Civil War was all about slavery
Real history can be brutal and ugly. That is why so many people prefer to change it around to meet their needs. I was disappointed to read a major article in the paper about yet another person who believes that the Civil War was not really about slavery.
It most certainly was about slavery. It was all about slavery.
It was about the claimed right of certain “sovereign” states to dissolve the compact they had made under the Constitution so they could continue a way of life that had been established more than a centur y before. That economic system depended upon the continuation of the plantation culture, its ruling aristocracy and their supporters especially in the tobacco and cotton producing industr y, and slave labor. Lots and lots of slave labor.
This way of life was competing with a new and different economic model that was emerging in the Northern states. That model was based on a growing merchant class, small family farms and entrepreneurial manufacturing enterprises, and wage labor, including massive immigration.
It was a war that put aristocrats like Robert E. Lee, who traced his heritage and position to one of the first families of Virginia, against hardscrabble but persistent nobodies from nowhere like Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.
Both economic systems needed the western lands for expansion. Only one system would survive that competition. Slave labor or wage labor — which would win?
That would be the system that could deploy a growing network of railroads to move troops and supplies quickly around the country, telegraphs systems to coordinate actions on a continental scale, and mass production of things like modern weaponry to supply an army of hundreds of thousands backed up by a fleet of steam powered and ironclad ships.
It would be built by German and Irish immigrants, by tough men from the iron ranges of Michigan and Minnesota, lumberjacks from the far north, small farmers and businessmen from Ohio and western Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois. The aristocrats of Boston, New York and Philadelphia would have less and less say in ruling this restless people as they moved westward before, during and after the Civil War.
These people, the Grand Army of the Republic (and the Navy) and their pioneer compatriots, changed the way this country grew. These are the people whose statues we should honor. These are the patriots who saved the United States and made possible the “middle class” way of life we have enjoyed since. These are the people whose names should grace our highways (not Jefferson Davis).
But we don’t, because they were too busy building a living future instead of trying to recreate the dead past. Kent Smith, Waldorf