Civil War and Slavery

It was a thinly veiled deception during the winter of secession in 1861 that the Southern states who were leaving the Union were leaving to protect states’ rights. The truth, which everyone knew, was that slavery was the reason - the South was determined to protect the institution at all costs.

While the election of Abraham Lincoln - a vehement anti-slavery candidate - brought about the secession of Southern slaveholding states and the birth of the Confederacy, the issue of slavery did not suddenly begin to be problematic with Lincoln’s election.

Slavery was actually legal in the entire United States until the end of the Civil War; however, as early as the Revolutionary War, Northern states, which had been heavily populated with more white indentured servants than slaves, had begun passing emancipation laws. The South, however, dependent on slavery for the brutal labor that was part and parcel of the cotton and rice plantations that flourished there, was dependent on slavery, and therefore continued to support what its citizens referred to as the “peculiar institution.”

With each state that was admitted to the Union, a precursor to the Civil War raged about whether or not it would be a free or slave state. Preserving the balance of free and slave states was key; any upset in this balance would mean that one or the other section, slave or free, would control Congress.

It was hardly surprising, then, that the Deep South states where slaves outnumbered free men and women - South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas – were the first to secede from the Union when Lincoln and his Republican party were voted in during the elections of 1860. The Republicans were an anti-slavery party, and these states feared the threat that this new Republican government posed to slavery. The threat was real, for these states; the large, slaveholding plantations of these Southern states represented the majority of the wealth and commerce in the Deep South. The abolition of slavery would devastate these states. In comparison, the slave states that actually held the fewest slaves, suchas North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee, were the last to secede, and border states like Kentucky and Missouri, who were almost evenly split between populations that relied heavily on slavery and citizens who held few or no slaves at all, found themselves contested throughout the war, claimed by both the Union and the Confederacy. For Virginia, the disagreement was both bitter and destructive; the eastern part of the state, which was slave territory, and the western part of the state, which had abolitionist leanings, divided over the issue.

Southerners defended their peculiar institution, denying to themselves and to others the horrific truths of slavery. Claiming to love and care for their slaves, slave owners insisted that their slaves would be unable to care for themselves, that they appreciated their enslaved status. It was a lie that could not hold up; while some areas of the South preserved slavery until Lee’s surrender in 1865, the influx of runaway slaves to the North began at the end of the war and intensified after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Slavery, like the Confederacy created to defend it, was doomed.