A Matter of Perspective

For decades academic historians have attributed the causes of the Civil War to  two factors: First was to prevent Southern Secession in order to “Preserve the Union” because a United America was  a role model for the rest of Western Civilization.    Second was to prevent the spread of slavery into the federal territories because the institution was morally repugnant.

The first factor suggests that “Preserving the Union” was a noble objective to maintain the brotherhood of Americans, North and South. In truth, such sentimentality was a secondary goal if it was a goal at all. Northerners chose to fight the Civil War because a unified America brought them prosperity.

The federal Union enabled the states to prosper by promoting commercial trade among them. Without a Union, the individual states might be tempted to put up trade barriers to protect suppliers within their own state. New York, for example, might put a tariff on goods from Connecticut and vice versa. But in 1789 (the first year of the Republic) Virginia’s James Madison pushed through the Tonnage Act that put a 50-cent per ton tax on the cargo capacity of foreign ships entering American ports but only a 6-cent tax for domestic ships, a boon to New England’s maritime and shipbuilding industries.

Regarding slavery, historians  portray the Southerner as the “bad” guy.  Southerns chose to secede, they proclaim, because  Republicans would not let them take their slaves into federal territories.

When some of the seven cotton states started publishing their Declarations of Causes for Secession in the winter of ’60 – ’61 the legislatures of at least ten “free” states passed joint resolutions to explain why they objected to Southern secession. After fulminating about Southern “traitors” and “rebels” they generally concluded on the point that the Union promoted economic prosperity.

At the 1787 constitutional convention the Northern states declared that they had but one motive to form a constitution, and that was commerce. By the time of the Civil War they were generating about $350 million in revenues for themselves from Southern trade, much of which they would lose with a low tariff Confederacy on their Southern border.

By the time of the Civil War the Yankees had a second objective. Specifically, they wanted to quarantine blacks in the South. In voicing his objections to the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that promoted Popular Sovereignty, for example, Abraham Lincoln announced that he wanted the western territories to be settled by free white men. In 1862 his home state of Illinois voted five-to-1 against black suffrage even though blacks accounted for only 0.5% of the Illinois population. After the Emancipation Proclamation took effect in 1863 the Union Army attempted to send blacks to Massachusetts for resettlement but Governor John Andrews refused to accept them. He said they would just become paupers. That kind of rejection of blacks from the North was typical.

The quarantine was successful enough to keep 90% of blacks living in the South as late last 1910—fifty years after Lincoln was elected President.

Philip Leigh

Philip Leigh contributed twenty-four articles to The New York Times Disunion blog, which commemorated the Civil War Sesquicentennial. He is the author of U.S. Grant's Failed Presidency, Southern Reconstruction (2017), Lee’s Lost Dispatch and Other Civil War Controversies (2015), and Trading With the Enemy (2014). Phil has lectured a various Civil War forums, including the 23rd Annual Sarasota Conference of the Civil War Education Association and various Civil War Roundtables. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Florida Institute of Technology and an MBA from Northwestern University.

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