To be fair, let's review this article and get some feedback on a different view. This article suggests the Civil War was primarily a war on southern nobility.
The War on Southern Nobility
Posted on June 26, 2012 by teaspoonofhistory
The American Civil War was fought more so because of the South’s ideology of institutionalized nobility, than any other reason besides that of the continuation of the Union. To some lesser extent, the war was about the abolishment of slavery, but it had a much deeper implication than just the end of human bondage . The North was so appalled by the Southern sentiments of aristocracy, or that specific families, often land owners such as those who had plantations, were treated as royalty. It was the reconstruction of Old World attitudes and of recreating noble family lines that brought great resentment from the North. Although the outcome of the war was obvious to anyone who examined the two sides in any perspective, the most startling observation is that after the war had ended, the South had won the war on nobility and perpetuated the idea of a Southern Gentry for a century after the war ended.
It was with this impetus that the North and South were heading off in different cultural directions that sowed the seeds of the American Civil War. It was the dichotomy of black versus white; or earned money versus family money; that the society of both halves had been left to fester and allowed to propagate along completely different cultural values.
Lincoln could see that the impending dangers of allowing the two halves to proceed without direct intervention would eventually lead to an attempt by rogue states to impose their own ideology of government in the still formative years of the United States. In his 1858 senatorial campaign speech, Lincoln orates the words, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” This speech followed the Douglas’s Kansas – Nebraska Act of 1854 and the Supreme Court’s decision to make slavery legal in all states. Much of the Supreme Court up to this point had been controlled by southern gentry, and Lincoln could very well project that the courts would pursue such a line of defense and articulation as to head off a confrontation with the northern federalists.
Lincoln stated in the speech that there were two alarming points that needed to be made upon the argument of the Douglas’s Act. With his speech he articulated that the rulings strip negroes of citizenship. That the Constitution protected slavery as property and that no power at the level of a citizen, state, or country could prohibit it. The true ambition of the Act was to allow slaves to be brought into new fledgling states before a state constitution could be created, thus perpetuating slavery in all new states. It was this underhanded action, almost conspiratorial effort of the Supreme Court to force all new states to become Slave States that most upset Lincoln. What is unique about this entire situation was that it wasn’t about slavery, but was used as the perception or face of the argument. What was in contest was Southern Nobility and the concepts of that cultural significance that the Douglas Act was to complete.
It was this division that shown through the cracks of the North and the South, that both sides recognized would not dissipate and would be required to be settled. Both sides understood the gravity of the situation, but like playing chicken with two speeding cars, each side thought the other would flinch. Both sides were so sure that the other side would step back, that they didn’t realize course of events would lead to civil war.
“I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and put it in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old, as well as new.”
What Lincoln was suggesting was that the two sides would have to come to an agreement on the legacy of cultural institutionalism of nobility, not about slavery that neither side had any true concerns over. Both sides used slavery as the thorn of this dispute, but in truth it wasn’t about freeing the slaves or even the dissolving of a century of bondage. Slavery became the euphemism of southern nobility.
Lincoln’s Rebuke
Lincoln’s Springfield speech of 1858 outlines the North’s idea of slavery as, “Although I have ever been opposed to slavery, so far I rested in the hope and belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction.” the idea behind slavery was that it was required in the beginning, but as the nation expanded, the North thought that the entire country would assume that it was simply going to go away. Simply put, its future existence would be short lived.. Slavery was unnecessary in the burgeoning Industrial Age, as all things that could be done with slaves could be done with machines. It was simply obvious to the industrialized North that keeping a black person in bondage would become more expensive than the much cheaper alternative to having a machine that had no aspiration, no mind, that didn’t require housing, food, or living conditions favorable over a simple mechanical process. It was with this idea that the North thought that with the end of slavery, would also end the idea of Southern Nobility. The idea of one man controlling another man’s rights and aspirations, struck firmly against the North’s vision of the United States.
In Lincoln’ speech of 1858 the South thought they understood his rant, “. . .that the men of the present age, by their experience, have become wiser than the framers of the Constitution; and the invention of the cotton gin had made the perpetuity of slavery a necessity in this country.” With those words, the South pointedly interpreted that Lincoln understood the need for slavery for cotton and other agricultural intensive operations. This strikes against the ideas of course that Lincoln had issue with slavery, where it truly wasn’t about slavery but all about the noble birthright of the South. Lincoln did not like slavery, but it was not something he would have gone to war over. He believed that in time, the ideas of slavery would simply fade away, but the nightmare of a continuing upper class of the South would go on perpetually.
