Black History: The Causes of the Civil War

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing


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SPECIAL REQUEST FOR TCD FANS: The San Francisco Chronicle is pondering the addition of new cartoons for their paper - a process that seems to be initiated by Darren Bell, creator of Candorville (one of my daily reads - highly recommended). You can read the Chronicle article here and please add your thoughts to the comments if you wish. If anything, put in a good word for Darren and Candorville.

I am submitting Town Called Dobson to the paper for their consideration. They seem to have given great weight to receiving 200 messages considering Candorville. I am asking TCD fans to try to surpass that amount. (I get more than that many hate mails a day, surely fans can do better?)

This is not a race between Darren and I, it is a hope that more progressive strips can be represented in the printed press of America.

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David Wiegand
Executive Datebook Editor
The San Francisco Chronicle
901 Mission St.
San Francisco, CA 94103

Buzz It and Digg It

Strip Essay:
The main explanation for the origins of the American Civil War was slavery, especially the issue of the expansion of slavery into the territories. States' rights and the tariff became entangled in the slavery issue, and were intensified by it. Other important factors were party politics, expansionism, sectionalism, economics and modernization in the Antebellum Period.

The United States was a nation divided into two distinct regions separated by the Mason-Dixon line. New England, the Northeast and the Midwest had a rapidly growing economy based on family farms, industry, mining, commerce and transportation, with a large and rapidly growing urban population and no slavery outside the border states. Its growth was fed by a high birth rate and large numbers of European immigrants, especially Irish, British, German, Polish and Scandinavian.

The South was dominated by a settled plantation system based on slavery, with rapid growth taking place in the Southwest, such as Texas, based on high birth rates and low immigration from Europe. There were few cities or towns, and little manufacturing except in border areas. Slave owners controlled politics and economics. Two-thirds of the Southern whites owned no slaves and usually were engaged in subsistence agriculture, but support for slavery came from all segments of southern society.

Overall, the Northern population was growing much more quickly than the Southern population, which made it increasingly difficult for the South to continue to control the national government. Southerners were worried about the relative political decline of their region because the North was growing much faster in terms of population and industrial output.

In the interest of maintaining unity, politicians had mostly moderated opposition to slavery, resulting in numerous compromises such as the Missouri Compromise of 1820. After the Mexican-American War, the issue of slavery in the new territories led to the Compromise of 1850. While the compromise averted an immediate political crisis, it did not permanently resolve the issue of the Slave power (the power of slaveholders to control the national government).

Amid the emergence of increasingly virulent and hostile sectional ideologies in national politics, the collapse of the old Second Party System in the 1850s hampered efforts of the politicians to reach yet one more compromise. The compromise that was reached (the Kansas-Nebraska Act) outraged too many northerners. In the 1850s, with the rise of the Republican Party, the first major party with no appeal in the South, the industrializing North and agrarian Midwest became committed to the economic ethos of free-labor industrial capitalism.

Arguments that slavery was undesirable for the nation had long existed. After 1840 abolitionists denounced slavery as more than a social evil — it was a moral wrong. Many Northerners, especially leaders of the new Republican Party, considered slavery a great national evil and believed that a small number of Southern owners of large plantations controlled the national government with the goal of spreading that evil.

In 1860, the election of Abraham Lincoln, who won the national election without receiving a single electoral vote from any of the Southern states, triggered the secession of the cotton states of the Deep South from the union.

Birth Of A Notion Disclaimer

•  tip jar

  by StormBear on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 09:18:25 AM PDT

•  In a way, secession

  and the subsequent attack on Fort Sumpter was an example (the first?) of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war. It was based on a perhaps mistaken belief that the Congress was going to outlaw slavery at some point in the future.

  Hotheaded, rash and stupid.

  by elmo on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 09:26:03 AM PDT

  •  Sumter

    No "p" in sumter my friend....but you're right, the old slave power had a lot in common with the Bushies. Like the religious right today, once they found out they could no longer call the tune like they were accustomed to, they threw a fit, declared themselves the victims, and did something really stupid.

    This is one of those wars that the right side won.

