A few weeks before Captain George S. James sent the first mortar round
arcing through the predawn darkness toward Fort Sumter, South Carolina,
on April 12, 1861, Abraham Lincoln cast his Inaugural Address as a
last-ditch effort to win back the South. A single thorny issue divided
the nation, he declared: “One section of our country believes slavery is
right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and
ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute.”
It was not a controversial statement at the time. Indeed, Southern
leaders were saying similar things during those fateful days. But 150
years later, Americans have lost that clarity about the cause of the
Civil War, the most traumatic and transformational event in U.S.
history, which left more than 625,000 dead — more Americans killed
than in both world wars combined.
Shortly before the Fort Sumter anniversary, Harris Interactive polled
more than 2,500 adults across the country, asking what the North and
South were fighting about. A majority, including two-thirds of white
respondents in the 11 states that formed the Confederacy, answered that
the South was mainly motivated by “states’ rights” rather than the
future of slavery. The question “What caused the Civil War?” returns 20?million Google hits
and a wide array of arguments on Internet comment boards and discussion
threads. The Civil War was caused by Northern aggressors invading an
independent Southern nation. Or it was caused by high tariffs. Or it was
caused by blundering statesmen. Or it was caused by the clash of
industrial and agrarian cultures. Or it was caused by fanatics. Or it
was caused by the Marxist class struggle.
On and on, seemingly endless, sometimes contradictory — although not
among mainstream historians, who in the past generation have come to
view the question much as Lincoln saw it. “Everything stemmed from the
slavery issue,” says Princeton professor James McPherson, whose book
Battle Cry of Freedom is widely judged to be the authoritative
one-volume history of the war. Another leading authority, David Blight
of Yale, laments, “No matter what we do or the overwhelming consensus
among historians, out in the public mind, there is still this need to
deny that slavery was the cause of the war.”
It’s not simply a matter of denial. For most of the first century after
the war, historians, novelists and filmmakers worked like hypnotists to
soothe the posttraumatic memories of survivors and their descendants.
Forgetting was the price of reconciliation, and Americans — those
whose families were never bought or sold, anyway — were happy to pay
it. But denial plays a part, especially in the South. After the war, former
Confederates wondered how to hold on to their due pride after a
devastating defeat. They had fought long and courageously; that was
beyond question. So they reverse-engineered a cause worthy of those
heroics. They also sensed, correctly, that the end of slavery would
confer a gloss of nobility, and bragging rights, on the North that it
did not deserve. As Lincoln suggested in his second Inaugural Address,
the entire nation, North and South, profited from slavery and then paid
dearly for it.
The process of forgetting, and obscuring, was long and layered. Some of
it was benign, but not all. It began with self-justifying memoirs by
defeated Confederate leaders and was picked up by war-weary veterans on
both sides who wanted to move on. In the devastated South, writers and
historians kindled comforting stories of noble cavaliers, brilliant
generals and happy slaves, all faithful to a glorious lost cause. In the
prosperous North, where cities and factories began filling with freed
slaves and their descendants, large audiences were happy to embrace this
idea of a time when racial issues were both simple and distant.
History is not just about the past. It also reveals the present. And for
generations of Americans after the Civil War, the present did not have
room for that radical idea laid bare by the conflict: that all people
really are created equal. That was a big bite to chew. The once obvious truth of the Civil War does not imply that every
soldier had slavery on his mind as he marched and fought. Many
Southerners fought and died in gray never having owned a slave and never
intending to own one. Thousands died in blue with no intention to set
one free. But it was slavery that had broken one nation in two and fated
its people to fight over whether it would be put back together again.
The true story is not a tale of heroes on one side and villains on the
other. Few true stories are. But it is a clear and straightforward
story, and so is the tale of how that story became so complicated.
Bleeding Kansas History textbooks say the Civil War began
with the shelling of Fort Sumter. The fact is, however, that the
Founding Fathers saw the whole thing coming. They walked away from the
Constitutional Convention fully aware that they had planted a time bomb;
they hoped future leaders would find a way to defuse it before it
exploded. As the Constitution was being written, James Madison observed,
“It seems now to be pretty well understood that the real difference of
interests lies not between the large and small but between the Northern
and Southern states. The institution of slavery and its consequences
form the line.”
As long as the disagreement remained purely a matter of North and South,
the danger seemed manageable. But then North and South looked to the
west. All that land, all those resources — the idea that the frontier
might be closed off to slavery was unacceptable to the South. It felt
like an indictment and an injustice rolled into one. Slave owners were
not immune to the expansionary passion of 19th century America. They too
needed room to grow, and not just to plant more cotton. Slaves could
grow hemp and mine gold and build railroads and sew clothes. The
economic engine of slavery was immensely powerful. Slaves were the
single largest financial asset in the United States of America, worth
over $3.5 billion in 1860 dollars — more than the value of America’s
railroads, banks, factories or ships. Cotton was by far the largest U.S.
export. It enriched Wall Street banks and fueled New England textile
mills. This economic giant demanded a piece of the Western action.
See the 2011 TIME 100 Poll.