Although it was the Age of Machines that created so many marvelous technologies such as the telegraph, the steam boat, and the railroad the Southern Gentry knew it took hands to work the fields. In the north huge factories began to immerge that would transform the cotton into fabric, but these factories ran on hired labor and not slaves. The North saw no need for slavery in this capacity.
Northern Sentiments
With contempt, the North saw land claimed for slavery (and the continuation of Southern aristocracy) escalate as Texas joined the union and the millions of acres fell into the hands of the South. A letter written by Abiel Abbot, a leading and prominent northern clergyman, summarizes the dismissal and defamation that was lauded against the new addition of statehood, “The annexation of Texas is a great offense against humanity & a monstrous transgression of the law of God. It is a violation of the constitution of the U. States. Had either of the senators of New Hampshire voted against the measure the resolution would not have passed. Oh, shame for New Hampshire. The State is not a republic; it is governed by an oligarchy…. Moral principle is divorced from politics–partyism has devoured patriotism, human rights & put conscience to sleep.” The feelings, like that expressed by the clergyman, was that the government, most specifically the North, took a blind eye towards continuation and propagation of slavery. That if the Northern leadership would simply stand against the continuation of slavery and the propagation of it into new territories, that the South would have to abandon the idea. Again this is testimony that the North did not have a problem with slavery, but with what truly bothered them about the South.
Much like the modern debate how best to solve or alleviate the national debt, nineteenth-century Americans grappled with the idea of ending human bondage. Speeches, letters, and informal debates raged across the country, not just in the North but presumably in the South and the West alike. Theodore Weld commented thusly, “The case of Human Rights against Slavery has been adjudicated in the court of conscience times innumerable. The same verdict has always been rendered—‘Guilty;’ the same sentence has always been delivered” The letter shows that the North plainly saw that bondage was evil and the prescription of continuing slavery was an abomination against the goodness of which the country stood.
A letter by the infamous John Brown, a revolutionary abolitionist, to his father hints at the division in the west and the coming conflagration that would consume the nation, “We feel more, & more certain that Kansas will be a Free State. At this moment there is quite an excitement here growing out of a report of the Murder of a young Free Stater man by a Missourian. Large numbers on both sides are said to be in Arms near Lawrence; & some anticipate a Bloody fight.”
Southern Sentiments
For the South, it wasn’t about replacing a man with a machine as it was more about the cultural values associated with the work and family. That there was a spirit, perhaps even a lust, for doing hard, honest work that preceded the intervention of clattering machinery. It was about family ties and history, about landed gentry, about controlling the land as a living entity in itself. It was a world that was all living and had roots of deep sentiments in the past. The South saw emancipation as another way the North was perverting the core of its cultural values into money grubbing, Puritan convenience.
Although Thomas Jefferson was an opponent to foreign aristocracy, in that “the dangers grew out of the imperial crisis and patriots fears that a plague of “placemen” — a privileged, irresponsible, foreign ruling class” that he worked tirelessly to defend the nation against such evils, but he also saw that the aristocracy was everywhere and would proliferate in times no matter how much heel you put to its throat. It could be conjectured, therefore, that his ideas on a new aristocracy, like those of the plantation owners, bred and raised in the United States, were a necessary evil to the continuation of the nation.
The Confederates used the philosophy that it wasn’t truly about slavery as it was about the North’s inability to accept a different sort of culture within the United States, specifically the idea of an aristocratic South.. The Confederation had a culture steeped in archaic fundamentalist ideology of Old World governance and nobility. The southern states saw the North as a festering pot of humanity, with no regard to past or family, to a time when the United States stood against the world for values of personal conduct, state values, and an independence from a Empirical power such as a centralized government. Even “Many northerners began to cast their eyes southward because it appeared than an Old World aristocracy there had somehow discovered a way of assuring stability and cultivating a sense of gentility and decorum while maintaining a commitment to the public good” There was something almost quaint to the philosophic ideology that a moneyed nobility of the South created a cultural stability that was lacking in the North.
Confederate book publishers were quite active between 1863 and 1865 to publish a number of European books and offerings and Shakespeare ranked high in their selection. The Confederacy produced no masterpieces, and for obvious reasons they would not publish Northern literature. It was on this stage that such powerful rhetoric found home with the Confederates. The South held value of country, land, and family over the lust for gold. Just as in the Saint Crispin’s Day speech of Shakespeare’s King Henry the V, “By Jove, I am not covetous for gold, Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost; it yearns me not if men my garments wear; such outward things dwell not in my desires. But if it be a sin to covet honour, I am the most offending soul alive!” The South saw themselves as a single cultural entity and the North as a fetid pool of multiple nationalities with conflicting value and family ties, born out of the lust for gold, greed, and domination. Even the poorest Southern white farmer saw this difference and to some extent believed there was this need and desire to maintain a racial caste, without the hope of ever elevating their position in society. To them, the North was a pack of wolves devoid of leadership, and the idea that any mangy cur could claw, bite, and rip asunder the cultural layers of society to scramble the top of the hill.
