Why did the South break away from the union during the civil war?
Why did the South break away from the union during the civil war?
This will be disputed by apologists for the Confederate cause, but the main reason was this:
In 1861 the Southern states feared that Abraham Lincoln, the newly-elected US president, was a threat to the existence of slavery.
A lot of red herrings get thrown into this debate: for example, the fact that slaves existed in the North and that Lincoln was not an abolitionist, and that the war wasn’t sold to the Northern public as an anti-slavery crusade until long after the war had actually started (because Lincoln’s stated goal was to preserve the Union, not to free slaves, an action he used as a political and military measure).
The above are true, but they comprise a separate issue than the reasons for the secession. Many Southern plantation owners and their political allies in the Southern state legislatures were convinced that Lincoln would implement policies leading to the abolition of slavery (as a member of Congress, Lincoln had supported measures to limit the spread of slavery in the territories and newly admitted states in the West) . Slavery was a major basis for the economy of the South and so any move toward its elimination would be a threat to vested interests.
Lincoln was not an abolitionist in the strict sense of the word; he had never affirmed allegiance to any abolitionist organizations and often waffled on the slavery issue depending on the situation and his audience. But whatever his stance on slavery, he was widely perceived as a de facto abolitionist in the South. Slavery had been a divisive issue between North and South since at least the Declaration of Independence in 1776; when Thomas Jefferson attempted to introduce an anti-slavery statement into the Declaration, he was persuaded to drop it because most of the Southern signatories would never agree to it. In 1856 Congressman Preston Smith Brooks of South Carolina viciously beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner with a bludgeon after the latter referred to slavery as a “harlot.” To assert that the slavery issue was suddenly conjured out of thin air near the end of the war contradicts the documented history of the US. “State’s rights” primarily meant the “right” to own human beings as property.
South Carolina, the first state to secede, stated very clearly in its secession declaration that the state was acting in response to the election of a president they saw as a threat to the institution of slavery. Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens said in an 1861 speech that black people were “not equal to the white man…slavery subordination is [their] natural and normal condition”, and that those who disagreed with this were “fanatics.” Stephens was making this speech to describe the basis and rationale of the Confederate government.
The conclusion is inescapable: whether or not Lincoln fought to free the slaves, the Confederacy came into existence in order to preserve it.
Kelly Clarkson – Breakaway