    Since losing, the neo-confederates have cooked up convoluted explanation after explanation for why the Confederacy was founded, all in an attempt to whitewash the fact that it was all about slavery.  

    by Morpheus on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 09:33:40 AM PDT

    •  While I

      find myself sympathetic to the idea of states' rights and a weaker federal government, I am in full agreement with you here.

      On all three points.

      Now they talk about "heritage". Well, our heritage, as a nation, is that you lost, Confederates. Get over it.

      by Moody Loner on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 09:44:35 AM PDT

      •  nevah! The South will rise again, I say!

        My husband grew up in Tennessee and tells of elementary school playground re-enactments of the Civil War. He had to be on the Union side because he was Jewish and his family supported integrating the local movie theatre, but all the other kids wanted to be on the Confederate side.

        He grew up on Missionary Ridge in Chattanooga, by the way. Lots of battlefield markers all over the place there.

        by elmo on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 10:07:40 AM PDT

        •  I'd like to go

          and teach my daughter about the Civil War.

          The locals may not like the lessons I teach her, though.

          by Moody Loner on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 10:09:18 AM PDT

          •  take her to Gettysburg then...................n/t

            by gooners on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 10:10:37 AM PDT

            •  Oh, that too. (n/t)

              by Moody Loner on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 10:19:25 AM PDT

  •  I am covering that in a later strip.

    Davis thought he had the cotton trade with Europe sewn up (no pun). That was Davis' first taste of the global economy. The Brits, not wanting to piss off their rich trading partners in the North States, turned to Egypt for cotton, thus fucking over Davis is ways he could barely fathom.

    The die was cast before the first shot was fired at Sumter.

    Egyptian Cotton Economy Link

    by StormBear on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 09:46:34 AM PDT

    •  Egyptian cotton

      Somewhere in there there is a muslin/muslim pun just waiting to be made. Your mission: find it and make people groan.

      by dconrad on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 12:42:27 PM PDT

•  My take on the war

  My impression of war is that it is often promoted by the rich.  I have not found a war that was not economic in nature.  Complicated wars are difficult to discuss.  Often neglected in discussions of the Civil War is the fact that northern industrialists and farmers could not compete against southern industrialists and farmers in the south who had slave labor available to them.  They had an economic reason to support the war.  I do not minimize the economics of war and view the Civil War as a war of the rich against the rich.  Of course there are other factors.

  by realtime on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 09:37:37 AM PDT

  •  By '63 soldiers on both sides were calling it

    a rich man's war.  

    It was very much a war between competing modes of production, merchant and industrial capitalism in the North and agriculturally based capitalism in the South, with both sides controlling their respective politic realms.  However, at the national level, the South needed an expansion of slavery into the new states, or the South would no longer be able to maintain a status quo position in the POTUS, the courts, or the legislature.  With no expansion they'd have ended up on the short side of the stick reference House and Senate members, electoral college votes for the POTUS--and thus the power to appoint judges. The Southern agriculturally based bourgeoisie would also have been subjugated by northern capital.  The Civil War was at its heart an inter-capitalist conflict.

    by Kab ibn al Ashraf on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 10:04:47 AM PDT

•  SPOKEN LIKE A TRUE YANKEE

  and may i say,suh, y'all sound like a republican, as well.

  to many southerners, the wah of northern aggression was the result of yankee meddlin'. before lincoln's war, this country was referred to as "these" united states. afterward, it was called "the" united states as it is today. the difference is that lincoln was the big government man of his day and he fought a war to enforce his belief that states' rights were secondary to washington's will.

  it should be noted that south carolina seceded upon lincoln's election and ordered the federal govt to remove all troops. months after lincoln was inaugurated, he attempted to reinforce fort sumter, knowing it would precipitate opposition. thereafter, the u.s. govt invaded the sovereign confederate states of america.

  the slavery issue was important but i don't believe that's why my ancestors were defending their homeland.

  by tohbi on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 09:37:40 AM PDT

  •  Well, the South Carolina legislature...

    ...sure seemed to think it had a whole lot to do with slavery, in their Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union:  

    A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.

    Slavery and how-dare-they-call-it-a-sin appears all over this declaration.

    (Full disclosure:  I am not the least bit neutral on this issue, being descended from Abolitionists and Union soldiers.  But the text of SC's declaration leaves very little doubt that everybody knew at the time the primary breaking point was slavery.)