Much like the South’s postwar argument in the Lost Cause, the Confederacy:
“A doctrine followed logically from this image of a noble South, namely, that the Cavalier South was forced to take up arms against the money-seeking Puritan invaders. The South was torn asunder precisely because of its honor and nobility, its purity and grace. For put very simply, the Cavaliers of aristocratic manners and polite sentiments shaped existence in the South, in the other section there rules the opposite extreme.”
It was this sentiment that was so obvious to the South, born out at every level of society. Even the destitute white share cropper held the believe that their cultural values meant something more than this Northern affliction of simply money grubbing and lackluster attention to family history. It wasn’t that the South did not covet money, but it was secreted away under layers of cultural and established family values. It was the idea that money couldn’t buy happiness and that freedom of will always trumped a sack of gold.
It is institutionalized aristocracy that divided the North and South in more than simple slavery or even federalism, but that caused the angst of war to the forefront of national consensus. From the South we have this concept of the “intolerance of the Puritan, the painful thrift of the Northern colonists, their external forms of piety, their jaundiced legislation, their convenient morals, their lack of sentimentalism which makes up the half of modern civilization, and their unremitting hunt for selfish aggrandizement traits of character which are yet visible in their decedents.” The South looked down upon the North in all the values that they held supreme — the idea of regimented theocracy and religious connotations Catholicism, the idea of keeping separate business from family, creating laws that were favored by special interests, and the idea that old ideas needed to be flushed out and replaced by a new order of ideology. “On the other hand, the colonists of Virginia and the Carolinas were from first distinguished for their polite manners, their fine sentiments, their attachment to a sort of feudal life, their landed gentry, their love of field sports and dangerous adventure, and the prodigal and improvident aristocracy that dispensed its stores in constant rounds of hospitality and gaiety.”
How the South Lost the War
A cursory examination of the any number of categories reveals that the Confederacy simply had little chance at winning the war. It is a startling fact that the North was a so unbelievably more powerful than the South, that it is amazing that so many Southerners took up arms in the American Civil War. Commodities, including those devices and resources used to wage war, that the South was so verily dwarfed by the industrialized and resource rich North. For example, the Union had a 2.4 to 1 advantage in men; a 10 to 1 in industrial capacity, 32 to 1 in the manufacture of guns, bullets, and black powder; equally so in the production of coal which would be equivalent to oil/gasoline today. Even the production of food, although hampered by the North having to ship it south, was 3 to 1 in the North’s favor.
It is within this framework of logic that the North and South came to the fields of Gettysburg, the turning point battle of the Civil War, which was the harbinger of what was to come. Up to this point, the North had lost almost every major engagement, and the South had become empowered with the idea that they were fighting with God’s approval. General Lee had been transformed from a strategic genius of battles such as of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Battle of the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and the Battle of Bull Run, to a hero of epic proportions, as seen by Southern gentry and commoner alike. He held almost a mystical presence and the mere sight of him caused a hushed whisper amongst the Army of Virginia, his mere simple words being heralded almost as scripture. He had come to Gettysburg to meet and destroy the huge Northern army, then march to Washington and demand Lincoln to concede to the demands of the Confederacy, but it was not to be. When he became the aggressor, he lost some of his mystique and became just another embattled general fighting a war that could not be won.
On the North, there was ambiguity in the presence of General Meade, who was often maligned as being weak, ineffective, and perhaps cowardly. The force of the Potomac was larger and far better provisioned than its counterpart of the South and it was evident in the preceding battles of Gettysburg that it had fared poorly. It could be equally debated that as an aggressor it was always far more difficult to win the day, just as General Lee discovered at Gettysburg; it is far better to be in a defensive position than an outright attacker. This defensive posturing was also used eloquently with Lee’s strategy to his men that they were not the invaders, but the Army of Virginia was protecting their own homes, family, and Southern lifestyle; and when Lee changed from being the underdog defender of Southern hospitality to a raiding Visigoth bent on plunder and destruction, is when he ran afoul of his own doctrine of war. The horrendous loss of men on both sides, but arguably on the South set in motion the concept that the North could win on sheer number of forces rather than tactical victories. Lincoln understood that he did not have to win a single battle in the Civil War to win, but he just had to wear down the South. Every battle the South essentially lost a man that could not be replaced, while the North simply plucked more men from their seemingly infinite supply of soldiers from cities, towns, and countryside. At Gettysburg, Lincoln saw that this was the new course of the war and that he had to drive home the conflagration of war into the South to force every single man in the Confederacy onto the battlefield.
