There are apologists who claim the causes of the Civil War were varied. They talk about taxes, about state's rights, about independence, about the US Constution.
They're incorrect. Taxes and tarriffs and laws passed in the 1840s and 1850s were all compromises between slave and non-slave states, desperate attempts to keep the US from splitting down the middle. As the years passed, the South became more intransigent, started more and bloodier conflicts in its attempts to spread slavery. The South invaded Mexico in its desire to bypass the Missouri compromise and secure more territory south of that line. They intended to conquer the whole of Mexico. They funded expeditions into Central American nations in attempts to conquer them and bring them into the US as slave states. They mounted two failed invasions of Cuba for the same purpose. The fought a bloody conflict in Kansas, rife with election fraud and murder. The Civil War was not the first time the slavers killed for their institution, not even the fifth. Southern culture was vicious, violent, and fearful.
In the words of Albert Brown, US Senator from Mississippi:
I want Cuba . . . I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason -- for the planting and spreading of slavery.
We know why the Civil War was fought, because the people who fought it told us. Be aware, these are all quotes from the time of the Civil War, so content warnings for the language ahead.
From Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, in his Cornerstone Speech:
The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
US Representative from South Carolina, Laurence Keitt, in a speech to the House, in January of 1860:
African slavery is the corner-stone of the industrial, social, and political fabric of the South; and whatever wars against it, wars against her very existence. Strike down the institution of African slavery and you reduce the South to depopulation and barbarism.
The anti-slavery party contends that slavery is wrong in itself, and the Government is a consolidated national democracy. We of the South contend that slavery is right...
Keitt also spoke to the South Carolina Secession Convention:
Our people have come to this on the question of slavery. I am willing, in that address to rest it upon that question. I think it is the great central point from which we are now proceeding, and I am not willing to divert the public attention from it.
From the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union (note: Declarations of Causes were formal documents, ratified by Congresses or Conventions, but were not legal acts. The acts passed by Congresses intended to bring about secession were the Ordinances of Secession):
The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows:
"No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."
This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made.
We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.
From A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union:
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world.
From Florida's Declaration of Causes of Secession, incomplete and unpublished due to the outbreak of war:
Laws clearly constitutional and as decided to be by the Federal Judiciary as well as by the Courts of all the non slaveholding States where the question has been presented for adjudication have been by counter legislation rendered inoperative, laws without the power to pass which none will deny that the Constitution would not have been adopted.
The nullification of these laws by the Legislatures of two thirds of the non slaveholding States important as it is in itself is additionally as is furnishing evidence of an open disregard of constitutional obligation, and of the rights and interests of the slaveholding States and of a deep and inveterate hostility to the people of these States.
The Congressional halls ... has been prostituted to the daily denunciation and vituperation of the slave holding States as sanctioning oppression robbery and all villainies, thus subjecting the members from these States to the degradation of gross and constantly repeated insults...
By the agency of a large proportion of the members from the non slaveholding States books have been published and circulated amongst us the direct tendency and avowed purpose of which is to excite insurrection and servile war with all their attendant horrors. A President has recently been elected ... mainly if not exclusively on account of a settled and often proclaimed hostility to our institutions and a fixed purpose to abolish them.
Can any thing be more impudently false than the pretense that this state of things is to be brought about from considerations of humanity to the slaves.
It is in so many words saying to you we will not burn you at the stake but we will torture you to death by a slow fire we will not confiscate your property and consign you to a residence and equality with the african but that destiny certainly awaits your children...
From G.T. Yelverton, delegate to the Alabama Secession Convention:
The question of Slavery is the rock upon which the Old Government split: it is the cause of secession.
From S.C. Posey, also to the Alabama Secession Convention:
Mr. President, the fierce strife we have had with the Northern States, which has led to the disruption of the Government, is a trumpet-tongued answer to this question. They have declared, by the election of Lincoln, “There shall be no more slave territory–no more slave States.” To this the Cotton States have responded by acts of secession and a Southern Confederacy; which is but a solemn declaration of these States, that they will not submit to the Northern idea of restricting slavery to its present limits, and confining it to the slave States.
