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  • Was the American Civil War fought because of slavery? More than 150 years later

  • this remains a controversial question.

  • Why? Because many people don't want to believe that the citizens of the southern states

  • were willing to fight and die to preserve a morally repugnant institution.

  • There has to be another reason, we are told. Well, there isn't.

  • The evidence is clear and overwhelming. Slavery was, by a wide margin, the single most important

  • cause of the Civil War -- for both sides. Before the presidential election of 1860,

  • a South Carolina newspaper warned that the issue before the country was, "the extinction

  • of slavery," and called on all who were not prepared to, "surrender the institution," to act.

  • Shortly after Abraham Lincoln's victory, they did.

  • The secession documents of every Southern state made clear, crystal clear,

  • that they were leaving the Union in order to protect their "peculiar institution" of slavery

  • -- a phrase that at the time meant "the thing special to them." The vote to secede was 169 to 0

  • in South Carolina, 166 to 7 in Texas, 84 to 15 in Mississippi. In no Southern state was the vote close.

  • Alexander Stephens of Georgia, the Confederacy's Vice President clearly articulated the views

  • of the South in March 1861. "Our new government," he said, was founded on slavery. "Its foundations are laid,

  • its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man;

  • that slavery, submission to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition."

  • Yet, despite the evidence, many continue to argue that other factors superseded slavery

  • as the cause of the Civil War.

  • Some argue that the South only wanted to protect states' rights. But this raises an obvious question:

  • the states' rights to what? Wasn't it to maintain and spread slavery?

  • Moreover, states' rights was not an exclusive Southern issue. All the states -- North and South --

  • sought to protect their rights -- sometimes they petitioned the federal government, sometimes

  • they quarreled with each other. In fact, Mississippians complained that New York had too strong a

  • concept of states' rights because it would not allow Delta planters to bring their slaves to Manhattan.

  • The South was preoccupied with states' rights because it was preoccupied

  • first and foremost with retaining slavery.

  • Some argue that the cause of the war was economic. The North was industrial and the South agrarian,

  • and so, the two lived in such economically different societies that they could no longer stay together.

  • Not true.

  • In the middle of the 19th century, both North and South were agrarian societies. In fact,

  • the North produced far more food crops than did the South. But Northern farmers had to

  • pay their farmhands who were free to come and go as they pleased, while Southern plantation

  • owners exploited slaves over whom they had total control.

  • And it wasn't just plantation owners who supported slavery. The slave society was embraced by

  • all classes in the South. The rich had multiple motivations for wanting to maintain slavery,

  • but so did the poor, non-slave holding whites. The "peculiar institution" ensured that they

  • did not fall to the bottom rung of the social ladder. That's why another argument

  • -- that the Civil War couldn't have been about slavery because so few people owned slaves -- has little merit.

  • Finally, many have argued that President Abraham Lincoln fought the war to keep the Union together,

  • not to end slavery. That was true at the outset of the war. But he did so with the clear knowledge

  • that keeping the Union together meant either spreading slavery to all the states

  • -- an unacceptable solution -- or vanquishing it altogether.

  • In a famous campaign speech in 1858, Lincoln said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

  • What was it that divided the country? It was slavery, and only slavery. He continued:

  • "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free... It will become

  • all one thing, or all the other." Lincoln's view never changed, and as the war progressed,

  • the moral component, ending slavery, became more and more fixed in his mind.

  • His Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 turned that into law.

  • Slavery is the great shame of America's history. No one denies that.

  • But it's to America's everlasting credit that it fought the most devastating war in its history

  • in order to abolish slavery.

  • As a soldier, I am proud that the United States Army, my army, defeated the Confederates.

  • In its finest hour, soldiers wearing this blue uniform -- almost two hundred thousand of them

  • former slaves themselves -- destroyed chattel slavery, freed 4 million men, women,

  • and children from human bondage, and saved the United States of America.

  • I'm Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor and Head, Department of History at the United States

  • Military Academy, West Point for Prager University.

Was the American Civil War fought because of slavery? More than 150 years later

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