Why did the North really want to fight the Civil War? I mean the powerful, not the average

[raccoon]

Northerner.

Not because of slavery, surely. I suspect the abolitionists were only a very small minority, and the average person in the Northern states, rich or poor, really didn’t care one way or the other about slavery. Anyway, countries don’t really go to war for humanitarian reasons—they’re just a noble-sounding excuse for going to war.

Was it maybe because if the Confederate states were allowed to secede, it would set a precedent for other states to secede—and then the US would get smaller and smaller and less powerful? Was that why there was all the noise about “preserving the Union?”

I can understand resource wars; I don’t like them but I understand them. If it had been the case that all the coal deposits were located in Southern states, I could understand why the US would not allow them to secede.

So…any thoughts?

[Orrex]

1. Because they wanted to save the intelligent, thoughtful southerners from their neighbors...

who would one day vote for Sarah Palin.

[Brigid]

34. That is almost exactly what happened.

Except they seem to have migrated all over the country.

[lunatica]

2. Lincoln wanted to preserve the country as a unit.

[cali]

3. actually abolitionists were not a small or insignificant minority

and many abolitionists didn't foresee war as the outcome of their movement. The causes of the civil war were a complex web of reason- economics, religion, politics.

[CBGLuthier]

4. I think it was all that "noise" you refer to.

Using the logic about why countries go to war to describe a civil war does not work.

Preserve the Union. Like a certain Italian men's club, you are a member for life.

[brendan120678]

5. True, many in the North didn't care about slavery.

In fact, many of them benefited from slavery just as much as the southern plantation owners did.
Especially the owners of textile mills.

[GreenStormCloud]

6. To preserve the Union was vitally important.

Remember that those were the days of "Manifest Destiny". The country was just coming into its strength, having gone from a militarily weak country to a continental power. In 1845 Mexico was favored to win the war with the U.S. If the country fell apart then California would likely become a separate country too, as would much of the West.

[Deep13]

7. With the country divided, Britain, France and Spain would have been...

...in a much better position to carve up the continent into spheres of influence, kind of like what happened in China.

[zeemike]

8. I think you underestimate the power of the Abolitionist.

That movement became a religious one with preachers lining up on ether side....the south had theres that claimed that slaver way what God wanted and the abolitionist thought it was an abomination in his site.
And there rhetoric got ratcheted up just like today....Untill John Brown did his thing and set the stakes higher.
But there were many of the powerful that supported the abolitionist.

[Lyric]

9. Off the top of my head

1. To maintain free access to the southern ports, like Savannah, New Orleans, etc.

2. Southern natural resources like fossil fuels, especially coal.

3. Railroads. How many northern industrialists had already invested tons of money into building railroads in that area?

4. Many of the southern states were the "food producers" of their time. This was before the Midwest was developed as the breadbasket of America.

5. National security. That's one hell of a border to have to pay to protect, and they didn't trust Southerners to do a good enough job protecting the border with Mexico either.

6. They were worried that a splintered nation might be vulnerable to invasion.

7. They didn't want to risk competition for the resources of the Midwestern and Western territories.

8. They might not have been MORAL abolitionists, but they could have been pragmatic ones. Even if they didn't particularly care about the rights and freedoms of black southern slaves, they could certainly see that a huge slave rebellion in the South was probably inevitable, and I'm sure they thought that such a thing could have ugly consequences for northern business--warehouses, mines, and fields either destroyed or taken over, fugitives and refugees escaping into the north and becoming a burden, railroads dug out, ports blocked.

I might be wrong, but those are just a few guesses.

[OneTenthofOnePercent]

10. Southern states had alot of money and power.

The powerful northerners would always play second fiddle to the high exporting states of the south. "Preserving the Union" and "Humanitarianism" were only a front to keep poor and average northers vested in the side of the North (and keep the armies marching). Northern bureaucrats and barons long knew that the south's source of wealth was cheap/free labor... and since slavery was not allowed in their states, they saw fit to level the playing field.

Most of the exports and cash crops came out of the south. The south largely resented the northern bureaucrats telling them what to do. I don't imagine northern megalomaniacs liked that idea. It got to the point that the south and north became very partisan and when the northern wealthy pulled the strings and Lincoln made his Emancipation Proclamation, that was the straw that broke the camels back. It was a move that not only took rights & property away from southern citizens (southerners didn't consider slaves citizens), but it was a move that crippled the southern export capacity (cotton and indigo became effectively too expensive to produce without slave labor).