From John Tyler Morgan, also to the Alabama Secession Convention:
The Ordinance of Secession rests, in a great measure, upon our assertion of a right to enslave the African race, or, what amounts to the same thing, to hold them in slavery.
From Jefferson Buford, also to the Alabama Secession Convention:
Now, Mr. President, I submit that while our commission is of much higher import and dignity, it is, in one respect, by no means so broad. We are sent to protect, not so much property, as white supremacy, and the great political right of internal self-control---but only against one specified and single danger alone, i.e. the danger of Abolition rule.
From Robert Hardy Smith, Confederate Congressman from Alabama, in a speech given in Mobile, Alabama, 1861:
We have dissolved the late Union chiefly because of the negro quarrel. ... I congratulate the country that the strife has been put to rest forever, and that American slavery is to stand before the world as it is, and on its own merits. We have now placed our domestic institution, and secured its rights unmistakably, in the Constitution. We have sought by no euphony to hide its name. We have called our negroes 'slaves', and we have recognized and protected them as persons and our rights to them as property.
From the Alabama Ordinance of Secession:
Whereas, the election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin to the offices of president and vice-president of the United States of America, by a sectional party, avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions and to the peace and security of the people of the State of Alabama...
And as it is the desire and purpose of the people of Alabama to meet the slaveholding States of the South, who may approve such purpose, in order to frame a provisional as well as permanent Government...
From Joseph Brown, Governor of Georgia, in a letter written December 7, 1860:
What will be the result to the institution of slavery, which will follow submission to the inauguration and administration of Mr. Lincoln as the President ... it will be the total abolition of slavery ... I do not doubt, therefore, that submission to the administration of Mr. Lincoln will result in the final abolition of slavery. If we fail to resist now, we will never again have the strength to resist.
From Georgia's Declaration of Causes of Secession:
The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present ... the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slaveholding confederate States, with reference to the subject of African slavery. ... The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party ... anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose. ... The prohibition of slavery in the territories, hostility to it everywhere, the equality of the black and white races ... were boldly proclaimed by its leaders, and applauded by its followers. ... The prohibition of slavery in the territories is the cardinal principle of this organization. ... These are the men who say the Union shall be preserved. ... Such are the opinions and such are the practices of the Republican Party ... if we submit to them, it will be our fault and not theirs.
From Louisiana State Commissioner George Williamson, in a speech to the Texas Secession Convention:
With the social balance wheel of slavery to regulate its machinery, we may fondly indulge the hope that our Southern government will be perpetual ... Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery ...
From Thomas Moore, governorn of Louisiana, in his inaugural address in 1860:
So bitter is this hostility felt toward slavery, which these fifteen states regard as a great social and political blessing, that it exhibits itself in legislation for the avowed purpose of destroying the rights of slaveholders guaranteed by the Constitution and protected by the Acts of Congress... [in] the North, a widespread sympathy with felons has deepened the distrust in the permanent Federal Government, and awakened sentiments favorable to a separation of states.
From Texas's Declaration of Causes of secession:
We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.
[Texas] was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.
The States of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa, by solemn legislative enactments, have deliberately, directly or indirectly violated the 3rd clause of the 2nd section of the 4th article [the fugitive slave clause] of the federal constitution, and laws passed in pursuance thereof; thereby annulling a material provision of the compact, designed by its framers to perpetuate the amity between the members of the confederacy and to secure the rights of the slave-holding States in their domestic institutions...
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 an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of 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 Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.
They have for years past encouraged and sustained lawless organizations to steal our slaves and prevent their recapture, and have repeatedly murdered Southern citizens while lawfully seeking their rendition.
They have, through the mails and hired emissaries, sent seditious pamphlets and papers among us to stir up servile insurrection and bring blood and carnage to our firesides.
They have sent hired emissaries among us to burn our towns and distribute arms and poison to our slaves for the same purpose.
And, finally, by the combined sectional vote of the seventeen non-slave-holding States, they have elected as president and vice-president of the whole confederacy two men whose chief claims to such high positions are their approval of these long continued wrongs, and their pledges to continue them to the final consummation of these schemes for the ruin of the slave-holding States.
