Mark Kleiman has an interesting post about the meaning of the Martin Luther King holiday, expanding upon another interesting post on the subject by Eugene Volokh.
I commend both of these posts, but I do take issue with the following observation in Kleiman’s:
Chattel slavery was not a uniquely bad institution in world history — though it ranks high up on the list — but the struggle against it was, I believe, absolutely without precedent. Has any other country experienced a civil war fought within a dominant ethnic group over the welfare of a subordinated ethnic group? I can’t think of one.
It’s ahistorical to think of mid-19th Century white Northerners and Southerners as being in the same “ethnic group,” and not only because they did not think in terms of ethnicity. They of course recognized that they were all white, but that similarity did not outweigh what they saw as their political, economic, moral, and cultural differences.
More fundamentally, The War was decidedly not “fought over the welfare of a subordinated ethnic group.” It is certainly true that many Southerners were motivated by a desire to preserve slavery, and even those not primarily so motivated knew that a Southern victory would serve to protect slavery. With the exception of a relatively small scattering of abolitionists and abolitionist sympathizers, however, the overriding war aim of the North, and the purpose that impelled the vast majority of volunteers into the blue ranks, was not at all concern about the welfare of blacks, slave or free, but a desire to preserve the Union.
Much of the determination in what is now the midwest to prevent slavery spreading there was rooted in a racist determination to keep blacks, slave or free, from moving in. Similarly, after The War much of the motive for a sweeping Reconstruction in the South was to make the region habitable for the former slaves … so they would stay there. When, late in The War, emancipation was gradually added as a war aim, the motivation was much more military than moral, i.e., the recognition that the most effective way to attack a slave power is to attack slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation did not even free slaves in territory controlled by Union forces but only in areas still in rebellion.
In a thin but perceptive little volume entitled THE LEGACY OF THE CIVIL WAR, Robert Penn Warren wrote that the late unpleasantness bequeathed to the South a “Great Alibi” — anything that went wrong could be blamed on it — and to the North a “Treasury of Virtue” — no matter what it subsequently screwed up, the U.S. was always pure because the North had freed the slaves. Insofar as that treasury was filled by thoughts of Billy Yank marching off to war to free the slaves, it was overdrawn from day one.
I have to disagree here. The Civil War was precipitated by the election of Lincoln. A majority of Northerners voted for a man whose declared aim was (I am paraphrasing) “to restrict the spread of slavery in order to set it on the way to eventual extinction.” Having voted for a man with that aim, the fought to maintain the power of the government he headed. So it is hardly an exaggeration to say that they fought to end slavery. It may be an oversimplification, but any statement short of 2 million biographies, one for each soldier, would be an oversimplification.
Willard – That’s certainly a legitimate argument. Still, I think it’s both possible and useful to distinguish a determination to save the Union from a determination to free the slaves in Northern war aims, and I think it’s pretty clear that the former was dominant. Lincoln said as much when he wrote to Horace Greeley (Aug. 22, 1862) in an often quoted letter that
To avoid war Lincoln was willing to support a consitutional amendment to protect slavery in perpetuity where it already existed. That’s not to say, and some other Northerners, didn’t hate slavery. It’s just to say that their overriding purpose was to preserve the Union, with our without slavery. Thus the original point I was criticizing — that uniquely in the annals of the world the war was fought “over the welfare of a subordinated group” — is not persuasive.