The south, in their eyes, was fighting for basically everything - freedom, rights (southerners didn't consider slaves citizens, and their economy. Many in the south believed (and still do) that the war was brought to them. It was dubbed (and I still hear the phrase today), The War of Northern Aggression.

[MacNfries]

11. Why the North wanted war with the South ... my thoughts!

Being of a dying breed ... true blood Southerner ... my feeling is it definitely wasn't as much about slavery as it was biased representation in Washington, DC. Yes, slavery was an issue of that time being constantly debated, but there were a few states in the Union, at the start of the Civil War, that were slave states ... Maryland being one of them. Pretty close to Washington, DC wouldn't you say?

The rich,industrialized North had plenty of money to influence politics in Washington, DC ... the poor, agricultural South didn't, and Southern states felt they were being improperly taxed and taken advantage of by the rich, industrialized Northern states.

[Scruffy1]

47. I consider this revisionist nonsense.

This rewriting of history started a long time ago, and is the sheerest non sense that millions have been fed. I first heard some of this crap during the centennial year (yes I was only 11 when I started hearing this crap.) Originally, the South got to vote .6 votes for every slave. This created a Senate
that was dominated by the Southern bloc vote.
Imagine, if every Republican was allowed to multiply his vote by 1.5 times today and you get an idea of how the Senate was controlled both by seniority and the filibuster. After reconstruction this didn't change after the civil war, since blacks were simply not allowed to vote. By the time they got the vote migration had changed them to a minority. So the South has always had a one party ruling system, just the party names have changed. They used this power to hold the government for ransom and stop progress whenever they could ( sound familiar?). Just look at what happened as soon as they seceded. Transcontinental railway, land grant colleges, and the homestead act.
Many Northerners were willing to fight the South. Having growing up on the Mason-Dixon line and Kansas slave border and studying local history I realize there were many willing to fight the South for various reasons. If you can see the disdain reasonable hold for the tea party, then you can understand the Norths feelings toward the south (I refuse to capitalize either). The First Iowa didn't even wait for orders to invade Missouri and a state of war had existed on the Kansas-Missouri border for years.
A half a million left the South to fight for the North.
Anyone who doubts this should read the first three Articles of the confederate "constitution". It was all about 12 billion dollars in property called slaves.

[fasttense]

12. Yes, it was slavery.

Yes abolitionist were many, passionate and growing.

Slavery after all is tied to economics. If you have a mass of people working away for free, you have a mass of wealth going to someone. The wealth did not go to everyone in the South, just a handful of very rich oligarchs, not all Southerners owned slaves. These very rich people had a nice little feudal society working for them and they did not want to give it up. They loved it so much that a group of rich plantation owners tried to set up the same system in a South American country (I don't remember which one). It didn't work because the natives, they used as slaves, kept running off into the jungle.

Read a few of the declarations by the states that seceded from the union. They make it clear they are separating because they believed their basic institution of generating wealth was under attack (slavery and they use the words too) by the north and they hated Lincoln.

[Adsos Letter]

45. Don't forget the impact of the economic ideology of "free-soilers"

Eric Foner's seminal interpretation is still very relevant (and updated to include the influence of abolitionist sentiment) Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War With a New Introductory Essay <1995>

http://www.amazon.com/Free-Soil-Labor-Men-Introductory/dp/0195094972/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1302636862&sr=8-1#_

[leveymg]

13. Most of the really great fortunes in America have their origins in the Civil War and the wars that

followed. It's how this nation's financial and political system, and the economy, works. Nobody has ever made a dime off of peace and disarmament. If you can find an exception to that rule, it's an exception.

But, as for wanting to start and actually fight a civil war, let's give the Right-wing crazies in South Carolina (and the rest of the South) their due.

[cali]

16. "nobody has ever made a dime off of peace and disarmament"

really? that's absurd. And no, all the great fortunes in America don't have their origins in the Civil War. Why folks make such sweeping statements that are easily proved false is beyond me.

[leveymg]

20. So prove it false.

It's not absurd at all - let's start with banking. Read Chernow's "House of Morgan", and get back to us.