From Henry Lewis Benning, in a speech before the Virginia Secession Convention:
If things are allowed to go on as they are, it is certain that slavery is to be abolished. By the time the north shall have attained the power, the black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand for that? It is not a supposable case...
From Thomas F. Goode, in a speech before the Virginia Secession Convention:
Sir, the great question which is now uprooting this Government to its foundation – the great question which underlies all our deliberations here, is the question of African slavery.
From Governor Henry M. Rector, in a speech to the Arkansas Secession Convention:
The area of slavery must be extended correlative with its antagonism, or it will be put speedily in the "course of ultimate extinction." ... The extension of slavery is the vital point of the whole controversy between the North and the South ... Amendments to the federal constitution are urged by some as a panacea for all the ills that beset us. That instrument is amply sufficient as it now stands, for the protection of Southern rights, if it was only enforced. The South wants practical evidence of good faith from the North, not mere paper agreements and compromises. They believe slavery a sin, we do not, and there lies the trouble.
From the resolutions passed by the first Arkansas Secession Convention, their list of grievances:
The people of the northern States have organized a political party, purely sectional in its character; the central and controlling idea of which is hostility to the institution of African slavery, as it exists in the southern States...
... by refusing them the same protection to their slave property therein that is afforded to other property, and by declaring that no more slave states shall be be admitted into the Union. They have by their prominent men and leaders, declared the doctrine of the irrepressible conflict, or the assertion of the principle that the institution of slavery is incompatible with freedom ...
They have, in one or more instances, refused to surrender negro thieves to the constitutional demand of the constituted authority of a sovereign State.
They have declared that Congress possesses, under the constitution, and ought to exercise, the power to abolish slavery in the territories, in the District of Columbia, and in the forts, arsenals and dock-yards of the United States, within the limits of the slaveholding States.
They have, in disregard of their constitutional obligations, obstructed the faithful execution of the fugitive slave laws by enactments of their State legislatures.
They have denied the citizens of southern States the right of transit through non-slaveholding States with their slaves, and the right to hold them while temporarily sojourning therein.
They have degraded American citizens by placing them upon an equality with negroes at the ballot box.
Also from the resolutions passed by the first Arkansas Secession Convention, their attempt at "compromise":
Congress shall have no power to legislate upon the subject of slavery, except to protect the citizen in his right of property in slaves.
The elective franchise and the right to hold office, whether federal, State, territorial or municipal, shall not be exercised by persons of the African race, in whole or in part.
From an article written by John Wilford Overall in his newspaper
Southern Punch published in Richmond, in response to efforts by Confederate ambassadors to whitewash the Confederacy's embarrassing stance on slavery in the face of the international community's widespread and longstanding condemnation of the same (emphasis in the original):
‘The people of the South,’ says a contemporary, ‘are not fighting for slavery but for independence.’ Let us look into this matter. It is an easy task, we think, to show up this new-fangled heresy — a heresy calculated to do us no good, for it cannot deceive foreign statesmen nor peoples, nor mislead any one here nor in Yankeeland. . . Our doctrine is this: WE ARE FIGHTING FOR INDEPENDENCE THAT OUR GREAT AND NECESSARY DOMESTIC INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY SHALL BE PRESERVED, and for the preservation of other institutions of which slavery is the groundwork.
Of course, we must never forget the religious elements at play. White supremacists used the Bible to justify segregation and anti-miscegenation in the 1950s, and to justify slavery in the 1850s. Methodist reverend John T. Wightman:
The triumphs of Christianity rest this very hour upon slavery; and slavery depends on the triumphs of the South . . . This war is the servant of slavery.
And from The Soldier's Prayer Book, published in Charleston in 1863, from No. VII - For Our Confederacy:
From the beginning hitherto thou hast also, O righteous God, associated the institution of slavery as an organic form of involuntary labor with thy Church and people, thereby securing for slaves religious teaching and provision for their temporal wants, and to the world the benefit of service not otherwise attainable.
By thy holy, wise, and powerful providence, Lord, thou hast introduced slavery into these Southern states, which thou hast allotted to our fathers, and to us as a habitation for ever.