    Prog

    by Progressive Witness on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 09:47:24 AM PDT

    •  In my research, the conflict was termed as...

      ... the slave-holding states vs the non-slave-holding states.

      Also note, the only time the states mentioned state's rights was in terms of slavery.

      by StormBear on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 09:51:37 AM PDT

  •  despite my humbling and lowly

    beginnings, I am glad the North kicked the South's arse.

    On behalf of the South, I apologize, denounce, renounce, and spit upon our awful misdeeds.

    God bless America.

    by S Colbert on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 10:07:57 AM PDT

•  Live in the Bay Area

  I'll send something in today, along the lines of "Put this in your paper and I might start buying it."

  by Moody Loner on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 09:41:29 AM PDT

  •  Can I kiss you now?

    ::smooches::

    Here is an idea some of my readers are doing, they are buying a copy (in some cases finding an old copy from last week), and stapling a TCD strip to the front page and mailing that in along with their letter.

    It lets Hearst Publishing know the letter writer is a customer or probable customer.

    Getting your own product back to make a point is a powerful statement.

    by StormBear on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 09:49:47 AM PDT

•  ok.

  1. number 1 All wars are about money and economics the Civil War is no different.  It was about the right of the Central govt to tax the states and raise tarriffs on the South's number one export, Cotton.

  2. States rights vs Central Govt.

  3. Sectionalism: Will new states be slave or free states

  The Slavery issue became the "passion" issue of the war but it was NOT  why the war was started or fought... Lincoln only freed 100k slaves with the emancipation proclamation in 1863 and it was a move to free slaves in the south to create confusion behind enemy lines.

  by MasterHurrikane on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 09:44:21 AM PDT

  •  I'd like to add one thing.

    They are about money and economics, that result from population pressure.

    People want land and riches that they can't get in their homeland, so they go invade somebody else (or send their poor unmarried men off to do it).

    by S Colbert on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 10:09:37 AM PDT

  •  In fact the Emancipation Proclamation

    didn't free slaves in the Union states, only in the Confederate states - which at the time Lincoln had no control over.  The slaves in the Confederate states were actually freed when the Union army moved in after the war ended (why in the Southern states "June-teenth" is celebrated).  The slaves in the Union states weren't freed until the 13th Amendment of the Constitution was ratified.

    That Lincoln didn't free the slaves in the states he had jurisdiction over and didn't free any slaves until 1863 when the war was getting pretty unpopular and he could use the slave issue to bring the abolitionists in to support the war, makes the "war was primarily over slavery" proposition a little iffy.  The secession was primarily over slavery.  The war was not - at least not until after the Emancipation Proclamation.

    by bfitzinAR on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 10:46:11 AM PDT

•  You did leave out the tariff system

  in place that put the southern states largely in the same position as the American colonies in relation to Great Britain in the 1760-70s - they pretty much had to sell their raw materials for less than they could get them in an open market and they equally pretty much had to purchase finished goods from the same folks they'd had to sell their raw materials to.  Works great from the industrialists' standpoint, but sux from the agrarians' one.

  And the really stupid thing about the whole situation is that slavery, even if it had been ethically sound, was not economically viable.  Southern slaveholders were wealthy despite owning slaves, not because of it.  The same accounting structure that makes laying waste to our natural resources look viable is what made slavery look viable - neither one is.  (I know, that hasn't stopped the rape of the land either.)  As Al Gore pointed out in "Earth in the Balance" we've got to change our accounting system to a "cradle to cradle" version to be able to change self-destructive belief systems that result in self-destructive behaviors.  Outlawing the behaviors one at a time helps some, but it doesn't change the underlying belief system.  (Republican's "southern strategy" anyone?)

  by bfitzinAR on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 10:35:34 AM PDT

  •  Slaveholders wealthy...

    The big slaveholders were wealthy in a society that put the price of each slave in the hundreds of dollars when $2 was a very good daily wage.  The average white Southerner, though was poorer than the average white Northerner, and abolitionist writers claimed that the typical black Northerners were richer than the average white Southerner as well.

    by Yamaneko2 on Sat Apr 26, 2008 at 08:54:08 AM PDT