What caused the Civil War?

Although there is nobody alive today who lived through that era, there are a lot of people who speak with an air of authority about it as if they personally walked the fields at Gettysburg in July 1863.

The Civil War fosters more arguments, opinions and discussion today than perhaps any other historical event in our nation. That’s especially true in the South where Civil War ancestors still cast a long, revered shadow.

As a military, economic, social and political event, that conflict has no peer in our national lexicon. It has been analyzed, dissected, fictionalized and mythologized more than any other conflict in our history.

The immediate debate — albeit one that has raged for decades — is over the “cause” of the Civil War.

It’s an issue that will never be completely resolved because there is really no one, single answer. I have friends who are Civil War buffs who argue passionately that slavery wasn’t the cause of the conflict. There are others who argue it was the only cause.

I think both sides are right, and both are wrong.

While abolitionist sentiment in the North was strong in that era, the North did not attack the South to end slavery — it was the South, you remember, that fired on the Northern garrison at Ft. Sumter in April 1861. We started it (I say “we” because most of my ancestors fought for the South.)

But it’s also true that the South feared the abolitionist movement. When Lincoln was elected president, he was seen by the South as the abolitionist flag-bearer.

Many will argue that the war was caused by the economic differences between North and South and by a conflict over states rights. Both, of course, are true enough.

But it’s also the case that the economic conflicts were rooted in the South’s agrarian economy, which in turn relied on slavery as its machinery of production. While many Southerners didn’t own slaves, all Southerners were to some extent dependent on the institution as the region’s economic equipment.

Without slaves, the cotton economy would have collapsed and that would have affected just about everyone, not just plantation owners. (Just consider what might have happened if the boll weevil had hit in the 1840s rather than decades later; that might have ended the slave-based economic model and the war might not have happened?)

Tied to the economic differences is the debate over states rights. As a holdover issue going back to the Constitution, states at that time were far more sensitive to federal intrusion than they are today.

And yet, the states rights issue wasn’t simply a political or ideological debate. The Southern states wanted a large amount of independence because they didn’t want the federal government to abolish slavery. (Our Founding Fathers, in all their wisdom, couldn’t deal with the slavery issue, either. They kicked that can down the road until the explosion happened in the 1860s.)

At the time, states rights issues were a real threat because as new states in the Midwest were being formed, whether they were slave or free states changed the balance of federal power.

All of these things were among the backdrop of the conflict and all contributed to the atmosphere that led to the first shots. But they also have a common thread, which is slavery. If you read the speeches of that time, the defense of slavery as an economic and social institution was openly defended by Southern leaders.

So while slavery didn’t itself directly cause the war, slavery was the chain that linked all the other issues together. If there had not been slavery, there would not have been a war.

But I have my own theory about this that is a couple steps removed from the economic and political issues. While there were serious differences between the regions, the tipping point that I think led to those first shots and the ensuing carnage was due to a psychological hysteria in the South that reached a critical mass in late 1860 and early 1861.

We — human beings — are not as rational or logical as we like to think. There have been times in history where the confluence of social, political, religious and economic pressures led large groups of people to do things that under more normal circumstances, they would never have done.

In early 1861, just weeks after Lincoln’s election, the South felt assaulted politically, undermined economically and insulted socially. Southern leaders developed a large inferiority complex and reacted with a false sense of bravado.

The public was whipped into a frenzy by the press of the day and had been told in churches that God was on the side of the South (and that the Bible defended slavery.)
There was a real fear at the time that the new Lincoln administration would abolish slavery and that there might even be a slave uprising. Honor had to be defended and a mass psychological reaction took hold not just with a few individuals, but within the Southern culture in general.

Group dynamics is a strange and unpredictable phenomenon. People do things in groups they would never do as individuals. And as a cultural group, many Southerners in 1861 did things that transcend any normal, rational thought process. (Although there were some moderate voices at the time, those were drowned out by the louder voices calling for secession and war.)

Once worked into this irrational state of mind, and convinced that the South’s existence was under attack, it was a short walk from psychological hysteria to the guns aimed on Ft. Sumter.

That wasn’t everyone, of course. There was opposition to secession.

But once the armies were on the move, the psychological pressure to “defend” the South took hold and thousands of boys marched off, town-by-town, many to their deaths, for a cause they didn’t fully understand or care about. Really, most fought for their friends or for adventure, not some abstract cause and not directly to defend slavery.

I’m not one to mythologize the Civil War, or to extol the virtues of the “lost cause,” or excessively patronize the honor of my dead Confederate ancestors. I don’t know why my ancestors fought, what they thought about it, or if they were honorable or weasels, brave or cowards. They were human, not gods.

No matter what the “cause” of the Civil War, the end result was the same; a terrible conflict that killed many and left the South economically scarred and backward until nearly 100 years later.

This is the first of occasional articles over the coming years to look back at various issues and incidents of the Civil War on its 150th anniversary.
Mike Buffington is co-publisher of Mainstreet Newspapers, Inc. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.