[JVS]

23. People who run army surplus stores have made dimes off of disarmament.

[cali]

29. uh, Microsoft isn't a fortune rooted in the civil war and btw

YOU made the initial claim- it's up to YOU to prove it

[leveymg]

39. No, somehow the Union Army managed without the Windows operating system

But, most of the large financial and industrial fortunes of the Robber Baron era of the last three decades of the 19th Century, and much of the technology, is owed to changes in American industry and society that took place during the Civil War.

As for the most notorious Robber Barons and the dynasties they founded, a good place to start is Chapter 4 of Kevin Phillips "Wealth & Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich", reviewed a few years ago below. Phillips provides a readable snapshot of how the war profiteers of the era came to dominate American society and the national economy in the decades that followed: http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Democracy-Political-History-American/product-reviews/0767905342?pageNumber=2

My particular favorites in Wealth and Democracy are Chapter 4, from which I drew for the symptoms of decline, and Part III, about how "American wealth nourished itself on government influence and power - and vice versa." In the four chapters comprising Part II, Phillips explains that corporate socialism has been popular since, oh, 1787. That's when the first Constitutional Convention went on record encouraging industry and "mechanics," promoting fisheries, forges, factories and new technologies. Why do you think patent protection was written into the Constitution?

Federal land grants and tariff suspensions on iron subsidized several private fortunes for railroad entrepreneurs: Vanderbilt, Gould, Sage, Harriman, Hill and Astor (who bribed his way to a fur fortune and profited from the state-financed Erie Canal). That of course required steel, which Carnegie, Frick and Phipps supplied. And oil, which JD Rockefeller (the first billionaire), W Rockefeller, Payne, Rogers, Flagler and Harkness supplied. Of course, financing all this speculation and industrial expansion were the moneylenders: JP Morgan, A Mellon, R Mellon, Green, Baker, Stillman and Schiff. And government granting of exclusive franchises only cemented the relationship between state power and private fortune.

Eli Whitney was one of the first federal contractors. Samuel Colt profited out of gunmaking during the Civil War. And industry still has their hands out for those fat government contracts. That's how the major fortunes were made in this country. War is always good for business, and for war profiteers, dating back to the Revolution and the Civil War, but continuing through WW I and WW II, on through Korea and Vietnam (technically, the last two were "police actions"). Hey, maybe it's not too late for me to invest in the US-Iraq War?

Government subsidy of pharmaceutical research (from penicillin in WW II to 2/3 of all government biomed spending by 1965, with nothing for the public in return), telecommunications ($90 billion spectrum giveaways, with nothing for the public in return), and the development of the Internet (a Defense Department project) are only the most recent fortune-builders... for the private sector. And that doesn't even count the state and local governments subsidizing public works through private contractors - especially stadiums for millionaires, like the ones in my hometown of Baltimore.

If there is a cautionary tale in Wealth and Democracy, it is that a U.S. government "concerned with protecting wealth may do so at the expense of democratic procedures and may try to blame terrorism rather than flawed policy for hard times." As we enter the second dip of a W-dip recession, Wealth and Democracy sounds like a book for our time.

[cali]

40. yes, but that wasn't your original (now edited) claim and the one I responded to.

[leveymg]

42. What wasn't in there?

The only thing I edited was to add the last sentence about giving the Right-wing crazies in SC and the rest of the South their due for wanting and starting the war.

I come not to praise the South, or to bury the Northern Cause. I'm saying that emerging monopoly capitalism played a major role in creating the conditions that precipitated the Civil War and has been a major contributor to (and beneficiary of) America's many wars that followed.

My edits are merely the reflection of an often uncompleted thought process.

[yellowcanine]

14. Just because many people in the North were ambivalent about slavery doesn't mean the war wasn't

about slavery. It was - precisely because many in the South were NOT ambivalent about slavery. If you read the secession documents of the Confederate states and the newspaper articles from the time it is clear that slavery was the overriding issue.

[GTurck]

15. There are so many...

books on the Civil War to explain it from every angle but yes one of the main reasons was slavery or more accurately the expansion of slavery into new territories and potential states. Abolitionists were a powerful force in some areas and labor in others. The more the South pressed the issue the hotter it got as an issue. Those Northerners and Southerners in Congress and the various states who were willing to talk and compromise were slowly dying out and a new generation who believed in their one side only and expected the other side to capitulate finally made the heat explode into war. Lincoln was voted into office during the turmoil as a new sort of politician who spoke eloquently and wisely but was against expanding slavery and hoped for its eventual ending. The Southern radicals used that as a meme to arouse their base into believing that their "property" would now be confiscated. It didn't matter that the majority of their base did not own slaves only that property rights and hence states rights were the issue. Twisting the truth to manipulate a base is as old as politics and almost always leads to tragedy.
Lincoln was determined that there be a United States under one Constitution, one flag, and one government. The South thought it had a right to secede based on a false reading of the 10th Amendment. They saw their way of life as more important than the nation. The South Carolina militia fired the first shots at Ft. Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Until then it was a war of words.

