American Civil War Game Club (ACWGC)

So was it a necessary war in 1860? Or should it have been avoided completely, delayed, or should it have happened sooner?

I was discussing this with some people this week and thought I'd post the question here to see what responses come in.

I read somewhere that Slavery would have disappeared on its own without the war but the fact that "emancipation" really occured in the 1950's and 60's , I dispute that opinion. The Civil War created the canvas for emancipation and if it never occurred, racism wouldbe a stronger element in this country.
There is another reason the Civil War was necessary and that is the creation of nationalism. Before the CW, there was no concept of a nation, only a collection of states. States rights was vigorously defended by the South up to the CW. After the war, the country was united and states rights no longer was an issue.

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Gen. Drex Ringbloom,
AotS ,Commanding

I have to disagree there.....States rights is still an issue today, just not on the same scale as then....I do believe the war was unneccessary. I believe that there would be less racism, had one section of the country not been conquered and completely crushed partially over the issue of race.....Had slavery died a natural death (I do believe it would have as it was definatly in decline economicly), I feel there would have been far less of what occured both during and after the war that created much of the lasting bitterness on both sides of the issue. I do agree on one thing. After the war, the Federal government was free to define the limits of its own power. We are paying dearly for that today with our huge government and ballooning national debt. I, for one, think we are in deep trouble as in the end, we will spend ourselves to death.....

states rights were a big deal in 1860,,but economic stability was a even bigger issue. the united states could never allow the southern states to form there own country,,the economic impact wold have been devastating. the industrial north with its growing population depended on the tax revenue from the southern ports to fill the goverment coffers. the south on the other hand did not have such a dependency. so in that reguard the war was needed to preserve the united states.

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MG. Vannada
Headquarters:
Red Jackson's Division
Nathan Bedford Forest Cavalry Corp (3rd)
Army of The West

This is a tough question. The Southern leaders knew that the Republicans were out to stop the spread of slavery - which would eventually cause it to come to an end on terms other than those they themselves chose. I believe many in the South did not care for slavery but the question was always what to do with 3 million freed slaves? All efforts at deportation and colonialism for ex-slaves were far-fetched and met with minimal support and success. The sheer cost of moving that many people out of the country was unthinkable. Western lands were discussed for a "black" territory but that was never given any serious consideration in Congress. The South was determined that they alone would decide the fate of slavery in America in their own due time. The rise of the Republicans threatened the right of the South to decide the issue on their own. Radicals like John Brown only confirmed the idea that the North would do away with slavery at any cost.

For the North it seemed that the South had always taken advantage of their power within the government. Issues such as the Missouri Compromise, Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Fugitive Slave Law, and the Dred Scott Decision added fuel to fire of those who believed in a great slave-conspiracy. Radicals even promoted the idea of secession of northeastern states to leave a Union dominated by slave interests. When the Republicans rightfully won a fair election there were few people who accepted the South's claim that they were being steamrolled. The South's complaints seemed more like sour grapes than actual reasons for disunion.

So was the war necessary in 1860? I still say no. Who was to blame for it? Man.... thats a tougher question! I am going to walk the political line here and blame both sides equally. Extremists, north and south, had been beating the drums of secession and emancipation for many years. With every small incident exploited and every issue magnified by these men and women the populace of the country was under constant bombardment of propaganda for, and against, slavery. Churches divided over the issue, families split, and finally the nation followed. Had the extremists been silenced or ignored perhaps the Civil War does not occur in 1860 when Lincoln is elected. Maybe it could have been avoided altogether but that is too hard to say. But with the increasing northern population and industrialization the South's chances for victory were ever shrinking after 1860. Maybe at some point, a foreign war perhaps, the nation may have found a new sense of nationalism. After WW2 there was a great sense of indignation at the long standing Jim Crow of the South from many returning soldiers. How a nation who had just fought a world war to defend the ideal of man's equality and freedom from tyranny could tolerate gross injustice within its own land was hard to answer. This gradual change in thinking was to become a part of the Civil Rights movement of the 40s - 60s. Could such events have altered US history to make slavery die a natural death and thus avoid such a horrible Civil War? Something to ponder...

The South's economy was built on slavery. Without it the economy would collapse. It is one of those follow the money. There were more millionaires in Memphis than any other place in the world. They weren't going to give up the golden goose no matter what the future might do to it. So those who wanted slavery set up the Democratic Convention to fail. With a split Democratic party they assured Lincoln would win which insured they got succession like they wanted. They just didn't think the North would fight.

