Groucho Marxism

The American Civil War is usually portrayed as a battle of freedom vs. slavery, of good vs. evil. The truth, however, is rather different. The war began in 1861 and lasted four years, ending in 1865. At the time the war broke out, pretty much the entire world had already given up on slavery, or was in the process of giving up on it. In 1792, Denmark became the first country to issue a decree to abolish their transatlantic slave trade, effective from 1803. Haiti (then Saint-Domingue) formally declared independence from France in 1804 and became the first nation in the Western Hemisphere to permanently eliminate slavery in the modern era. Even the British Empire, hardly a bastion of enlightenment in these matters, abolished slavery in 1834.

The US was therefore something of an outlier in still allowing slavery within its borders in 1861. The likelihood is that, had the civil war not happened, slavery would have been abolished throughout the US soon afterwards anyway, as that was clearly the way the wind was blowing. Why, then, such a bloody war? The reality is that it had little to do with abolishing slavery and everything to do with trying ‘preserve the Union.’ The spark that led the northern states to declare war on the south was the secession of South Carolina, which was closely followed by the secession of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. These states then agreed to form a new federal government, the Confederate States of America.

According to the principle of self-determination, these states should simply have been allowed to secede and form a new country. Instead, Lincoln declared war on the Confederacy. Why did he do this? I can think of three reasons. First, if these states had been allowed to secede, the US would have become a lot smaller and therefore a lot weaker on the global stage. Second, the formation of the Confederacy would have created an equally-sized rival to the US right on its doorstep. And third, as these states seceded in response to Lincoln’s election as president, allowing them to go would have made Lincoln look weak and would have meant him going down in history as the president who caused the break-up of the Union.

The build-up of tension between the northern and southern states in the lead up to the war was a direct result of the rapid westward expansion of the United States following the Mexican-American war of 1846-1848, which must go down as one of the most one-sided wars in history. Ostensibly, the cause of the war was a border dispute between the US and Mexico; but in truth, this border dispute was deliberately manufactured by the US as a pretext to start a war against a much weaker nation that it knew it would defeat. The reason the US wanted to start a such a war was to annex Mexican territory and fulfill its ‘manifest destiny’: the imperialist belief in the 19th-century United States that American settlers were destined to expand westward across North America.

This rapid expansion created a dispute between the northern and southern states about whether these new territories would become slave states or free states, and this dispute eventually culminated in civil war. The obvious way to resolve the dispute would have been for the US to simply give the annexed territories back to Mexico; and while they were at it, they could have given the land they had stolen from Native Americans back to them too. But of course that would have run counter to the ‘manifest destiny’ dogma. It is tempting to say that the US got what it deserved in pursuing such an aggressive territorial expansion – except that, as ever, it was ordinary people who suffered most from the civil war, whilst the ruling class came out relatively unscathed.

Lincoln of course succeeded in preserving the Union, although he paid the ultimate price soon afterwards when he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. But his assassination only served to confer on him legendary status, and he has gone down in history as the man who valiantly defeated slavery and reunited the country. As we have seen, though, the idea that Lincoln started the war in order to defeat slavery is a fallacy. In fact Lincoln himself stated: ‘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.’ Hardly the words of a committed abolitionist!

Even though Lincoln didn’t explicitly start the war to defeat slavery, it could still be argued that he deserves some credit for bringing about its demise in the US. After all, he did issue the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, which declared all enslaved people in Confederate-held territory to be free, although it is generally agreed by historians that Lincoln did this for strategic rather than ethical reasons. The civil war certainly hastened the demise of slavery in the southern states; but as noted above, slavery probably would have ended there soon afterwards anyway. Had the Confederacy been allowed to secede, it might have prevented the US from going on to become the lumbering leviathan it is today – and perhaps the world would be a better place.