[Frances]

17. According to Bruce Catton,

the working men in the North fought because they thought it was in their best interests. There had been compromises in the past that allowed slavery to be legal in the old South, but the South wanted to expand slavery into the territories that were becoming states. What we would call blue-collar workers in the non-slave states knew that expanding slavery would make it much, much harder for them to prosper because they would have to compete with workers who received no wages at all.

The working man of the non-slave states hoped to get ahead in the world by his own efforts. And the larger and more powerful the country he was living in, the more likely it was that the average person would be able to move up the economic and social ladder by his own efforts.

White Southern working class people fought because, even though they were assigned their position in the social scale at birth, they were guaranteed a place on the social ladder that was above that of the slaves, so they would never be on the bottom of the ladder.

[Brigid]

33. General Grant said in his memoirs . . .

that he often wondered what would happen if the whites near the bottom of the southern social ladder ever realized that they were little better off than the black slaves they looked down upon.

[Frances]

48. The rich and powerful

were very smart. They were the ones who tacitly encouraged and overtly protected the Klan. The Klan gave poor whites a sense of power. And that sense of power was enough for them to accept their place on the social scale.

[BeGoodDoGood]

18. Slavery Was the Reason

The institution of slavery was clearly the force that impelled the rebellion.

Northerners of all stripes wanted to see representative government, the idea that men could govern themselves are were at last worthy of -being- free, they wanted that supported.

I studied the American Revolution at that great state university in Knoxville. The treaty of Paris stipulated that all the money owed to the Brits (20 times the currency then in circulation in the former colonies) would be paid back.

It never was.

Secessionists probably wanted that same sort of dispensation - a chance to wipe out all their northern debt at one fell swoop. And northern creditors probably didn't want their investments just going 'poof'. So that is another thing, to speak to the theme of this thread. Northern investors wanted their investments honored.

Walt

[JVS]

19. The North didn't want to fight the Civil War, which is why it didn't start it.

[WinkyDink]

24. EXCELLENT POINT. Thank you.

[PVnRT]

28. Winner

[RegieRocker]

21. The civil war never ended. It is still going on. And it's still about

pure caucasin race. They are regressives.

[WinkyDink]

22. No thoughts. The CW bores the living daylights out of me.

No, I am not a-historic; I just prefer to read about wider-ranging wars.

[leveymg]

41. Perhaps, that's just because of the way that it's been taught in most texts and curricula

without the context of Colonial social exploitation, racial genocide, and class conflict that hardened over decades into a Civil War fought along regional lines.

When you read it as a continuum that carries over into contemporary American politics and global policy of a declining empire, it is anything but stale and boring.

[WatsonT]

25. Cotton was big money back then

like the oil industry today.

Breaking up the existing plantations by force would leave a power vacuum that someone with money and political connections among the winning side could exploit.

Someone has to run those oil wells . . . sorry plantations after the war is over.

[Javaman]

26. While I believe it was because Lincoln wanted to preserve the Union...

read up some time about the railroad industry and how it was basically transportation that 1) won the war but also 2) the wealthy's want to expand into the south that helped push for that win.

The Union had thousands of more miles of rail than the south.

The Union was able to transport munitions and soldiers to the front far faster than the south.

One element to the plan of Gettysburg for the south was to take over its huge rail spur. If the South were able to do this, not only would they be able to move more men and equipment north, they would cut the Union effectively in half transpiration-wise. It would have put the south in a good position to sue for peace.

[hedgehog]

27. Several posts above suggest the North needed the South for food supplies,

coal supplies, to protect investments in railroads, etc.

These arguments are based on misconceptions:


http://www.maps.com/ref_map.aspx?pid=11377

http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/bhistory/underground_railroad/map.htm

[sinkingfeeling]

30. There are many fine books about the years before, people, and players of the Civil War. Try either

the Carl Sandburg series or Shelby Foote's as starters. Most universities offer in-depth study of history as well.

