For better or worse, the Civil war forged the framework of modern America. Mark Twain wrote that the “cataclysm of 1861 uprooted institutions that were centuries old, upended politics and society at their roots, and wrought changes so profound that the influence cannot be measured in two or three generations.”
Academic historians often write that the war was primarily about sectionalism or economics, but those are secondary issues. Abraham Lincoln understood that the central issue was slavery. He declared before the conflict began, in his Second Inaugural Address, that “one-eighth of this country constituted a peculiar and powerful interest, which all knew to be, somehow, the cause of the war.”
The Confederacy did not merely oppose the Federal Government, as the pro-Union abolitionists claimed; it wanted to establish its own slave-holding republic. The CSA bent over backward to avoid using the word “slavery” in public, but in its private papers it railed against the “backwoodsman of Illinois,” the “flat-boatman,” the “rail-splitter,” and the “third-rate lawyer.”
As the war progressed, white northerners came to recognize that their principal goal was Union victory. The abolitionists and Radical Republicans pressed for emancipation, but the majority of white northerners considered the issue a matter for the states rather than the nation. Even so, by the war’s end most whites had come to understand that emancipation was essential to defeating the CSA and that it was an important step toward ending human bondage.
About the Author