It Was Not About Slavery
The discussion of the day showed that the idea that a black man was of a different species all together, harkens back to the writings of Phillis Wheatley, the first Afro-American writer and poet that saw publication, and the question whether she actually wrote the work or that it was provided by a white person. It was simply understood by most Americans of the time that blacks were inferior to whites and that they were of a subservient race, not just in the eyes of the South but scientifically proven that they were of lesser status. It is often hard for people today to understand the actions of the culture in the past. The idea of treating another person, just because of color, as an object is completely foreign. But during the mid-nineteenth century this idea of Afro-Americans as being of lesser status was accepted, if not believed in.
We have for example the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe in her novel the clear statement of the condition of the black slave of the day. The slave was not seen as another human being, but simply as property, nothing more than a farm implement or as a cow in a herd of cattle. “What! Ye blasted black beast! Tell me ye don’t think it right to do what I tell ye! What have any of you cussed cattle to do with thinking what’s right? I’ll put a stop to it! Why, what do ye think ye are? May be ye think ye’re a gentleman, master Tom, to be a telling your master what’s right, and what an’t! So you pretend it’s wrong to flog the gal!”
Southern sentiments spoke thus from an unanimous source in 1859, “We have never entertained a doubt that the condition of the southern slaves is the best and most desirable for the negroes, as a class, that they have ever been found in or are capable of. There is abundant evidence to prove that the black man’s lot as a slave, is vastly preferable to that of his free brethren at the North.” Upon reflection, perhaps this was more evidently true as after the war it could be argued that the lot of the Afro-Americans were worse than before they were set free. Prior to the war, the negroes was held as property and the owner would protect his investments. As freeman, they had to stand alone, often without the protection of the principality or nation. The rise of clandestine forces aimed at controlling and subduing the negroes, such as the KKK, for decades caused the black man to live in fear without any recourse.
Much of history is painted with a broad brush, its strokes mixing the paint of truth with the hues of what we want to believe or are told to believe. Lincoln never intended to free the slaves, at least the slaves that were being held in the North. Grade school history, and that of general public opinion, holds that the Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves that were in the United States. This is unequivocally false! Lincoln did not free the slaves. The proclamation was done as a political move and not some great humanitarian gesture towards black slaves: “I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States (not one that was in the North), and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons. As the war wore on, Lincoln had to convince the North that the truth behind the war was bondage, though in truth it had nothing to do with it.
Nor was the Proclamation misunderstood by anyone, even as far as the poor black slave as he saw it and as one black volunteer put it so eloquently, “And I am not willing to fight for this Government for money alone. Give me my rights, the rights that this Government owes me, the same rights that the white man has. I would be willing to fight three years for this Government without one cent of the mighty dollar. Then I would have something to fight for. Now I am fighting for the rights of the white man.”
Who Won the War
For the South, the Civil War was a lost cause that was more than a war for its confederacy; it was a crusade against the infidels of the North. It was about a legacy of Southern sentiments, character, pride, and of the nobility. Contrasting with this ideology, the North was bound to break the chains of southern noble families and to boldly force the states back into the Union.
One could hypothesize that much of the American Civil War was lost with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Late in his bid for the second term of office, he brought in Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, as his running mate hoping to pick up more votes by extending his reach into other political venues. Although Johnson was an advocate for the poor and socially maligned, he was nothing more than a pure racist. With the death of Lincoln, Johnson set the stage for the reconstruction after the war. All of the ideas of freedom for the blacks were mostly lost during Reconstruction. The bigotry of the South settled as the foundation of Black Codes and even the KKK. It would take another one hundred years for the North to once again push their ideology of freedom into the deepest parts of the South.
Against the background of Lincoln’s assassination, the war in itself proved to be calamitous to the United States and particularly of the South. One out of four men was dead or severely wounded. Entire families were wiped out. Southern towns were decimated of working men and most of their cities were completely destroyed, along with the infrastructure. The southern farms and plantations were also burned to the ground. In the North, there was mostly the loss of man power, but nothing to the extent of the south — the war was mostly fought in the South and most Northern states never saw any war damage.
Adding to the shambles of southern economy, which was underdeveloped at the start of the war, was the addition of four million freed slaves, yearning to make their own way in the United States. Although the Freedman’s Bureau was set up after the war to assist blacks, it was a government sham further reduced in its ability by the racist President, Andrew Johnson. What perpetuated out of this was the continuation and development of sharecropping, which could be understood as nothing more than a euphemism for “slavery.”
It was not a complete loss. The greatest thing to survive and flourish after the American Civil War was the United States – the idea of a conglomeration of separate state entities formed into a permanent union.
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