What Issue Was Really at the Heart of
the Civil War, and is it Relevant Today?

The writer does not overstate the importance of non-slavery economic issues and interstate rivalries in bringing about the Civil War. However, he does understate the importance of slavery in that event. This is acceptable in an article of this length, but we must not allow it to happen in our discussions with others over the issue (unless we have established a grounding in advance that, yes, slavery played an important role in causing the Civil War, but other factors also played an important role and are often overlooked.

A good summary of how the North (now blue states) financially attacked the way of life of the South (now mostly red states) via tariffs starting 30 years before CW-1 actually started. And while 'slavery' is being taught these days as being the primary reason for the conflict, that is false. It was already a dying institution that would probably be gone by the early 1900s. The mechanization of farm implements was growing by the mid to late 1800s and these items would replace the slaves. After all mechanization is much cheaper than housing and feeding humans.

Well written and timely...The old adage: to keep your powder dry and save your confederate money boys, the south will rise again, may be truer than had been previously thought. Some things keep coming around: Now the Blue High Taxed states are requiring the Red States to augment their overspending by demanding that the excess taxes paid to the states be deductible from their federal taxes, thus not paying their fair share into the Federal Government.

Author seems like some modern bible scholars today. Pours over the minutea and misses the point. All that he recounts is true, but mainly concerned the elites in both north and south. The average man was neither affected by or concerned with their beefs. During this time, the political parties and their leaders, who eventually formed the core of the Democrat Party, conspired to do war over 'threats' to their lifestyles. They worked tirelessly to move the federal armories into the southern states, And were behind every agressive, expansionistic act the young country made. They even tried, privately to overthrow developing democracies in countries in South America and around the Carribean, to replace them with States willing to enslave their people for American plantations and businesses. Slavery, was hardly a footnote.

Things have flipped. The blue states are now the slave states and the red states are now the free states.

The first time I remember hearing about the Civil War was from my great-grandfather. He called it "The War of Northern Aggression."

Interestingly, I noticed yesterday how "Critical Race Theory" is on the move, even on YouTube where history revisionists are attempting in not such subtle ways, to secure one cause for the War Between the States as slavery and slavery alone, even ridiculing the fact that blacks willingly served in the uniform of the Confederate Army. Sadly, Americans even of my generation, were never taught the whole truth about slavery in the Colonies and early United States. Facts are inconvenient, but the first slaves in North America were WHITE people from Europe captured by the British and exiled in the new world to be worked to death. The same fate would await the people of New Holland (Australia) when the United States won their freedom from the Crown. There were also freed blacks in the Southern States who themselves owned slaves to do agricultural work on their plantations. Not much is said about that. Like most wars, truth is the first casualty of the conflict, and slavery was a side issue at best, but Abraham Lincoln was losing ground and grasping at every emotional straw he could find to rationalize his War of Northern Aggression. Slavery had been on its way out decades previous, and the issue wasn't one that would easily disappear.

Economic slavery today by the Federal Government. There is a growing risk I will not be able to continue to monetize wealth I have in my personal property - coal and hydrocarbons in the ground in property I own in my state - that is worth millions on the world market. Due to the ‘scientific consensus in developed world [nic the world’s slave owning pollution free factory country du jour - Red China]. This was why the colonies fought the King George III - you had to sell your agricultural products to London to get hard currency, in return had to buy manufactured goods from British merchants and manufacturers. Then in antebellum US you had to sell to the Yankees instead, using Yankee railroads and Yankee bankers. Post Civil War you now have multinationals spanning the gap internationally by arbitraging non-free US/Europe ‘market’ prices for products where they capture the bulk of Value-add from raw materials to finished goods across the world, and pay a small fee to national Pols to facilitate the process. meet the old boss….same as the new boss….

