Sometimes the news of the day touches on the deep roots of our national story, and anniversaries of milestone moments cause us to reflect again on our history.
Most often, these result in a net gain for the study of history as we consider the forces and circumstances that led to those moments.
In the South, our understanding of the Civil Rights struggle has been enhanced as we have reflected on the 50th anniversary of events such as Freedom Summer, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Selma-to-Montgomery March and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was signed into law 50 years ago Thursday.
But there is another topic that has emerged in recent weeks that seems to be having the opposite effect. The efforts to remove Confederate images from state grounds in South Carolina and the state flag in Mississippi have produced not a better understanding of the political and cultural causes of the Civil war but a steady stream of distortions, misconceptions and alternate theories that cloud the history of that epic event.
The chief fallacy that endures, much to chagrin of historians, is the belief that the primary cause of the war was state’s rights rather than slavery.
In 2011, in recognition of the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, pollsters at the Pew Research Center asked: “What is your impression of the main cause of the Civil War?” Thirty-eight percent of the respondents said the main cause was the South’s defense of an economic system based on slavery, while nearly half–48 percent–said the nation fought over the South’s insistence on the right to determine for themselves the subject of slavery, i.e., state’s rights.
Yet the established record of the era allows no room for that belief. In exploring any event, historians try to get as close to the event, chronologically-speaking, as the evidence can lead them, and in document after document, the Southern cause was directly, unambiguously, tied to the question of slavery.
That is not to say other misconceptions do not persist as well. Large numbers of Northerners were either opposed to the abolition of slavery or indifferent. To many Northerners, the war was about preserving the Union, at least on a surface level. But even the preservation of the Union was, in a great sense, a means to a greater end. As Lincoln noted famously in his “House Divided” speech of1858: “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free… It will become all one thing or all the other.”
That statement did not prevent revisionists from attack Lincoln’s motives, however. They point out that Lincoln did not believe that blacks were equal to whites, noting his support for recolonization of free slaves to Liberia and his recorded statements that argued that blacks should not have the right to vote, own property or serve on juries.
The portrait that emerges is that of a president who was conflicted on the question of slavery, but that is not what the Southern states believed at the time believed. Six weeks after Lincoln was elected president, South Carolina seceded from the Union, soon to be followed by Mississippi and the other Southern states.
Likewise, Lincoln’s reluctance to cast the war as a fight against slavery (his Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t issued until halfway through the war) is seen as evidence to support this alternate narrative.
What is deliberately excluded from the revisionist argument is Lincoln believed the war had to be won before slavery could be abolished.
In this case, he faced a precarious balancing act. An outright attack on slavery might mean to loss of the slave-holding border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware, which had not left the Union. The fate of the war, Lincoln believed, rested in keeping those states in the Union. Lincoln was a progressive, but he was, above all, a pragmatic progressive and the concern over the status of the border states is one reason why the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to those states in the Confederacy.
The other reason was that while the authority under the war powers his office provided him allowed Lincoln to free slaves in the rebellious states, he saw no Constitutional authority to ban slavery in the Union states.
The evidence, when viewed in proper context, leaves no credible doubt as to the cause of the Civil War or the motives of those in political power in both the North and South who executed it.
The facts are there. They have been there for 150 years now.
As the recent debates painfully indicate, there are many who still refuse to accept them.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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