June 17, 2015, a violent racist committed an act of terrorism in Charleston, South Carolina, cutting down ten black members of the congregation. Revelations of his worship of the Confederacy has reinvigorated discussion of the proper legacy of that bygone institution, and most importantly, its legacy of racism. There has been no lack of vocal, and often offensive, attempts to defend the Confederacy in one way or another, both here on reddit and in other media. I won't be focusing on any specific one, and rather be speaking generally. Nor will I be tackling the entirety of the "Lost Cause", an undertaking that would cover a far larger scope than can be dealt with in a short essay such as this. The purpose of this piece is solely to look at the causes of the American Civil War, and apologist claims regarding whether the South seceded over slavery, whether states' rights justified it, and whether the North cared about slavery as well.

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I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.

-Abe Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861

It is a canard of Confederate apologia that war aims must be perfectly opposite. It is simply a fact that in his public statements, President Lincoln made clear that he was not out to abolish slavery, and that the Union undertook its campaign to prevent southern secession, since, in his words, the Union was perpetual, that "Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments". So, their logic goes however, that if the Union did not launch its war to end slavery, then slavery was not the cause of the war. Nothing could be further from the truth. This work will attack this position from multiple angles, demonstrating not only that the protection of slavery was a principal aim of southern secession, but that the mere right to secede was never a clearly established legal one, at best subject to major debate, and indeed, only entering the national discussion as slavery became a more and more divisive issue for the young nation, and further, that aside from legal/Constitutional concerns, secession as performed by the South was an immoral and illiberal act.

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Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was "to form a more perfect Union."

-Abe Lincoln, March 4, 1861

The idea, often pithily expressed by the factoid of "The United States are vs. The United States is", that as originally envisioned the several states were essentially independent nations held together by a weak Federal entity for the common defense, and that it was the Civil War which changed this relationship, is an utterly false one. While Lincoln is perhaps a biased figure to appeal to, his observation nevertheless points to the sentiments of the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution that followed, which speak of perpetuity and union at the time of founding.

At the time of drafting, James Madison, the "father" of the Constitution, noted in a letter to Alexander Hamilton that "the Constitution requires an adoption in toto, and for ever", because "compacts must be reciprocal". Likewise, while reading out the letter to the New York Ratification Convention, Hamilton expressed similar sentiment in response, that "a reservation of a right to withdraw […] was inconsistent with the Constitution, and was no ratification." Similarly, Washington, serving as President of the Constitutional Convention, noted "In all our deliberations on this subject [the perpetuity of the government] we kept constantly in our view that which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American, the consolidation of our Union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety, perhaps our national existence".¹ While it is certainly true that the Constitution made no explicit mention either way as to the correctness of secession, and that some expressed trepidation at the thought secession could not be an option, it is equally true that the issue was addressed at the time of ratification, and it was anti-secession Federalists such as Hamilton and Madison, with clarity of their position, who shepherded it through.²

But if secession was not a clearly reserved right from the beginning, when did it begin to enter the "conversation"? Well, the fact of the matter is that the importance of the aforementioned perspective is itself a product of the post-war revisionist works. It is misleading at best to speak of state loyalties above country and in fact, it is demonstrable that it was the supremacy of national loyalties that helped to delay the divisiveness of slavery that started to nose itself into the national conscious with the 1819 Missouri Crisis^3a. Rather than being an inherent weakness of the Federal government as created by the Constitution, the apparent weakness of the Federal government was a creation of southern politicians specifically working to protect their slavery based interests from the mid-to-late 1820s on-wards, forcing compromises that maintained a balance between slave and free states. To quote Donald Ratcliffe:

The strengthening of national power in the 1860s reflected, in part, the restoration of the political situation that had existed before the South began to impose its deadening hand on the Union in the thirty years before the war.^3a

Now, while demonstrating that the doctrine of states' rights was not a constant over the first 80 years of United States politics, it still stands to show that, far from being a "flavor of the month", as some 'lesser' apologists assert, slavery was an absolute central component of Confederate war aims, and the defense of their 'peculiar institution' surpassed any principled defense of States' Rights. The simple fact of the matter is, that far from simply asserting their moral right to own another human being for the use of their labor, the southern states' need for slaves was intimately tied to their political and economic fortunes, to the point that any claim of political or economic reasons for secession can not be separated from the root base of slavery.