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General Kennon Whitehead
Chatham Grays
AoT II/1/3 (CSA)

Neccesary for what? I would submit that something like another comrpromise could have delayed, but not cancelled some large military conflict.

However, other questions aboudn
Did the Civil War cause the following

The end of slavery-Yes
The end of sectionalism-No
Nation building-Yes
Tolerance for diversity-No

Lincoln viewed the beginning of the war as an effort to save the Union
Davis postulated that the South would only defend itself if invaded.

Those policies did not survive the first 2 years of the War

Was it inevitable? Most likely.

As long as there are fanatics on both sides, usually the worst possible result is the outcome. Check current day situation for myriad examples.
As for the Fed. Government getting too big and powerful because of the Civil War, I would have to think that the events of the 1860's did not force the Big Govt. issues now current-The conflict certainly has great influence still, but many other events (mainly world wars) have lead to some of the challenges of today.

Of course, that falls outside the topic asked.

My 2 cents.

BG Elkin
3rd Div/(2nd Cav)XVI Corps AotT

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I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies. . . . Let us look before us, and not behind

Slavery would have ended in the South, probably in another decade or two.
Brazil abolished slavery in 1888 without a war, the last country in our hemisphere to do so...hardly a bastion of enlightenment for human rights.
Even though an agricultural nation, Brazil did not collapse economically afterward.
Where did any other country find it necessary to fight an internal war to end slavery?
Haiti comes to mind, but that was a successful internal rebellion by the slaves.
Usually the rebelling slaves lost, but other countries freed them later anyway.

The Union did quite well economically with a hostile South at war fighting it...as some trade always going on by smugglers. Gen. R. E. Lee deplored it but did not interfere because it was the only way to get critical goods such as medicines.
Furthermore, the Union had increased its trade during the war that it was caught up with its prewar level without the South... which the Union resumed its economic exploitation of the conquered states after its victory.

I have always found it interesting that the North continuously claimed during the fighting that the Confederacy could not leave the Union, but were still in it....then after the war required the conquered states to reapply to re-join the USA.
So did the rebel states secede or were they cast out?

Protection of Slavery was an issue already won by the South, which was continued by the Union in their slave holding border states throughout the war. Lincoln was afraid that they too might secede so he excluded them from the Emancipation Proclamation.
Republicans were determined to prevent any more states joining which permitted slavery because they did not want their votes against the interests of the industrial North. Otherwise, the industrial North already had the votes in Congress to vote themselves benefits at southern expense and were not trying to abolish slavery in agricultural states or even border states which had far less economic interests in preserving slavery.

Abe Lincoln even offered that the South could leave...as long as US federal agents could still collect tariffs in southern ports.
Fort Sumter was such a federal installation to continue those collections. The Confederates had demanded that the garrison leave.
I believe that the bombardment of Ft Sumter was a southern ultimatum, after the failed Union attempt at reprovisioning, that the South Carolinians would enforce removal of Union garrisons...and were willing to fight about it...were even eager to fight. That fits with the later determination of Sherman to punish S. Carolina for starting the rebellion.

All states, including the North, had joined with the understanding that the principle of states' rights would trump the federal government laws except where it was empowered by the US Constitution. Otherwise, most would not have joined.
The first 10 amendments were created to spell out to all that the federal government was specifically bound to respect states' rights in those areas.
The 10th Amendment spells out that the states have the right of secession. There is no provision in the Constitution that states are bound permanently or that the federal government is empowered to prevent states from seceding...for any reason.

BG Ross McDaniel
2nd Bde, 3rd Div, III Corps, AoG, CSA

"Southern Bid for Commercial Power"
It does not require extraordinary sagacity to perceive that trade is perhaps the controlling motive operating to prevent the return of the seceding States to the Union, which they have abandoned. Alleged grievances in regard to slavery were originally the causes for the separation of the cotton States; but the mask has been thrown off, and it is apparent that they people of the principal seceding States are now for commercial independence. They dream that the centres of traffic can be changed from Northern to Southern ports. The merchants of New Orleans, Charleston and Savannah are possessed with the idea that New York, Boston, and Philadelphia may be shorn, in the future, of their merchantile greatness, by a revenue system verging upon free trade. If the Southern Confederation is allowed to carry out a policy by which only a nominal duty is laid upon imports, no doubt the business of the chief Northern cities will be seriously injured thereby.
The difference is so great between the tariff of the Union and that of the Confederated States, that the entire Northwest must find it to their advantage to purchase their imported goods at New Orleans rather than at New York. In addition to this, the manufacturing interest of the country will suffer from the increased importations resulting from low duties...The ...(government) would be false to all of its obligations, if this state of things were not provided against. -The Boston Transcript 18 March 1861