I’m writing as a former Truman/Kennedy-style democrat, nominally a Republican who misses Reagan and Trump, now an Independent, disgusted by the abused-wife/girlfriend wing of the Republican Party (no more money from me). As a Northerner by ancestry (all four of my great-grandfathers fought for the Union in The War Between the States) and sentiment, having a formerly low opinion of Southerners during the Fifties and Sixties, I now regret that the South lost its fight, against what I gradually came to perceive as Northern economic tyranny. There has been so many arguments, pro and con, concerning the morality and economics of slavery, not to mention the constitutionality, it became nigh impossible to see clearly, the true picture of the conflict of North v.s. South. What I do understand, is federal over-reach and fascism/communism in the guise of the Democrat Party. This time, the Fight will be for the real soul of this country in the Spirit of 1776.

The next move for secession will begin in 2025 after the Supreme Court has repealed Roe and Casey and after the Republicans have taken Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024. And the movement will begin in Democrat states over the issue of abortion.

Reply 2: If you haven’t, you should read “A Journey Through Texas” (1857) by Frederick Law Olmsted. He remarks on the inefficiency of slavery in the first part of the book. He points out how much better things work with free labor as opposed to slave labor.

Don Surber today on the most recent point of this symbiotic relationship Elizabeth Warren tweeted, "What happens when only a handful of giant grocery store chains like Kroger dominate an industry? They can force high food prices onto Americans while raking in record profits. We need to strengthen our antitrust laws to break up giant corporations and lower prices." Conrad Black tweeted, "The Left demands more regulation, which eliminates competition from smaller businesses who can't afford the lawyers, lobbyists and compliance departments needed to survive, then calls for more regulation to crack down on the quasi-monopolies the initial regulatory burden created." Regulation is a barrier to competition. Economics 101. Big business means bigger government. Politics 101.

As northerners and southerners pay your taxes this year, note the SALT (state and local tax) limit of $10,000. Those northerners now only being able to write off their SALT taxes up to $10,000 (up to 10s of thousands more before President Trump) whereas southerners in in low / no tax states never got that write off ... just who's been subsidizing whom?

Slavery and other issues were secondary. The big issue was not unlike the crips, the bloods and the mafia. If you try to quit the gang they will kill you. Thats who we are ruled by.

With today's vilification of the 1%ers we are supposed to believe that the Sothern dirt farmer laid down his life so massa didn't have his priivalaged life interrupted. And I'm a racist white supremacist from the day I was born but my GGGGrandfatfer was a noble chap who sacrificed his life so that black slaves could be free. When 20% of the population pays 75% of the tax burden (a byproduct of the trade policy well documented in the article) something is going to break. As much as I agree with the articles focus on trade policy you can't extract slavery from the Southern side of that issue. The exports Europe was taxing were the product of slave labor. As for the noble northerner just remember that this was the era of child labor and 15 hour days 6 day weeks in Northern factories. And with an endless supply of Irish disembarking every day how well do you expect them to have been treated? Another parallel to today; when you allow unbridled immigration of suppressed people you subject the market value of all to the effects of that suppression. Essentially you ask your people to pay the price of other countries policies. A slave unlike the Irish weren't roaming around waiting to be exploited. They cost the equivalent of a good new car in today's economy. Nobody is going to deny that sadistic bastages did horrible things but reach your own conclusions about how people treated free stuff vs expensive stuff. Pardon my crass use of "stuff." The one undeniable truth about that war, millions suffered the consequences of an argument between a handful of the elites of their time. There was no single "cause" of the war. Since the insanity was largely inflicted by volunteers it had to be about whatever they thought it was about. What did they think and why did they think it can be extracted from their letters. What motivated those who influenced their thinking is an entirely different matter and the one that draws the focus of attention in the quest for "a" cause. I might state the cause as: Common people of modest to little means allowed themselves to be talked into slaughtering other people of similar means by rich elites who had the overwhelming preponderance of the economic stakes in the matter. To me the root of those stakes are secondary particularly regarding the lessons learned which should be the point of studying history.

Americans like to put it all on a bumper sticker but the truth is there were many reasons for the Civil War. Maryland, and I think Tennessee were slave states that fought for the North so, how does that fit with modern history? It will always come down to "State Rights," I hope. I tend to agree with Putin that America will split up eventually and the padding of the SCOUS or ending the Filibuster of a deliberate body to mob decisions that avoid compromise will prove Putin correct.

