Was Civil War Really About Slavery

Civil War

During the last few days, I've asked several thousand teachers and Students for the main reason the South seceded. They always come up with four alternatives: states’ rights, slavery, tariffs and taxes or the election of Lincoln. When I ask them to vote, the results, and resulting discussions convince me that no part of our history gets more mythologized than the Civil War, beginning with secession. My informal polls show that 55 to 75 percent of teachers, regardless of region or race, cite states’ rights as the key reason southern states seceded. These conclusions are backed up by a 2011 Pew Research Center poll, which found that a wide plurality of Americans, 48 percent believe that states’ rights was the main cause of the Civil War. Fewer, 38 percent, attributed the war to slavery, while 9 percent said it was a mixture of both. These results are alarming because they are essentially wrong. States’ rights was not the main cause of the Civil War, slavery was. The issue is critically important for teachers to see clearly. Understanding why the Civil War began informs virtually all the attitudes about race that we wrestle with today. The distorted emphasis on states’ rights separates us from the role of slavery and allows us to deny the notions of white supremacy that fostered secession. In short, this issue is a perfect example of what Faulkner meant when he said the past is not dead it’s not even past.