When Lincoln was elected in the fall of 1860, the South was terrified. Whatever his prior declarations that whether he wished to or not, he had no power to interfere with the institution where it existed, Lincoln was nevertheless a Republican, a political party founded on its opposition to slavery, and at its most mild, committed to stemming the further spread as statehood spread westward. While committed, absolute abolitionism was a vocal minority on the national stage, the simple limiting of expansion presented a long term existential crisis to the slaveholding states. Every free state to enter the Union represented additional Senators and Representatives to immediately exercise power in Congress, and represented the growth of power not only in future Presidential elections, where anti-slavery parties could continue to gain momentum, but in the long term even foreshadowed, one day, a strong enough majority to abolish the institution once and for all through Constitutional Amendment. And it wasn't only that Lincoln and the speedy rise of the Republican party threatened a political threat to slavery, but also that, due to the 3/5 Compromise, the existence of enslaved populations represented a significant boost to the electoral power of the slave states.^3b

Economically, the fortunes and viability of the South were intertwined with slavery so closely as to be inseparable. Turning to the Nullification Crisis of the 1830s, Calhoun observed that slavery was the undercurrent of economic disagreements with the northern states, although he was by no means the first or last:

I consider the tariff act as the occasion, rather than the real cause of the present unhappy state of things. The truth can no longer be disguised, that the peculiar domestic institution of the Southern States and the consequent direction which that and her soil have given to her industry, has placed them in regard to taxation and appropriations in opposite relation to the majority of the Union, against the danger of which, if there be no protective power in the reserved rights of the states they must in the end be forced to rebel, or, submit to have their paramount interests sacrificed, their domestic institutions subordinated by Colonization and other schemes, and themselves and children reduced to wretchedness.

While fears over the continued viability slavery had been a driving concern for southern politicians for at least a decade by then, it was the Nullification Crisis that clearly established the unbreakable ties of slavery and economic concerns. To quote Richard Latner:

South Carolina's protest against the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 was only a surface manifestation of profound planter fears, real and imaginary, that a hostile northern majority would subvert their slave system. The crisis laid bare southern anxieties about maintaining slavery and evidenced a determination to devise barriers against encroachments on southern rights.⁴

Over the next several decades, the divisiveness of slavery would continue to smolder and widen, even as compromises continued to be made. It was slavery driving the divisions above all else, and arguments of slavery that continued to drive Southern movement towards breaking part of the Union.

Beginning with Vermont in 1850, and soon followed by many of her northern neighbors over the next several years, free states began passing laws to prevent compliance with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The reactions from the South to these acts were not sparing in their condemnation of states exercising their rights against the Federal Government. Papers throughout the South decried the "nullification" and threatened responses of their own, such as in the case of one Richmond paper declaring:

When it becomes apparent that [the Fugitive Slave Law's] operation is practically nullified by the people of one or more States, differences of opinion may arise as to the proper remedy, but one thing is certain that some ample mode of redress will be chosen, in which the South with entire unanimity will concur.⁵

The refusal of Northern states to enforce the Fugitive Slave Laws remained a sticking point throughout the decade, as did the thinly veiled threats by southern states that they might very well secede over the issue (A tit-for-tat, perhaps, but nevertheless demonstrative of the centrality of slavery to their grievances). The first example came with the December, 1850 convention held in Georgia, where they accepted the Compromise of 1850 in what was known as the Georgia Platform. The integrity of the Fugitive Slave Act was one of the key factors (along with slavery in DC, and maintaining the interstate slave trade), and there is a barely disguised threat of secession included in the statement released by the convention. The Georgia Platform was de facto adopted as the platform of the Southern Democrats, perhaps culminating, in February, 1860, with then Senator Jeff Davis's resolution that included the statement that refusal of certain states to enforce the act would "sooner or later lead the States injured by such breach of the compact to exercise their judgment as to the proper mode and measure of redress."⁶

Whether or not the south appreciated the Irony that they were threatening secession because certain states were attempting to exercise "states' rights", is unclear, but what is clear is that, as Dr. James McPherson put it:

On all issues but one, antebellum southerners stood for state's rights and a weak federal government. The exception was the fugitive slave law of 1850, which gave the national government more power than any other law yet passed by Congress.⁷

Which now brings us to 1860. Within only days of Lincoln's election, South Carolina made to leave the Union, a process completed before the year was out. Although claiming secession to be their right, the acceptance of their platform is, as noted previously, an inflated one by post-war revisionists, and even ignoring that, a thoroughly illiberal and immoral abrogating of democratic principles. As Madison, in his old age, put it to Daniel Webster, "[Secession at will] answers itself, being a violation, without cause, of a faith solemnly pledged," or in more immediate terms, participation in the system is a pledge to abide by it. In 1860, even if they refused to even list him on the ballot, in participating in the Presidential election, the South made implicit promise to accept the results. While we have already explored the mixed opinions on secession upon the foundation of the country, this presents another, albeit minor, nail in the southern claims to righteousness. To return to the earlier point, it is true, as certain Neo-Confederate apologists like to cloud the waters with:

The South did not secede to protect slavery from a national plan of emancipation because no national political party proposed emancipation⁸

But such claim is not one that an reasonable historian would make. The simple fact is, that decades of debate and action demonstrated the undercurrent of slavery moving towards this moment, and that despite Lincoln's protests that he had no inclination, the Southern planter class simply did not believe him, and whether or not a specific platform of emancipation had been put forward, the simple fact is that they chose to secede following Lincoln's election, over the issue of slavery. Whether you view it through the thoroughly practical lens as an economic and political issue, rather than a moral one - although the fire-eaters made no qualms of declaring their moral right, it cannot change the simple facts which their own words so clearly express:

• Mississippi:

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.

• Texas:

Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated Union to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and other slave-holding States of the confederacy. Those ties have been strengthened by association. But what has been the course of the government of the United States, and of the people and authorities of the non-slave-holding States, since our connection with them?

• South Carolina

The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.

• Georgia

The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic.

And lest the clear ties of secession and slavery are not demonstrated through these declarations, the fire-eating Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens eloquently noted:

The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution — African slavery as it exists amongst us — the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization" and further that "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea ["equality of the races"]; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

The words that came from the Confederate Founding Fathers over the next several months only further illustrate the importance of slavery over any cares for states' rights. Copying almost wholesale the American Constitution for their own purposes, some of the most jarring changes were those that not only strengthened the institution of slavery, but further more quite possibly did so at the expense of the states' rights. In Article I, Sec. 9(4) it declares:

No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.

This is further reinforces with Article 4, Sec. 2(1) which goes on with:

The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.

Finally, the right is again solidified with Article 4, Sec. 3(3):

The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several Sates [sic]; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.

Now, it is true that the secession of the latter Confederate states can be construed as less straight-forward. There is no real need here to play "What If" as to whether Virginia or Tennessee could have been kept within the Union, or whether Missouri of Kentucky could have been prevented from splintering both ways. Their declarations/ordinances of secession make less pleas towards slavery specifically, and point as well to solidarity with the earlier breakaways, but to take their lessened language as a symbol that, unlike their Deep Southern partners, these Upper Southern states were acting out of principled support for their brethren is erroneous, least of all given that it was the Upper South whose papers and politicians were more vocal than most when it came to decrying Northern 'perfidy' with regards to the fugitive slave act. The stakes of slavery were made well aware to them, and they acted knowing full-well what they were leaving the Union to protect. Speaking to the Virginians assembled to discuss the issue of secession, the fire-eater Henry Benning of Georgia gave listeners no doubts as to the cause and motivations of secession:

[The reason] was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North-was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery. [....] [T]hat the North is in the course of acquiring this power to abolish slavery.

Playing on their concerns regarding the Fugitive Slave Laws, he went on further to assert that the North acted not out of any love of the enslaved population, but out of hatred of the slave owners, and that, having left the Union, the North would no longer shelter runaways, and, as "the North will be no attraction to the black man-no attraction to the slaves", escapes northward would lessen.