"...It is that you may have an opportunity of cheating us that you want to limit slave territory within circumscribed bounds. It is that you may have a majority in the Congress of the United States and convert the Government into an engine of northern aggrandizement. It is that your section may grow in power and prosperity upon treasures unjustly taken from the South...You desire to weaken the political power of the southern states; and why? Because you want, by an unjust system of legislation, to promote the industry of the New England states, at the expense of the people of the South and their industry." -Jefferson Davis, from a speech before the ACW

“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right—a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.”
Abraham Lincoln in a speech before Congress on January 12, 1848

Unfortunately I can't find the book that had the detail statistics in it. It was a rather boring book being statistical in nature but the conclusions were interesting. The South's economy and particularly its wealth was based on cotton and slavery. Over half the white population either made money from the work of slaves or made money selling the slaves. While its true it was declining in the Eastern states, mostly due to soil exhasution from one crop farming, it was on the rise in the western states particularly Texas. Those who controled the wealth and power in the South obtained it through the riches of slavery. The few that didn't make their living in some way from the institution felt threatened by anything that migh put them in competition with ex-slaves for jobs.

An interesting analysis was made on the make up of Lee's Army, mostly to illustrate why southern men who were not among the 10% who owned slaves would be willing to fight to keep it. The author showed that well over 40% of the soldiers either owned or were involved in earning money from slavery. Almost all the officer corps were slave owners of some degree. Those who weren't feared the consequences of freeing slaves.

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General Kennon Whitehead
Chatham Grays
AoT II/1/3 (CSA)

it was a factor, but relatively minor in the decisions to fight for both Union and Confederate states.
The war against Southern independence was Northern aggression, intent on continuing to exploit the South economically. Had the South been allowed to go free, the USA would have been the South's main trading partner anyway, but the Northern interests would not have been able to penalize the NW states for preferring to trade with a free trade South or England and France for docking in Southern ports.

"The South's economy and particularly its wealth was based on cotton and slavery. Over half the white population either made money from the work of slaves or made money selling the slaves....
An interesting analysis was made on the make up of Lee's Army, mostly to illustrate why southern men who were not among the 10% who owned slaves would be willing to fight to keep it. The author showed that well over 40% of the soldiers either owned or were involved in earning money from slavery. Almost all the officer corps were slave owners of some degree. Those who weren't feared the consequences of freeing slaves."

The above blurb is an irrelevant and unproven smear against the Confederacy.
One might as well assert that anyone doing business in the South benefited from slavery...somehow, somewhere along the trading.
Lincoln did not move against slavery in the border slave states. The Emancipation Proclamation was only for slaves held in control by the Confederacy. They grew the crops and built fortifications that supported the Confederate armies.

Although I have repeatedly posted and proven that the Union was a slave holding nation until the end of the war against the South, the issue keeps being brought up as though the Union fought to free the slaves held by the Confederacy and that was the primary cause of the ACW. Balderdash!
The primary cause of the ACW was the determination by Abe Lincoln and the Republican Party that independence of the confederated states would not be allowed. Lincoln offered in his inaugural address that the South could go in peace... as long as federal agents could collect tariffs in Southern ports. This would have been "taxation without representation," the same cause that the colonies went to war against the British crown. How appropriate!

The proper name for the ACW could be "The War for Southern Independence" or more likely, "The War to Prevent Southern Independence"...since the North won, and victors write the history books that go into the education of the young. It was not a civil war as the Confederacy had no desire to conquer and administer the Union states.

For those interested in what the period of slavery was really like,....
Below is an article which gives enough references to hunt down and verify or dispute statistics and statements. You may find some of its accounts incredible and/or enlightening. Obviously thousands of freed Negroes preferred to remain in the South and prospered after they were free:
(But what about all those scared white folks?!)

http://americancivilwar.com/authors/bla ... owners.htm
Dixie's Censored Subject- Black Slave Owners
Excerpts:
..."In 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. According to the U.S. census report for that last year before the Civil War, there were nearly 27 million whites in the country. Some eight million of them lived in the slaveholding states.
The census also determined that there were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned slaves (1). Even if all slaveholders had been white, that would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country (or 4.8 percent of southern whites owning one or more slaves)...