Back in 1971, my history teacher in Jacksonville High School (Alabama) made exactly this point. Thanks for a clearly written article. Slavery slavery slavery is like Russia! Russia! Russia!—A false narrative from the get-go.

#18–Most East Tennesseans fought for the Union. Middle and West Tennessee were for the Confederacy.

In the 70's Democrats discovered their social justice movement's cause célèbre in the Party of Jim Crow, which was Cesar Chavez and the underpaid (by middle-class American standards) fruit pickers of the Southwest, many of whom were either illegals, or seasonal "guest workers". Then Automotive Labor Unions were demanding better work conditions, benefits, and wages to the point of strangling their companies. Today and we have automated fruit-picking machines and fully robotic automobile factories which require very few humans for oversight. Quality is higher and the complaining humans are free from "slave" tasks. Interestingly it was the AFL-CIO (think "Democrat') who fought tooth and nail against the introduction of robots into automobile assembly lines. So, why would these Democrat "slaves" be against anything that made those horrible jobs go away? Today's Democrats want a perpetual "slave class" for their "cause" to fight for during election years, and for further enslavement in between. The Democrats ARE the Party of Slavery.

Remember that not a single leader of the Confederacy was tried for treason. Not out of magnanimity. There WAS no ground to prove treason in a court of law. If terms of federation were violated states had a right to secede. The US is still a Federation not a Union.

The causes of the Civil War were many and it took many decades to create the tensions between the slave states and non-slave states. Fist fights broke out in Congress over the issue of slaves. The north was more industrialized and didn't need slaves to make money. The closest thing to a slave in the north were people from Ireland. The south's economy was based on agriculture, and they needed people to work the farms to make money. So having slaves was an important aspect of the south's economy. The south was tired of the north telling them what they could and could not do. Basically butting into their business. Remember, during that time, the concept of a United States, a whole nation, was foreign. People identified themselves not as U.S. citizens, but from their state. Lee when offered the position to command the Union army basically said, "I cannot take up arms against my own country". Meaning Virginia. At some point the pot was going to boil over, and it did in April 1861 with the firing on Fort Sumpter in South Carolina.

Sorry #20 it was Kentucky, I was thinking about. Shouldn't rely on my memory anymore.

After watching a documentary about the Southern states and their decisions on secession I was convinced that it was all about slavery. While that may have been the reason for the governments that didn't get hundreds of thousands of southern gentlemen to sacrifice their lives. For them, it was about Southern pride and the repugnation of outsiders controlling their lives.

"The average man was neither affected by or concerned with their beefs." per #4. Actually, the average man DID have a concern, a safety concern. In most of the Southern states, the Black population outnumbered the White population. White Southerners knew what they would have done, if they had been slaves and freed, en masse, and Nat Turner's Rebellion was in the living memory of all Americans. The North offered no plans to cover either the economic or perceived safety ramifications of freeing about 4 million people at one time. Even after the Civil War, the North seemed to be under the assumption that freed slaves were going to live exactly in the same places and continue doing the same jobs they did as slaves. (The difference being Northerners could now buy up the plantations.) Although the occupying Federal army did provide some safety for Blacks and Whites, it is still astounding that there wasn't more violence than there was. Also, I think poor White Southerners could quit dragging the jaws on the ground and understand why they weren't getting as much return for their crops and why the price of everything was going up. (And I know elite Southerners would be sure to tell them.) The perceptions of what non-elite White Southerners thought would happen was definitely something that would make a small farmer from southern Alabama (with Black ancestry that I am sure he was aware of) enlist in the Confederate Army and find himself fighting at Richmond. (Not to mention all the hurrahing for the Bonnie Blue Flag, etc.) I think the seeds of the Civil War were planted in the aftermath of the Stono Rebellion, listed as a slave rebellion but really a rebellion of the non-elite, including non-land-owning Whites, indentured servants, slaves (which I think still included Indians) and free Blacks and maroons (see Black ancestry, above.) The elites made every effort - legal, economic, social - to break up the above coalition. The result was a South divided by race and not social/economic status. (And when the Black ancestors started turning White.)

