Dear Alabaman:
I have been in the wrong so much I've bought a timeshare.
This is my theory. Unlike many on this forum, I can't produce the amount of research and stuff, but it is the product of my reading and studying the Civil War for a long period.
In 1861, the Southern states seceded from the Union. The decision makers may
have felt they had a legal right, but I don't think that influenced their thinking. They certainly felt they had a natural right, like the revolutionary generation, to rebel. Certainly men like Lee felt that way.
Why did they secede? To protect their rights.
Which rights are those? To own slaves
Why was slavery worth secession, and prehaps war?
Because of the central place slavery held in the Southern economy.
Also, because American slavery was race based, with a philosophy of absolute race inferiority of blacks to whites, because to interfere with slavery seemed to violate the order of nature, and to have unknown and dangerous social consequences, that abolitionists, far to the North, would not share.
But the vast majority of the Southern armies were made up of non slaveowners? What stake did they have?
Most of the
CS soldiers may have resented the planter class, but many aspired to be part of it. Nearly all the
CS soldiers were white, and strongly held to the belief of white superiority, and shared the slaveowners angry and anxiety of "outsider" attempts to interfere with the bedrock reality of their society: white superiority.
Because of concerns about servile revolt, especially as the national debate sharpened, the average Southerner heard less and less that would disagree with this. The range of political debate and opinion in the South narrowed. As the years progressed, especially in the 1850s, these attitudes hardened.
Since the war consisted mostly of Union armies attempting to penetrate the South, regardless of how a Southerner might have felt about slavery, or secession, he certainly would have felt he was defending his homeground against invaders. Lee who had his doubts about both secession and slavery, thought this way.
What about the Northerners?
They fought in 1861 to preserve the federal union established by the Constitution. They felt there was no legal right to secession, and this did shape their response. They felt that the idea of the United States as a functioning reality, as the "last, best hope of mankind," as representative democracy had to be preserved.
What right of the federal union had to be preserved?
The right of the winners of elections to take office, and losers of elections to accept their loss.
And what on what issue did the winner intend to press a policy the losers of the election that they would dislike? The federal control of slavery. Not the abolition of slavery, In 1861, slavery was embedded in the Constitution, and the issue was on "interstate" issues, such as the extension of slavery, or the federal fugitive slave law. The abolition of slavery was called on by people like Garrison, but abolitionists were a minor influence.
Didn't white Northerners share the racism of white Southerners? Yes. But economically and socially, they didn't need it, the way a slaveholding society did. They could change their behavior.
Bill Torrens started a very interesting thread about a Northern "philosophy of force" I think he was on to something.
Many Northerners felt contempt for Southerners as backwards, violent and cruel, a society whose concerns were not valid. These attitudes influenced the willingness of Northerners to prosecute the war and impose their "superior values" onthe South. While abolitionists weren't a major force, politically, their propaganda had a role in shaping Northern beliefs about the South. Northern society which was more urbanized and industrialized, put a greater value on conformity than Southern society.
As the war progressed, growing bloodier and bloodier, the stakes grew higher and higher. Among Northerners came the great epiphany:
Not only was slavery wrong, it was what was wrong with the South. Slavery shaped the attitudes of the ruling class, produced beliefs incompatible with true democracy. Slavery was cruel and backward and made society cruel and backward. Pull slavery out by its root, and the way ahead was clear.
The cost of the war demanded nothing less than the complete reform of the South.
Among some Confederates, like Cleburne, Lee and others, argued that, for the South to live as an independent country, gain foreign recognition, and use its strength and resources the most effective way possible, that slavery would have to be reformed, reduced, weakened and otherwise interfered with. They were not heeded. Partly it was because other decision makers didn't agree with them(indeed as Howell Cobb said, they couldn't, without removing the rationale for their revolution), or because it just wouldn't produce victory.
I'm not a fast writer, and I've got to go now. This is a lot of what I think.
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