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.
So if you read the San Francisco Chronicle or live in the Bay Area (Google Analytics tell me there are a lot of you), please send your kind comments (or naked, straining outrage) to David Wiegand at his published addresses below. If you are a subscriber, cut out your mailing label and staple it to a TCD strip and include it in your letter.
or
David Wiegand
Executive Datebook Editor
The San Francisco Chronicle
901 Mission St.
San Francisco, CA 94103
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.
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United States History
This may seem like minor quibbling, but it is not a fine point - it is an essential point on a matter about which too many people in this country remain either confused or utterly ignorant. I love your essay, but please forgive me for taking issue with the wording in quotes:
I think a less confusing way to state it is that it wasn't that the states' rights and tariff issues got entangled in the slavery issue or that "other important factors" included expansionism and economics . . .etc . . but rather that these issues were inseparable. The wording above almost seems, to me, to suggest that slavery was just part of many factors. It was much more than just a part -- it was the thread that links all those facors. It also goes without saying that slavery was the most obvious economic institution that defined the differences between the regions, but the moral concerns about slavery were way, way down on the list issues that mattered to the men in power on either side of the Mason-Dixon line.
As you know, Lincoln was known to privately detest slavery, but he did say that if it were necessary to preserve the union he would keep it, and if it were necessary to save the union he would end it. What the South feared about Lincoln was not that he was going to free the slaves, but that he was going to prevent its expansion.
Anyway, I hope you'll take these comments as adding to rather than arguing with your points. Again, far too many people in my generation attended school during a period here in the South where it was still too damned raw to be discussed, and I think far too many people in the younger generations are getting a sufficiently short synopsis in school that they come away with a shorthand (and quite incorrect) concept that "the North was the good guys; the South was the "bad" guys and that was that. Next!
And of course there are still plenty in my generation and the preceding generation who will insist that slavery was just a side issue. Horsehockey! Anyone who claims that the Civil War was not about slavery hasn't read our history carefully. It was definitely about slavery. But it was *not* about freeing the slaves. That concept emerged much later, and was used to add moral impetus to the cause.
Those who say that the institution was dying of its own weight are correct, but there's no telling how long that would have taken were it not for the war. As long as slavery continued to be profitable, those who profited from it directly and indirectly were going to continue to justify it.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing
-Edmund Burke