 3:23 pm
ari
Or so it seems on some days.
For me, at least, the past couple of years have been one of those days.
August 7, 2008 at 11:55 pm
Zeke
Wouldn’t it be a touch more accurate to say that the war’s proximate cause was the demonstration (as percieved by South Carolinian slaveowning politicians) that pro-slavery forces had lost the balance of power in national politics? After all, it was an election, in which an anti-slavery candidate won despite fragmented but universal Southern opposition, that sparked secession, not any actual statutory attempt to abolish slavery or prevent its expansion. I’ll grant, of course, that this is fairly absurd hairsplitting, but then again the whole exercise of coming up with a single explanation for the cause of the war is a touch silly. After all, the civil war would not have occurred had Lincoln been willing to accept the partial dissolution of the Union, or if the South had been willing to accept Lincoln’s election, etc. etc. etc. When you get dow to it, it was fought over slavery, and anything more specific requires so many caveats and complications as to be largely useless for the kind of quasi-polemicism that we enjoy on these internets.
August 8, 2008 at 7:58 am
Nebris
The American Civil War took place because the South was psycho-culturally incapable of accepting what it perceived as the eventual results of the election of Lincoln and the North was likewise psycho-culturally incapable of accepting what it perceived as the eventual results of Southern secession. That their respective perceptions were based on very realistic fears simply made the reactions all the more ferocious.
August 8, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Charlieford
The reluctance of the North to “accept” southern secession was more political and economic than merely “psycho-cultural.” On the political front, secession constituted a Constitutional crisis: accepting it would establish the precedent that elections are not determinative, and that “losers” had the option of “going their own way.” The loss of the Mississippi River/New Orleans likewise would have rendered the Mid-West economically untenable. Likewise, the motivations of the South were more crassly economic than is sometimes portrayed. Remember that the “first” secession was really that which split the Democrats in April/May of 1860, over the demand that the platform recognize the right of all citizens to take their property into whatever territories they wished, and the concomitant duty of the Federal government to protect that property (small government and states’ rights only cut in certain directions for those people).
August 9, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Daniel Buck
Two thoughts on the subject. First, as I recall (in other words, this is a memory shot, like a bank shot in billiards, but shakier), Lincoln offered the South an unamendable constitutional amendment enshrining slavery. In other words, slavery forever and ever in the then slave-holding states. That offer went nowhere.
Counterfactual question. If the South had accepted the offer, how many more decades would slavery have lasted? Would the United States have been the last country on earth to have abolished slavery?
Second, race. If the slaves had been Irish or Polish or Italian, they could have been absorbed into southern society. But the slaves were black. Not only black, but in several southern states a substantial percentage of the population. The south had painted itself into a corner. Nowhere to go. It was a lost cause before it was a Lost Cause.
Dan
August 9, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Daniel Buck
Here’s the citation for the constitutional amendment: chapter 28, “Compromise Rejected,” THE ROAD TO DISUNION: SECESSIONISTS TRIUMPHANT (2007), William W. Freehling. I was wrong about Lincoln, it was the “Committee of Thirteen” (Senators), led by Kentucky’s John J. Crittenden, who, after the election of 1860 but before Lincoln’s inauguration, wrote the amendment and made the offer.
Freehling implies Lincoln would have agreed to it.
(Freehling also asks the “what if?” question. If there had been no civil war, how long would slavery have lasted?)
So, in essence, the slave states rejected a deal that would have given them a couple more generations of slavery — maybe more than a couple — for a disastrous war and the end of slavery.
One reason for their rejection, I think, is my second suggestion above.
Dan