Look down upon us especially as a slave-holding Confederacy. As thou hast bestowed upon us the blessing given in perpetuity to the posterity of Shem and Japhet, do thou, in blessing, bless us, and make slavery a blessing, to ourselves, to our slaves, and to the world at large.
Later in the war, because they were losers and were losing, the Confederate government started to get desperate. At a number of times throughout the war, people had considered the prospect of slaves going to war. This notion was universally despised, because Southerners managed to maintain the delusion that slaves were happy in their slavery while simultaneously believing that slaves were mere instants from rising up in universal "servile insurrection" and indulging in a universal orgy of rape and murder. White supremacy is good at that sort of thing; they imagined that black people were necessarily violent and hypersexual and needed a firm hand to be held back from that, and thought black people were glad to be held back from that. Slaves never voluntarily joined the army and were never allowed to carry weapons. Neo-Confederate myths about black soldiers almost always refer instead to slaves taken to war by slave-owners as body servants.
Anywho, as the pro-slavery asshole government of the Confederacy faced the prospect of its imminent destruction, they started seriously considering the prospect of arming slaves, possibly offering them freedom in return for service. A number of people responded in the negative.
Howell Cobb, politician from Georgia and former general in Lee's army thought it was impossible for slaves to make good soldiers, that they were dissolute and barbaric by nature:
If slaves will make good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.
The North Carolina Standard published an editorial:
it is abolition doctrine . . . the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down
And Senator from Virginia Robert M.T. Hunter objected very succinctly on the grounds of state's rights. Just kidding, he didn't want anyone freeing his slaves:
What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?
Finally, let's take a look at some constitutions. Alabama and Georgia decided that joining a new Confederacy meant writing up a new state constitution.
From Georgia, the entire text ofArticle 2, Section VII, Paragraph 3 of their Constitution of 1861:
The General Assembly shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves.
From the Alabama Constitution of 1861, the entire text of Article IV, Section 1:
No slave in this State shall be emancipated by any act done to take effect in this State, or any other country.
Boy howdy, the Texas Constitution of 1861 was determined that no slave would ever be freed by anyone ever. From Article VII: Slaves, we get:
SEC. 1. The Legislature shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves.
SEC. 2. No citizen, or other person residing in this State, shall have power by deed, or will, to take effect in this State, or out of it, in any manner whatsoever, directly or indirectly, to emancipate his slave or slaves.
SEC. 3. The Legislature shall have no power to pass any law to prevent immigrants to this State, from bringing with them such persons of the negro race as are deemed slaves by the laws of any of the Confederate States of America; provided, that slaves who have committed any felony may be excluded from this State.
And of course, the Constitution of the Confederacy as a whole. First, Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 4:
No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
And Article IV, Section 3, Paragraph 3:
The Confederate States may acquire new territory . . . In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and the territorial government.
Look, the Civil War is an absurdly well documented war. There were newspapers and congresses and conventions and letters and diaries... do some digging and you'll find quotes for
days. This is just what I found in the course of a few hours one afternoon. Historians can, and have, spent years digging through archives and published volumes and texts and articles and books about it. Everyone was aware that the war was about slavery, many in both the North and the South resented it: racist Northerners didn't want anything to do with abolition or anything that smelled of giving equality to black folks, and a lot of Southerners who didn't own slaves and who had been conscripted were really upset about the fact that they were risking their lives for the "property rights" of rich assholes who
did own slaves had paid a little fee so they wouldn't have to risk their own lives. Everyone knew the war was about slavery and said so openly. The lie of the Lost Cause and state's rights and all that other horseshit didn't become established until decades later. Anyone who says otherwise... well, let's go ahead and quote The Vidette, camp newspaper for Confederate Brigadier General John Hunt Morgan's Cavalry brigade:
It is a hard matter to get a Union man to acknowledge that this is an abolition war. He will say to you; 'If I thought this was a war for the abolition of slavery, I would not only lay down my arms which I have taken up for the defense of the Union, but I would go into the Southern army...many in the western states speak the same way. Now, any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks, and that the whole course of the Yankee government has not only been directed to the abolition of slavery, but even to a stirring up of servile insurrections, is either a fool or a liar.
Emphasis mine.