If a barefoot, poorly equipped Confederate rebel soldier could talk ask him if he were a slave owner. His answer just might be he's fighting for his southern homeland not the slave's freedom. If 10% of the south were slave owner 'elites' and it bothered the industrial elites in the North maybe they should have met on a field of battle to settle their differences. This would have saved a lot of bloodshed many years later the south remained broken. Louisiana was so poor it was still in Civil War times when Huey Long became governor.

The Civil War was about secession. And secession was about slavery. This tired "tariffs" argument is revisionist history. Look, multiple Confederate states issued "Declarations of Secession", telling us exactly what motivated them to secede. And most of them say slavery if not in the first sentence, then in the first paragraph. None of them, NONE, not one single declaration talks about tariffs. And most Southerners didn't own slaves? Sure, okay. Does that mean the ones who did not were indifferent to the prospect of freed slaves walking around, happy as you please? Putting on airs, as it were? The whites who perpetrated lynchings and terrorism after the war and well into the 20th Century did not own slaves either. What was their excuse? Or was it just the lineal descendents of those 10% who owned slaves doing that stuff? It wasn't. The Confederacy was feces that too many people continue to try to polish. As a Republican today, my opinion on the decisions of that bunch of awful Democrats is exactly the same as a Republican living in 1861. No different. And this is not an indictment of any modern Southerner living today. I am talking about people long since dead.

One of the reasons that the North started that bloody, illegal war was that the northern ports..NYC, Boston were still getting ice jams. The Little Ice Age was waning but winters were brutal. The warm water ports in the South would be lost to northern shipping in winter. No more import/export plus loss of tariffs the government depended on. The North went to war for that oldest of reasons…money.

The war was over state's rights. The law was not directly over slavery. Lincoln didn't issue the Emancipation Proclamation until the war was essentially over. The 'discussion' was about whether states could decide for themselves what was and was not legal in their states.

All the dancing rationals miss the point. The Civil War was an inevitable result of a willful infection caused by the British when the country was founded. The usual class/oppresion/slavery system created by British landowners in the South had to be resolved in war and all the decades of Jim Crow racism that followed were also the usual aftermath of any British rule. You can NOT have a founding principle of 'all men are created equal' and tolerate slaves. Of course money was key. That is why the British upper class loved enslaving any population they could oppress, but the entire economic and social structure of the colony states of the south was built on a rotten base, originally setup by mostly British colonists. We are just lucky that most of the Tories left for Canada, Some hung around on their plantations, like the British, French, Spanish and other European wealthy class did in every other part of the world when their game was up.

The war wasn't essentially over in 1862 #31. Lincoln was waiting for a big Union victory before issuing an Emancipation document. The battle of Antietam was as close as a victory the Union army had had in the first year and a half of the war, and even the battle of Antietam is considered a stalemate. There were still huge battles left to take place in 1863 before the south faced certain defeat. The combined Union victories at Gettysburg on July 3rd and the following day July 4th at Vicksburg pretty much ended the chance of a Confederate victory in the war. With the Union blockade on the coast, and the control of the Mississippi river with the victory at Vicksburg, the south was now surrounded.

"States Rights" and yes. The federal government was allowed to get big and powerful enough to pick out individual states and bully them into submission. It's still going on. The battle will go on until the feds are knocked back on their arses. Their only obstacle is an armed citizenry. Make sure it stays that way. Slavery was not all that important except as a moral issue for Lincoln and cheap labor for cotton-picking states but it was enough to fan the flames of the emotional types.

Abraham Lincoln clearly states his "position" in a letter to Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, on August 22nd, 1862. Preservation of the Union was his paramount objective. Hon. Horace Greeley: Dear Sir. I have just read yours of the 19th. addressed to myself through the New-York Tribune. If there be in it any statements, or assumptions of fact, which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and here, controvert them. If there be in it any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not now and here, argue against them. If there be perceptable in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right. As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing" as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views. I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free. Yours, A. Lincoln.