The plain truth of the words laid out here speak for themselves, but the blood of 800,000 dead Americans had barely dried when the very fire-eaters who had previously crowed that the foundations of the Confederacy were built on slavery and white supremacy began one of the most successful whitewashes of history. One of the very first authors to spearhead the revision secession and give birth to the "Lost Cause" was Alexander Stephens, although he would be by no means the only. Not even a decade after calling slavery the 'Cornerstone of the Confederacy', he wrote "A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States" in which he argues forcefully in favor of States' Rights, and further that slavery was a minor concern. This foundational text of Confederate apologia would soon be followed in 1881 by Jefferson Davis's similar work, "The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government", alternatively called a book of “legalistic and constitutional apologetics”, or more simply, "terrible".^3c The "Lost Cause", as the revisionist approach to the Confederacy came to be known, was as much a political doctrine as anything else, and orthodoxy was enforced. Longstreet's willingness to make not just bury the hatchet, but work with Republicans in the post-war period saw him come to be blamed for many of Lee's failures, such as at Gettysburg, and although a war hero as well, William Mahone served only a single term as Senator for Virginia when he chose to work with Republicans and the Readjusters.⁹ The failure of Reconstruction, and return to political office of the white Democrats who had so recently risen up in rebellion merely allowed entrenchment and further perpetuating of the Lost Cause mythos, to the point that by the early 20th century it dominated the national conscious, despite being grounded in myth more than reality.¹⁰

Hereto now, I have focused almost entirely on the Southern causes of war, and I hope, have adequately demonstrated a) The central, vital nature of slavery to the cause of secession, to the point that no other issue can be conceived as being able to so divide the nation; b) That ignoring slavery, the South did not act out of a correct, abstract principle of states' rights, but rather what at best can be called murky Constitutional grounds; c) And finally the root of the arguments in favor of the aforementioned positions can be traced to the very people who had the most vested interest in presenting the cause as noble, yet at its start had made clear the importance of slavery to their cause.

What I have not yet touched on except in brief is the Union, and specifically how slavery plays into their own cause. As pointed out, a key point of southern apologia is that the Union did not go to war to end slavery, and again, while not negating the fact that the South left to protect it, this much is, essentially, true. While campaigning, however much he might have privately detested slavery, Lincoln had no plans - expressed publicly or privately - to raise an Army and march south to end slavery once elected. Upon his inauguration, faced with a crumbling nation, his plea for unity impressed the point that he had no inclination to do so. As late as 1862, even while planning the Emancipation Proclamation, he wrote to Horace Greeley:

If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about Slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union, and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.

A month after, on the tail of victory at Antietam creek, he would release the "Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation", essentially a warning to the south that, were they to continue in their rebellion, he would make slavery a direct aim of the war, but were they to rejoin the Union prior, he would not end it for them. While, by this point, Lincoln had begun to commit privately to ending slavery one way or the other, he believed that Compensated Emancipation would cost far less, both in lives and monetary value, than the war would, and was prepared to put it into action. Although the South, of course, rejected the offer, movement was made to do so with the loyal states, but in the end only the slave owners of the District of Columbia were compensated, since after a failed attempt in Delaware, the idea was scrapped.¹¹

But we digress. On January 1st, 1863, the abolition of slavery became a stated goal of the war. Except for according to some, who point out that Lincoln freed no slaves in the north with his act, which in fact was a PR ploy, aimed simply to prevent Britain from making nice with the Confederacy. The claim is false on both aspects. As far as Lincoln's power to free the slaves was concerned, as he himself had stated, he did not believe himself to have those powers, nationally. He believed himself to only have the power to free the slaves in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, where he wielded unrivaled power over the very areas he did not control - those in rebellion. In issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln believed himself to be exercising as much power as he was capable off as regards the slaves, and to free them in the loyal states, even ignoring the fact that to do so by fiat would incur their wrath, he needed the assent of their legislatures. He worked for much of the war to secure the end of slavery, through legal means, in the north, first with the failed bid for compensated emancipation, and then through the 13th Amendment, which began to work its way through Congress, for the eventual ratification by the states, in early 1864.¹²

