Slavery as a Primary Cause of Widespread Confederate Support for the American Civil War

In light of the ferocious crusade-against-slavery rhetoric emanating from the victorious North, it is hardly surprising that the leaders of the Confederacy would seek to explain their role in the war’s raison d’être without reference to slavery. Further, with their old political leaders arguing that slavery had no role in the war, it is similarly unsurprising that many other ex-Confederates followed suit. Slavery was gone, and in a Republican-dominated political climate little stood to be gained by resisting its demise.

Powerful states’ rights rhetoric, in contrast, was not so thoroughly crushed. Though Southern states’ rights were in clear peril after the war, politicians realized that many rights would nonetheless still be guaranteed by the Constitution if each state could return to the Union. Since re-admittance into the United States seemed to hinge upon appeasing the Republican Party, the expedience of slavery-amnesia quickly became apparent in the post-bellum South, paving the way for convenient myths to develop in place of forgotten realities.

The North, too, experienced a degree of slavery-amnesia. This phenomenon served to enforce arguments in the South that denied slavery’s role in the war. As early as 1865, the Northern memory of slavery’s importance to the war began to suffer due to a new spirit of reconciliation with the South. A Northern audience listened and applauded when Henry Grady, an editor for the Atlanta Constitution, called for “a new era of peace and prosperity,” asking Americans to “[l]et bygones be bygones.” Historian David Blight’s 2001 study, Race and Reunion,argues that the “great challenge of Reconstruction was to determine how a national blood feud could be reconciled at the same time a new nation emerged out of war and social revolution,” and asserts that this effort caused the race issues of the war to be largely forgotten. Both Blight and Horwitz point out that talk of slavery was completely absent from the 1913 reunion of Union and Confederate veterans at Gettysburg. Pushed aside by reconciliation, slavery virtually disappeared from the popular American narrative of the Civil War, both Northern and Southern. Academic arguments seeking to de-emphasize the role of slavery fit neatly into this reconciliation-inspired narrative, thriving in an environment that no longer chose to remember the institution’s divisive effects.

Slavery was the primary reason for the great degree of popular support for war in the Confederacy of 1861. It was an all-pervasive institution with deep roots in the South’s antebellum past, so great that it was inseparably entwined with – and, crucially, prior to – Southern politicians’ arguments for states’ rights. White Southerners, rich and poor, had a material stake in slavery’s survival, a stake magnified by their belief in natural white superiority. As such, slavery was an integral part of the Confederate identity, and when this institution came under threat, vast sectors of the newly-formed Confederacy rose quickly to defend it. After the fall of the Confederacy, however, slavery was quickly divorced from both Northern and Southern recollections of the Civil War’s opening phase. As a result, Americans’ understanding of their national history remains incomplete. Lost Cause myths, which rose to fill this gap, make up an important component of America’s semi-fictionalized understanding of its past.

But the consequences of America’s historical amnesia extend beyond mere myth. In part due to the forgetful spirit of reconciliation, Reconstruction would fail to secure anything but superficial rights for freedmen and freedwomen. Forgotten by federal authority, black Americans would endure another century of undisguised racial oppression until their civil rights were finally enshrined in the American system. Even in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the surrounding area, the federal government would be widely criticized for ignoring the plight of black Americans and focussing its relief efforts on predominantly white sectors of the disaster area. Because America fails to accurately recall the past, it fails to accurately assess – and ultimately fails to solve – the pressing racial issues that still confront it in the twenty-first century.