AcademyFriend1
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Although I agree with much of what Bullet said earlier, its important not to oversimplify the reasons for the secession. Census figures for 1860 show that only about a quarter of the families in slave states actually owned slaves. The majority had five or fewer while many plantations had substantial populations of slaves.
Notwithstanding the likelihood that many of those who were too poor to own slaves had ambitions to own them in the future, the low percentage of slaveowners suggests that there were other powerful motivations behind the secession. These included fear of domination by the Northern majority and loyalty to individual states over loyalty to the union. When Cadet Delahanty and I toured the Vicksburg battlefield, we noted that the memorials for both sides were organized by state. The same is true at Gettysburg.
Although the majority of the (white) population of the southern states supported secession, there were many Unionists. One of the last states to vote was Virginia, which voted down the proposed ordinance of secession by a two thirds majority in early April 1861. After Fort Sumter, another vote was held with secession winning 88 to 55 (leading to West Virginia's secession from the secession). Another close vote among the individual conventions was in Alabama, where 61 of the 100 delegates voted in January 1861 for secession. The relative closeness of this vote can be misleading, since a number of the 39 who voted against secession were in favor of cooperating with seceding states, and some later changed their votes.
It is also interesting to note that the young Republic of Mexico had abolished slavery by 1829. One of the reasons the Texans revolted in 1835-36 was their rejection of interference with their right to own slaves. It's some time since I read the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which I suggested on another thread, but I recall reading an arresting phrase along the lines that the Civil War was God's revenge for the Mexican War (of 1848).
Good post. However, let me chime in as a U.S. History teacher. I would say that while many individual soldiers in the Confederate Army (CSA) FOUGHT for reasons other than to protect slavery (for independence, to protect their home soil, out of loyalty to their kith and kin in their home state), the overwhelming causal reason for secession was a desire to protect the institution of slavery.
At the time of the Constitutional Convention, many in the south, including slave-owning framers of the Constitution, believed that most likely slavery would die out of its own accord at some time in the future and that it was a "necessary evil" in their present day. With the advent of a lucrative new plantation-based cash crop after 1800 -- cotton, made economically viable by the invention of the cotton gin -- slave-based agriculture became enormously profitable. In part due to that, and in part as a backlash to what they saw as Northern criticism of and interference with slavery, by about 1840 the Southern elite did not regard slavery as a "necessary evil" but as a "positive good." John C. Calhoun, the intellectual father of secession (and U.S. Senator, and Secretary of State, and Vice President at various points in his career) gave a famous speech using the phrase "positive good." By the 1850s, the South was truly a slave society -- slavery was a dominant, and arguably THE dominant, influence on Southern culture, politics, economics, and even strongly influenced religion (we got "Southern Baptists" and "Southern Methodists" as the result of an Antebellum split on slavery).
When the U.S. acquired huge amounts of new territory after the Mexican-American war, a simmering dispute over slavery boiled over. Northerners who subcribed to a "free soil" ideology wanted the new land to remain free territory, a source of cheap land for small farmers who did not want to compete with big plantation owners using slave labor. Southerners felt that their considerable skill in arms had helped win this territory in blood and they were being unfairly excluded from the fruits of victory. They believed that for slavery (and their society) to thrive, slavery had to be allowed to expand or it would wither and die politically and economically.
Lincoln's election was a last straw to pro-secession Southern "fire-eaters," because he was a long-standing free soiler and a member of a new political party, the Republicans, founded primarily on one issue: exclusion of slavery from any new territory. In Lincoln's victory -- he was not even on the ballot in 10 southern states! -- the South saw the demographic handwriting on the wall: they would not have any chance of the election of a president either favorable or neutral to slavery as an institution. Lincoln's protestations that he had no intent of trying to go after slavery where it currently existed were either disregarded (he had given his "house divided" speech suggesting the two systems were irreconcilable), or they were seen as irrelevant: it wasn't about losing one presidential election, it was about losing all of them. And they believed -- and we know this because they said it, again and again -- that the loss of political influence spelled danger or doom for slavery.
The first state to secede, South Carolina, issued their own version of the Declaration of Independence explaining why they wanted to secede -- you can google it, it is called the "declaration of the immediate causes of secession." The document is crystal clear that the "immediate cause of secession" is northern hostility to slavery. The other similar seceding state declarations are also quite clear that secession is to protect the institution of slavery which, in the words of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, was the "cornerstone" of the Confederacy.
Again, let me be very clear that many, many Confederate soldiers fought for reasons other than protecting the institution of slavery. But if you look at the words of those who were architects of secession, they were proud to say it was in defense of slavery.
Whew! Got me going there. (For what it's worth, I celebrate Lee as a peacemaker -- had he encouraged any sort of guerrilla warfare the fighting could have gone on at the insurgency level for generations. His acceptance of defeat and counsel to his troops and the South to accept the loss put the country on the road to healing. )