Nikki Haley, when recently asked what caused the Civil War, caved to “Make America Great Again” fear and was unable to say the word “slavery.”
Slavery was indeed the prime mover, but there was more to it than that. There are two things needed to start any war: anger and miscalculation.
There was plenty to make people on both sides angry. The Supreme Court opined in 1857 (Dred Scott) that the Constitution never intended Black people to be citizens.
In 1856, John Brown, that most rabid of abolitionists and a homicidal maniac, led a raid in Pottawatomie, Kansas, in which he and his sons massacred five pro-slavery Kansans. Three years later, Brown and sons attacked a federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, hoping that slaves would rise in rebellion and join them. Brown was quickly tried and hanged. In the South, he became a villain second only to Abraham Lincoln. In the North, he was a martyr.
In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a work of fiction which roused both sides to fury, if for different reasons. When Lincoln met her a decade later, he reportedly said: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”
On the floor of the United States Senate in 1856, Charles Sumner, an abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, was beaten nearly to death by Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina after making an anti-slavery speech.
From 1831 until the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865, which ended slavery, an abolitionist writer named William Lloyd Garrison published The Liberator, a hugely influential newspaper that fanned flames on both sides. Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from slavery and was probably as great an orator as America has produced, did the same with the spoken word.
Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860. So feared and detested was he in the South that his election was tantamount to a declaration of war. When he moved from Illinois to Washington, he had to do so secretly.
There was so much anger abroad that most people on both sides believed that only a good bloodletting would dispel it.
Enter miscalculation. As the historian Barbara Tuchman wrote, war is the unfolding of miscalculations.
In 1860, we had not been in a fight since the War of 1812 ended in 1815. Very few Americans had been in a war or had any idea what it was like. Both sides assumed that the fate of slavery would be decided in one or two decisive battles, after which there would be medals for all … or nearly all. Young men on both sides stampeded to enlist. Regiments were raised and paraded through their towns with flags flying.
What very few people were aware of was how much the weaponry had changed, and how deadly it now was, and how little the generals in command understood that change. There were exceptions. William Tecumseh Sherman, a general in the Union Army, saw what was coming. In 1861, he had what would today be called a nervous breakdown.
Sherman was an optimist. The Confederacy surrendered after four years. The number of men killed on both sides is debated, but it was probably 750,000. That’s the equivalent of 7 million people today. As one historian put it: “Everyone knew someone who should have been alive, but wasn’t.”
Slavery died, although we are still dealing with its consequences.
Probably, we will not have another such war. But we have come to detest each other, bitterly, and there is no sign that we are going to change.
As for miscalculation of the fatal kind? It is alive and well, and doing a thriving business.
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