Slavery and the Causes of the American Civil War


Virtually every professional historian who declares out loud or in print that slavery was the main cause of the war has received letters, emails, or comments from audience members that say something to the effect that southerners—sometimes they refer to specific ancestors—did not go to war to defend slavery, nor did northerners go to war to end it. They often suggest that we academic historians have ignored the well-known facts that most southerners did not own slaves and that most northerners shared the era’s racist attitudes.

But on this particular issue, historians and those who attack our ivory tower inability to see what they firmly believe is the truth are often talking about two different things: underlying causes and personal motivations. The convictions that inspire men to risk their lives for their country are not necessarily the same as the policies that thrust that country into armed conflict.

When historians assert that slavery caused the Civil War, most are saying that only the presence of the “peculiar institution” made it impossible to resolve peacefully the constitutional, political, and economic issues that had long animated sectional tensions. Based on the personal correspondence or reminiscences of individual Confederates, however, our sometime-critics usually argue that those issues—under the umbrella of states’ rights—were the conflict’s real causes. Fair enough. There’s no reason not to believe the actual words of actual southerners on why they went to war against the Union. Moreover, contrary to what many people think, most historians who argue in favor of slavery as the primary cause of the war do not suggest that it was the only cause.

James Marten

But other, equally convincing documents provide explanations for why these states—the governing bodies who formulated policies, not the men who carried them out—went to war against the United States. The curt, to-the-point secession ordinances passed in the winter of 1860-1861 rarely provide much in the way of explanation. But most secession conventions also passed far more explicit clarifications of their actions. For example, on Christmas Eve 1860 the South Carolina secession convention approved the “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” (Read the original document here.) The document is infused with the notion that one of the most important underlying causes of the state’s dissatisfaction was the federal government’s growing enmity toward the institution of slavery. The slaveholding states, it asserted, would not have united with the free states in 1787 without the Constitution’s explicit protections for slavery. It went on to argue that the previous decade had seen individuals, northern state governments, and even members of the national government threaten the rights of slave owners to retrieve their escaped slaves and to migrate with their slaves to the common territories of the United States.

By invoking the ownership of slaves as perhaps the most valuable right protected by the doctrine of states’ rights, this document makes it clear that the men leading South Carolina out of the Union had no doubt that slavery—in combination with other issues—lay at the center of the South’s beef with the Union.

A modern and decidedly different example of the difference between personal motivations for fighting and the  underlying causes of war might shed some light on this. Few Americans serving in Iraq would say they were fighting to satisfy the West’s thirst for oil. Yet it is impossible to understand the United States’s policies in the Middle East—the policies that have required us to go to war or to threaten war a number of times in that region since 1945—without understanding the extraordinary importance of that oil to our nation’s security and economic well-being. That fact does not have to undermine our admiration for the soldiers and Marines, the pilots and sailors, who have served in the Gulf at any time during the last twenty years to acknowledge that the presence of major oil reserves played a role in putting them in harm’s way.

It is equally ahistorical to ignore slavery as a cause of the Civil War. Simply saying that many, or even most, individual Confederates did not necessarily risk their lives on its behalf does not erase the importance of slavery as a cause of the conflict to which hundreds of thousands on both sides gave their “last full measure of devotion.”  Every war has its causes; every soldier has his or her reasons for taking up arms. The Sesquicentennial of the Civil War should inspire everyone who takes the history of this epic conflict seriously to stop talking past one another.

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James Marten is chair of the Department of History at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He specializes in the histories of the American Civil War and of children and was elected president of the Society of Civil War Historians in 2008. His many books include Children and Youth in a New Nation, The Children’s Civil War, Civil War America: Voices from the Home Front, and the forthcoming Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America.

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