...According to federal census reports, on June 1, 1860 there were nearly 4.5 million Negroes in the United States, with fewer than four million of them living in the southern slaveholding states. Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans. The country's leading African American historian, Duke University professor John Hope Franklin, records that in New Orleans over 3,000 free Negroes owned slaves, or 28 percent of the free Negroes in that city.
To return to the census figures quoted above, this 28 percent is certainly impressive when compared to less than 1.4 percent of all American whites and less than 4.8 percent of southern whites. The statistics show that, when free, blacks disproportionately became slave masters...
...The general practice of the period was that plantation owners would buy seed and equipment on credit and settle their outstanding accounts when the annual cotton crop was sold. Ellison, like all free Negroes, could resort to the courts for enforcement of the terms of contract agreements. Several times Ellison successfully sued white men for money owed him...
...On March 27, 1863 John Wilson Buckner, William Ellison's oldest grandson, enlisted in the 1st South Carolina Artillery. Buckner served in the company of Captains P.P. Galliard and A.H. Boykin, local white men who knew that Buckner was a Negro. Although it was illegal at the time for a Negro to formally join the Confederate forces, the Ellison family's prestige nullified the law in the minds of Buckner's comrades. Buckner was wounded in action on July 12, 1863. At his funeral in Stateburg in August, 1895 he was praised by his former Confederate officers as being a "faithful soldier."

BG Ross McDaniel
2nd Bde, 3rd Div, III Corps, AoG, CSA

Surrender means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the War; will be impressed by all the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit subjects for derision."--- General Pat Cleburne, CSA

“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right—a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.”
Abraham Lincoln in a speech before Congress on January 12, 1848

Bases the 1860 census the Volunteers of 1861:

Owned slaves or lived in a family that owned slaves: 36%
One in ten lived in households headed by non-family members who owned slaves.
This brings the number of recruits in the army linked directly to slavery to one in two.

In addition those enlisties not in the above catagories either rented land from, sold crops to, or worked for slaveholders this the slaveholders were the ones with wealth.

More than half of the officers in 1861 owned slaves and none lived with family members who were slaveholders based on the census. This means that the officer corps was mainly drawn from plantation owners rather than the family of.

One in twelve of the enlisted men owned slaves but when those who lived with family slave owners were included the ratio exceeds one in three.

These statistics would indicate the the armies formed in 1861 were very much represented by those whose livelihood dependented on slavery. Almost half the armies.

For comparison, only 24.9% of the households owned slavery for the South as a whole.

This represents a very strong link between the institution of slavery and the financial health of the South. The sudden elimination of one would surely play hell with the other.

As to why the South succeeded, Mississippi stated it well

"A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union

In the momentous step, which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin."

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General Kennon Whitehead
Chatham Grays
AoT II/1/3 (CSA)

I think you have to take a good, hard look at the political parties in both the North and the South at the time of the war. And the Northwest, in particular, is a good place to start for the North. By the winter of 1862 the Northwest Democrats felt that the great peace of their region had been disrupted by the war, the succession of the Southern States being viewed as an inevitably sad affair that probably could and should have been repaired by force of arms as quickly as possible. The preservation of the Union was the primary motivating force that kept the majority of the Democratic Party in the North as supporters for the war.

But there was a vocal minority of the Democratic Party within the Northwest that believed that the war was a contrived result of a Republican engineered attempt to dominate the South, and that they had actually provoked and goaded the South into succession! Furthermore, they believed that the Republicans were radically bent on imposing throughout the South what they felt was a mistakenly held supposition that blacks were the equals of whites. They identified themselves as the staunchest of the so-called Peace Democrats and argue for a swift end to hostilities before the cost of re-unification became too high to bear! They had garnered seats in the Houses and Assemblies of the States in the region that autumn during the 1862 elections, some of them adopting the copper penny as their distinctive badge of display. They were quick to loudly trumpet their ideology with each military defeat suffered by the North.

It was a simple strategy, the successful end of which would be resolved by how many lives and how much cost the general Northern population could actually endure. If the Northwest, as a region, should withdraw its support for the war, the Lincoln Administration could not then hope to continue the contest. The South would be recognized in their independence, free enterprise would be restored with the peace and the rest of the country would quietly and without further disruption return to the rationally contrived political path upon which it had formerly embarked. There would always be room for compromise, even for the most egregious differences that might exist within the two nations! Slavery might be allowed to die its own death, the blacks patiently educated and trained towards their own future as circumstances allowed. The institution had been successfully channeled before, and it could be done so again.