To be sure, not everyone was pleased. While some soldiers had, from the start, seen the war as a noble crusade to end slavery, plenty more were committed to the preservation of the Union. The establishment of emancipation as a declared war aim was met with both praise and censure. Most famous of the latter, perhaps, were the New York Draft Riots. Contemptuous of black liberation, which they saw as a threat to the labor market, potentially undercutting them for lower wages, the poor, mainly Irish and German immigrant population of New York City took a dim view of Emancipation, a fear that Democratic forces in the city did their best to stoke. With the expansion of the draft laws in spring of 1863 matters had nearly reached their crescendo, and the boiling point finally came in July, with five days of anti-draft and anti-black riots, eventually requiring the use of troops to put down, but not before over 100 people lay (or hung) dead, and thousands of free blacks had fled the city in terror. However terrible the incident was however - and it was not the only protest against the draft and the "N***** War", only the most violent - it does little to change the facts, and if anything, simply serves to illustrate that Emancipation had been unleashed as a committed goal by the Union, not merely an empty slogan.^{13, 7}

As for the British, the chance of armed intervention was always next to none, and even the threat of diplomatic intervention is a highly overblown one. While support for the Confederacy was fashionable in upper-class circles for a time^11, it never extended into the middle or lower classes, where support was near universal for the Union even before the Emancipation Proclamation, which, to be sure, only spurred their support even further given the deep hatred of slavery that so many of them held. While the letter from the Manchester Working Men and Lincoln's reply is perhaps the most famous example, it is a sentiment that could be found throughout the country, even in the heart of the industry suffering from cotton shortages. With regards to support for the South, slavery was an "insurmountable stumbling block" from the very beginning of the war.¹⁴ And as dire as concerns were bout the impending cotton famine, in reality, they were overblown. Imports from other regions more than doubled, making up for much of the shortage, and several organizations found jobs for out-of-work mill-workers constructing public works such as roads and bridges. Far more dire than cotton shortages were those of food. Britain experienced a string of bad harvests in the 1860s, making it highly dependent on imports (wheat more than doubled from 1859 to 1862), and none more so than the United States, which, despite the ongoing conflict, had a nice surplus, allowing them not only to increase their exports to Britain several times over, but more importantly, the volume of American imports were nearly equal to all other import sources combined^{15, 7} . The level of dependency was enormous, and a far more vital import than cotton, especially in light of the remedies for the lack of the latter.

So in short, the threat of British intervention, while cherished by the South, and grimly contemplated from time-to-time by Seward, was a remote one, tempered the least by practical concerns, and more generally by political ones. While showing the world the righteousness of his cause was indeed happy by product of the Emancipation Proclamation, to see in it simply an appeal to the British is to not only skip over Lincoln's legal reach, but also to ignore how generally supportive the British people were from the start, even taking into consideration the private enterprises who evaded the law to supply the Confederacy with ships and arms.

Emancipation brings us, however, to one final quirk of Confederate apologia, which is perhaps one of the stranger. It is not uncommon to hear claims that slavery was on the way out, and that the South would have abolished it on its own in due time, or even that they were already planning on doing so (obviously, as part of the argument that slavery wasn't important to them).

At its most basic, such claims fly in the face of reality, not only the words of the slave holders who had proclaimed their rights, and duties even, to hold enslaved Africans, and not even the Confederate Constitution, which enshrined protections of the institution that would only be surmountable by Amendment, and one clearly opposed to the spirit of the Confederacy at that, but it also is a claim without more than the barest scrap of evidence. In fact, what evidence we do have, if anything, points to the desire to further expand slavery south to ensure its survival, with Southern-driven plans to claim Cuba, or filibuster expeditions in Central America. As noted by Allan Nevis:

The South, as a whole, in 1846-1861 was not moving towards emancipation but away from it. It was not relaxing the laws that guarded the system but reinforcing them. It was not ameliorating slavery, but making it harsher and more implacable. The South was further from a just solution to the slavery problem in 1830 than in 1789. It was further from a tenable solution in 1860 than in 1830.¹⁰

The one piece of evidence that is dragged out is the claim that the Confederate Army fielded black soldiers, with some claims rising into the thousands.¹⁶ While it is undoubtedly true that tens of thousands of enslaved black men were utilized in the Confederate war effort, they labored as cooks, teamsters, or body-servants. Reports of these slaves picking up arms and fighting the Union, while not to be totally dismissed as fantasy, ought also not be accepted as motions of support. To quote from one representative example related by John Stauffer:

John Parker, [was] a slave forced to build Confederate barricades and later to join the crew of a cannon firing grapeshot at Union troops at the First Battle of Bull Run. All the while, recalled Parker, he worried about dying, prayed for a Union victory, and dreamed of escaping to the other side. “His case can be seen as representative,” said Stauffer. “Masters put guns to (the heads of slaves) to make them shoot Yankees."¹⁷

In the waning days of the Confederacy, the Barksdale Bill was passed on March 13, 1865. The bill allowed for the enlistment of black slaves for service in the Confederacy, but required the permission of their master, and left whether they could be emancipated for their service ultimately in the hands of their master rather the guaranteeing it by law.^{18, 11} Far from being symbolic of any actual movement towards emancipation, or evidence that slavery was less than a core value of the Confederacy, the law should be viewed as nothing more than a desperate measure by the Confederate leadership who knew just how close to defeat they were. Even considering their situation, the measure was far from universally supported. The fire-eater Robert Toombs decried the bill, declaring that “the day that the army of Virginia allows a negro regiment to enter their lines as soldiers they will be degraded, ruined, and disgraced.”¹¹ The distaste for such an act was strong with many more, and it was only the truly dire straits that saw passage of the bill. A year prior, Gen. Patrick Cleburne had suggested a similar motion, seeing slaves not only as source of manpower, but daring to suggest that emancipation could help the Confederacy:

It is said that slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.

His proposal, flying in the face of Confederate opinion and policy, was utterly ignored, and almost certainly derailed his career as well, since, despite his obvious talents, he received no further promotion before his death in November, 1864.

As noted, even when the idea of black soldiers had enough support, it still fell far short of Cleburne's proposal, which, if taken at face value, truly could have stood to change the relationship between the Confederacy and slavery, and instead offered a watered down measure that didn't even give absolute guarantee for those slaves who served as soldiers. And in part due to this, partly due to masters unwilling to part with their property, and in no small part due to unwillingness on the part of the slaves themselves who know freedom was only around the corner, the law failed to have any effect. Barely a handful of recruits ever reported for training, and they would never see action, as Richmond fell two months later, with the erstwhile recruits enthusiastically greeting the Yankees along with the rest of the now freed black population.¹¹

Outside of the Barksdale Bill and Cleburne, motion to enlist black soldiers did rear its head on one instance. Free people of color and mulattoes enjoyed a much greater degree of acceptance and freedom in New Orleans than elsewhere in the south, and a 1,000 man unit was raised there at the onset of the war, known as the Louisiana Native Guard, composed entirely of free blacks and mulattoes, barring the regimental commanders. While more accepted in New Orleans, the Native Guard still faced considerable discrimination, never even being issued with arms or uniforms, forcing them to provision on their own dime. New Orleans fell in early 1862, and, having never seen action, the shaky loyalties of the Native Guard was made evident when many of their number soon were dressed in Union blue with the reformation of the Native Guard under Yankee control.^{19, 20}

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And that is, the sum of it all. The South undeniably seceded over the issue of slavery. Their words and actions cry it from the rooftops. Lincoln, while entering the war to preserve the perpetual union of the states, never had slavery far from his mind. It was that fact which drove secession, and it was the splintering of the nation that allowed Lincoln's anti-slavery to transition from personal conviction into a policy of emancipation as the war dragged on. Less than a year after the first shot was fired upon Fort Sumter, Lincoln was contemplating how he could bring about the end of slavery, and by the next, he had made his move, ensuring the eventual destruction of the South's peculiar institution. While the accepted history of the war for many decades following lionized the "Lost Cause" of the south, and romanticized the conflict, all to downplay the base values of the Confederacy, that narrative is nothing more than a legend, a falsehood, and in recent decades has, rightfully, been eclipsed by a revitalization of scholarship that has returned slavery to its rightful place in the history of the American Civil War.

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Bibliography:

Primary sources are linked here for context. Other sources are noted with superscript and listed below, although due to the character limit, they are in a separate post.