[Arkansas Granny]

44. After seeing Shelby Foote on the Civil War mini series by Ken Burns, I have decided

to buy his book, The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville, which is the first in a 3 volume set. I felt that he gave a factual history of the Civil War with more of a Southern perspective than I had heard before. I'm just starting the book, but his writing style is much the same as his oral account and I expect I will be buying the other two volumes as well.

[Geoff R. Casavant]

31. If you can find it, read "Captains and the Kings."

It's a fictional account, to be sure, but it's about the wealthy behind-the-scenes operators during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the arguments made about the Civil War are certainly plausible.

By no means should you watch the mini-series.

[Geoff R. Casavant]

32. Dupe. n/t

[bhikkhu]

35. It was about who's testicles were larger

...or that's the impression I got reading of the run-up, especially all the bull-headed congressional failures to resolve anything. Once it was underway they came up with some good narratives about the "why's", but that's probably how it goes with many wars.

[FLPanhandle]

36. Money, honor, prestige as well as rape, pillage, and burn

Pretty much the standard reasons for going to war.

Of course, all wars have to have their pretty exterior reasons.

Shermans march to the sea was dominated by the wagon trains of loot brought back. The officer corp of the Union Army made out quite well during and after the war. Much better than they would have without it.

[iris27]

37. All supposition, of course, but if I'd lived then,it would've just been about

preserving the union to me.

The Civil War took a terrible toll on our nation - now imagine if the South had won, and every war that followed also had a "home front"? Harry Turtledove has some great spec. fiction along these lines, where the Confederacy signs a deal with Britain and France to give up slavery over X amount of time, in exchange for their recognition as an independent nation. That tips the balance of the war, so understandably the US is pissed off at Britain and France. So when WW1 rolls around, guess who joins opposite sides? The USA becomes an Axis power and the CSA joins the Allied forces...making WWI another war fought on American soil.

Not at all implausible. It's the reason I cringe everytime someone suggests secession here as the answer to our political woes. I would much rather have the fucknuts in my country, screaming with misspelled signs, loyal to my nation in their own twisted way, than at my border with tanks and rifles and nukes.

[WhiteTara]

38. I recently read the bio of Gouverneur Morris

the author (wordsmith) of the constitution and certainly the Preamble. He greatly despised slavery and its effects. He fought very hard against the 3/5 rule because of the undue advantage given slave holders. The slaves couldn't vote, but they got counted in the census (as 3/5 of a person :puke:) and thereby giving the southern states advantage in the representation in the House. He deplored the way the south degraded -- ripped earth, shanties, torn forests, wretched humans - the country and did not like Jefferson for that and many other reasons.

It was an interesting read Gouverneur Morris, An Independent Life by William Howard Adams. Another about him and the views of the Founding Fathers (he was in his 20s during the Continental Congress.) Later became the ambassador to France where he helped them write theirs, is "Gentleman Revolutionary/Gouverneur Morris - The Man Who Wrote the Constitution" by Richard Brookhiser.

However, from the perspective of the book, I would say that there was the idea of preservation of the Nation. It had been a long struggle to get to where they were as a Nation and for the South to be able to profit from slavery while the rest of the country worked for its living was enough to say, STOP THIS and fight them. But, this is just conjecture on my part from having read a book.

[Xithras]

43. There was an economic aspect to it.

The north was primarily an industrial economy, while the south was primarily agricultural. The industries in the northern half of the country were highly dependent on cotton and other raw materials imported from the south. Northern cities also relied heavily on food importation from the warmer southern states during the winter months (food shortages were widespread in the northern states during the Civil War).

The northern economic elite supported the war because they feared that their raw materials would instead be shipped to England, or that it would be subject to additional taxation by both countries, which would undermine their ability to compete. It was in their economic interest to preserve the union.

[Adsos Letter]

46. Also, the impact of labor theory in the "free-soiler" ideology

Eric Foner's seminal interpretation is still very relevant (and updated to include the influence of abolitionist sentiment) Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War With a New Introductory Essay <1995>

http://www.amazon.com/Free-Soil-Labor-Men-Introductory/...
"Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest

[Odin2005]

49. Because the policies the Planter Class supported got in the way of industrialization.

The Planters supported low tariffs, the Industrialists supported high tariffs.