Such, of course, was not the reality shared by President Lincoln. Earlier that year he had attempted to politically bolster the prosecution of the war by announcing to the nation and the world that the institution of slavery could no longer be tolerated within the American ethical and political fabric. The Emancipation Proclamation condemned slavery into extinction with the advance of Union armies throughout the South. It was a move at once completely detested, deplored and railed against by the Copperheads, and which drew serious looks of concern from the majority of the Democratic Party north of the Mason Dixon Line.

It also caused substantial pause within Europe and Great Britian for a number of different reasons. There the question had been the economic cost of not recognizing the legitimacy of the Southern succession, a cost created by the self-imposed embargo by the South of its own cotton trade with Europe. English textile mills had for a time felt the crippling lack of supply, and France debated whether it would be in her own best interests to deal with two Americas, not one! Yet, neither Great Britian or France could now hope to openly support the Confederacy without appearing to condone slavery, a practice that each nation had not only already abolished at home, but were successfully and actively suppressing as a trade within and without their empires. Regardless of the fact that Lincoln's proclamation seemed to raise the nervous specter among some European leaders of horrible retributions that might be visited upon the South once the enslaved, black populations were freed, a great, moral cloak had been thrown over the conflict, begging the spirit and soul of man.

It was the politics, economics and morality of the times, all interwoven, that not only produced the causes of the Amercian Civil War, but eventually morphed it into the great, wrenching cataclysm that it became!

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General Jos. C. Meyer, ACWGC
Union Army Chief of Staff
Commander, Army of the Shenandoah
Commander, Army of the Tennessee
(2011-2014 UA CoA/GinC)

Whether or not one argues that the war was about slavery or not.... it is interesting that the direction this thread has taken is now decidedly about slavery and its economic, military, and social consequences. In this period of American history it seems all issues eventually became about slavery. No matter how mundane something might be it somehow became a larger issue when the issue of slavery was somehow intertwined with it.

America had successfully avoided Civil War from 1787 to 1860 despite the issue of slavery being a constant theme in politics. That in 1860 the election of Lincoln finally brought the great war upon us is a shame. From my very words there it is clear I would have preferred to see slavery die out naturally rather than have seen the Civil War take place. I dont think it necessary in 1860 or at any point in the future really. The South should have began to realize, by 1880, that slavery was outdated and that the industrialized north was pulling far ahead of them. As industry grew in the South it would have began to change the culture there away from agriculture. Foreign, religious, moral, and social pressures to end slavery would have continued to mount and eventually one or two states would have led the way by abolishing slavery (likely Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware or Tennessee).

While looking back from our perspective it seems so obvious that slavery would die an natural death if just given time, there were those in the South who wanted to prevent this from happening at any cost. Bruce Catton stated it best:

"Whatever there was in all the South which had to resist the pressures of the outside world would from its ranks here (Charleston), vigilant to beat down anything that even looked like a concession to the demand for change. It would take an extreme poistion because no other position was left to it. The institution of chattel slavery on which it was based was broad but extremely delicate, and to touch it at all could cause the collapse of everything that rested on it. Hence it was forbidden even to admit that it might some day be necessary to touch it. On this point Douglas was dangerously unsound: his Freeport doctrine, which held that no conceivable safeguard of Federal laws could protect slavery in a territory where the people themselves wanted no slavery, was open and unforgiveable heresy.

So there were men in this convention who would fight Douglas without paying any heed to the cost of the fight, and they had the advantage which any completely determined minority has in a meeting where the majority would like to have harmoney. They were ready to go to extremes."
....
"These men, the allout fire-eating secessionists, believed that they could get what they wanted if the party lost the election. Beyond the wrangling over platform and candidate they could see a completely new nation, an independent South ebodying the most soring dreams of the cotton empire, zealously preserving the peculiar institution and the complex values that rested on it."

And they did.

The opening chapters in Bruce Catton's "The Coming Fury" is an excellent study of how a few extremest can drag the majority and a nation down a path to destruction.

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General Kennon Whitehead
Chatham Grays
AoT II/1/3 (CSA)

Why are you so certain that slavery in the South would have died a "natural death?" Mississippi didn't ratify the 13th Amendment until 1995, and Kentucky, which all but institutionalized the export of slaves to the South, didn't ratify the Amendment until 1976!

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General Jos. C. Meyer, ACWGC
Union Army Chief of Staff
Commander, Army of the Shenandoah
Commander, Army of the Tennessee
(2011-2014 UA CoA/GinC)