While I think the writer is onto something, I think the headline is misleading. "Everything you know about the Civil War is wrong" is patently false. However, "Much of what you know about the Civil War is incomplete" would be correct. It's not a sexy, flashy title, however.
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Slavery led to secession
Lincoln's refusal to allow it led to war
Huisachel is right. So is BQ78, who is pretty much the gold standard poster on all things Civil War. There are some good comments from others as well, I'll just add my two cents:
Not all states noted slavery in their secession proclamations, but those that did were pretty strong. Texas in particular:
DECLARATION OF CAUSES: February 2, 1861
A declaration of the causes which impel the State of Texas to secede from the Federal Union.Quote:
The controlling majority of the Federal Government, under various pretences and disguises, has so administered the same as to exclude the citizens of the Southern States, unless under odious and unconstitutional restrictions, from all the immense territory owned in common by all the States on the Pacific Ocean, for the avowed purpose of acquiring sufficient power in the common government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her sister slave-holding States.
and
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In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color--a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and the negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.
Smokedraw01 says this:
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Was there any real threat to slavery for the South. The author of the article above stated clearly that northerners were hardly abolitionist, so what major threats to slavery were the south concerned with?
If you read the Texas secession ordinance, they clearly think that there is a massive group of abolitionists in the North, even though we know with hindsight that they were relatively small. But this was an age of partisan "fake news" in which things were often blown out of proportion and there was little opportunity to counter-act it. If Lincoln had been able to go on CNN (probably remotely, since he wouldn't travel to their headquarters in Atlanta)
he would have said, "Hey dudes, chill. I have no intention to abolish slavery."
But of course, even if he had, the fear, hate and skepticism towards him would have led folks to think it was a lie. Remember how Obama said he wasn't an extremist and all the conservatives thought he was lying, or when Trump said he wasn't a racist and all the liberals thought he was lying? Imagine that, but times 30. So there was no trust of Lincoln, and everyone assumed he was basically a twin of John Brown.
This leads me to the next point:
YOU CANNOT TALK ABOUT SECESSION WITHOUT JOHN BROWN. It's like talking about causes for World War II and ignoring Versailles. Yes, it is true that the war was about slavery, but what is slavery? It's not sufficient to define it as human bondage.
To abolish slavery in the south had a deeper meaning to Southerners. It wasn't simply the moral issue, though that was there (Note that the founders' generation were very troubled by the immorality of slavery, but they justified it in their thinking that it would die out in time. By the 1820s and 30s, however, this attitude was replaced with a moral justification and even glorification of slavery that would have seemed shocking to Washington or Jefferson).
1. To a southerner, slavery was his economic system, and there was no alternative. His crops required heavy labor, and as long as Washington gave land out basically for free on the frontier, there was no way to keep free labor there. And if they did, what do they pay them with? Before 1849, specie was basically non-existent in the South, and even after the gold rush, it was hard to come by. Free labor simply didn't work (or they couldn't conceive of it working), and to them, abolishing slavery meant condemning them to poverty and decline.
2. Southerners were perpetually fearful of slave revolts or revenge. African-Americans had been kept in such a debased state that they were considered by their owners as lowly, almost animals. Of course, this was their own fault: you can't treat people like dogs and then complain that they aren't fully civilized. This conception then leads to the belief that the slave response to freedom is going to be an animal response. The caged, underfed tiger will turn on its master.
3. John Brown's raid fuels the fear of 2, and the greater fear that the revenge-seeking slaves are egged on and supported by Northern extremists.
1, 2, and 3 are all considerations that would outweigh the moral elements of freeing the slaves for many folks, even if they had cared about them. 2 and 3 create a moral that in their reckoning, outweighs the moral wrong of slavery. To a southerner, freeing the slaves means the murder and rape of whites in the south. While there might be moral high ground to free slaves, to them, they have the moral high ground, because they are fighting for self-defense against a calamity which will mean their certain death. The right to self defense is basically the first moral responsibility of human beings, and trumps all others.
This last point, by the way, is the reason that most Northerners, even though they were opposed to slavery, were ALSO opposed to abolition, and why many, including Lincoln, tied abolition schemes to resettlement of slaves in Africa.
The fact that slaves did not respond as southerners and northerners had feared is the result of a complex chain of events, not the least of which contributors is the presence of the Union Army throughout the south, but also, something no one could have predicted, that most African-Americans were not consumed by hatred and revenge-seeking. They just wanted to get on with their lives in freedom. This was a great thing, but no one in 1861 would have predicted it.