"Civil War" vs. "War Between the States"

I haven't gotten the Gettysburg pictures from Art yet, but here are some more ramblings inspired by my visit to Gettysburg. Let's see if I can manage to lose any readers I might have from the South if I haven't already done so with my Robert E. Lee comment from last post . . . don't you just love how I flatter myself with thinking that I have readers outside my immediate family?

Every gradeschooler in the North who pays attention in history class can tell you what the American Civil War was fought because of slavery. As someone who lived north of the Mason Dixon Line when in the US, that was the only explanation I knew of . . . until high school American history. As briefly mentioned in my last post, my high school American history book was produced by Bob Jones University Press, and, as we all know, BJU is in South Carolina (on Wade Hampton Boulevard no less . . .Wade Hampton was a Confederate hero).

The first hint that this was going to be a significantly different version of the war was that the chapter was titled "The War Between the States" (apparently the Southern designation, for the war) rather than "The American Civil War" (the way I'd always heard the war described). There was obvious (and frequently hilarious) bias for the Confederates as section headings for Southern victories were big and bold with declarations of great decisive victories, sidebar articles were about godly, saintly Southern generals, headings for Northern victories toward the end of the war were in much smaller typeface, and most Northern victories were described as "technically a Union victory" with the implication that it was really a "draw" since both sides lost so many men.

Most interesting, however, was the Southern view of why the war was fought . . . "states' rights." As one of the Confederate soldiers in the movie Gettysburg says, "I ain't fightin' for no [racial slur deleted]s one way or the other. I'm fightin' for my rats" (the Portuguese subtitles at this point of the movie are hilariously literal and Brazilians who watched this movie must have a pretty twisted idea of why the South fought the war). The way my BJ history book presented it (and I think this is the prevailing view among those who think the South was right), the South was fighting for the rights of states to make their own laws and disregard/annul any federal laws that they disagreed with. My history book made out the main federal laws in question to be "protective tariffs" that benefited the industrial North and hurt the agricultural South. According to this book, slavery had pretty much nothing to do with it, it was just brought up by the North as a self-righteous justification for the war, and most Southerners didn't own slaves anyway.

The way I see it, this ALMOST makes sense if you don't think about it too hard. However, once you really look at it, most of these "states rights" come back to the preservation of slavery as an institution. Even if it was true that "most Southerners didn't own slaves", it seems to me that the majority of the agricultural economy that the South was trying to preserve with their "states' rights" was built on the backs of slaves! Even if only the "aristocracy" plantation owners owned slaves, isn't it from them that money trickled down through the economy?

I think that even if the average Confederate soldier didn't think of this as a war about slavery, the war was to allow the Southern states to make decisions/legislation (regardless of what the federal government said) that would preserve the Southern way of life which was on many levels inextricably linked to the institution of slavery. Not to mention, how hypocritical it is to fight a war for your "rights" while denying the most basic of rights to thousands of human beings. I'm not a historian so feel free to ignore my speculation, but I think that at it's root the Civil War WAS largely about slavery, regardless of whether it's couched in the prettier sounding idea of "states' rights." If it was really just about states' rights then, as Confederate General Longstreet says in the movie Gettysburg, "We should've freed the slaves before we fired on Fort Sumter."

(and don't you just love all the massively long run-on sentences and parenthetical comments I've used in this post!)