Why Did The North Fight The Civil War?

And Why Don't We Talk About It?

Welcome again to another edition of the 90-minute newsletter (yes, I have upped my time. For another day, I may tell you why you get more if I give myself less time.)

For this 90 minutes I will talk about something difficult: the US Civil War and why it was fought. I’m hoping the limited time will allow me to unfurl my thoughts in an unbroken flow, rather than fretting over them too much.

I have been mulling over the Civil War for at least a decade. For a while, I was thinking about writing a book about it. I don’t think my focus is misplaced. Just to recap, in 1861 eleven states attempted to leave the union, and a war ensued. More people died in this war - a lot more - than any other in our history. Cities were burned to the ground. Slaves were freed. Afterward, the country built itself back up, but in a very different form.

Understanding it in some fashion is worth doing, because so much of being an American goes back to this war. The federal government gained new powers and our position in relationship to the whole, both as states and citizens, was different. I am an American - even if I currently live in Portugal. So understanding what makes an American and America is worth doing.

Often, the question is asked What Was The Civil War About? Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and former candidate for the Republican nomination for president, got heat recently for her attempt to answer this question at a forum.

It’s a good question, but it’s not a complete question. Wars are often asymmetrical. The two sides are fighting, but they aren’t necessarily fighting for the same thing. So it would be better to ask what was the South fighting for, and what was the North fighting for.

In recent years, it has become standard to say the Civil War was about slavery.

I think the war was about slavery, for the South. I think it’s accurate to say the South, at least those who favored separation, was leaving the Union in order to protect and nurture slavery as part of its very profitable agricultural, export-based economy.

Because of this, I am okay with thinking of the South as the bad guys in that war, even though all my ancestors were on that side. I once in conversation called the antebellum South an incipient “evil empire.” It was doubling-down on slavery at a time when the practice was on the way out intellectually and morally in much of the world. I am not pro-South, in terms of the civil war.

But what was the North fighting for? Here is where the asymmetry comes in. The North was not fighting to end slavery. This may surprise people used to thinking of the war this way, but the historical evidence is pretty clear.

President Abraham Lincoln famously said in August 1862, as the war raged, that "If I could save the union without freeing any slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."

I think Lincoln was speaking truthfully, if also politically. From a more enlightened perspective, what Lincoln said was immoral because he said saving the union was worth keeping millions of people as slaves.

He said something almost identical during his first inauguration speech in March of 1861, just before the war broke out in earnest. He said: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He then reiterated his support for returning escaped slaves to their masters and said the US Constitution clearly demanded this.

This first inaugural speech is revealing. Lincoln spends a short time saying he has no intention to interfere with slavery. Then he spends a lot more time saying why he thinks leaving the union is forbidden. Lincoln the lawyer is on view. He has to somehow show why secession is forbidden, even though the Constitution does not say it is forbidden. It takes him a while. If necessary to save the union, Lincoln even says he would support a proposed amendment to the Constitution then before Congress forbidding the federal government from interfering in any way with the institution of slavery.

Lincoln’s priorities were clear: it was keeping the union together, even if it meant the South maintaining slavery for a long, long time.

Putting the words of President Lincoln aside, another way to look at this question is to consider that four of the states on the Northern side - Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri - were states with slavery. They would hardly be fighting for the Union if they expected this to mean it would free their slaves.

This isn’t to say there weren’t people passionately against slavery in the North. There were. But they weren’t in charge of bringing a nation to war.

A War of Nationalism

If the North wasn’t fighting to end slavery, what was it fighting for? Wars, particularly big ones, are like hurricanes. They pick up force from multiple sources. But principal forces can be identified.

I think we, the Northern we, were fighting for a new nation, one that was called “The United States of America.” One which was not a collection of parts, but one nation that happened to include some parts. According to Ken Burns, who made the big documentary about the Civil War, before the war people said The United States “are”. Afterwards, they said The United States “is.” Before the war, they talked about the union. Afterwards, they talked of “the nation.”

I think for the North the war was a war of nationalism, aggressive nationalism. We had become one country, and “we” (the Northern we) weren’t going to let our brethren steal some of “our” country. War ensued.

I think present-day “we” haven’t come to terms with this. If the US Civil War was a war of nationalism, it means it was a war of choice. And if it was a war of choice, it means it was a war of conquest. In not letting the southern states secede, the North was conquering the rebels and forcing them into a political union.

If the war for the Northern side was about nationalism, it means we have something in common with the war Russia is waging on Ukraine, which is trying to force a part back into a union. For a less inflammatory example, it means we have something in common with the nationalists of Spain, who won’t let Catalonia hold a referendum on becoming a separate nation, and put people in prison who try. Or with the Canadians who, when it was a hotter issue, did not want to let Quebec leave that union.

Nations and states often fight about who is in charge. You can easily see an alternative history where the Iberian peninsula where I am located has four or five separate nations - Galica, the Basque country, Catalonia and others - rather than just two, Spain and Portugal. For about 75 years, Portugal was part of Spain until Portugal won back its independence in the war of 1640, the Portuguese Restoration War.

So fighting a war of independence and control is not new. But we don’t talk about the Us Civil War in those terms.

There is a tendency, in countries as in human nature, to focus on the sins of the other to avoid focusing on the sins of yourself. I think in our collective national American psyche, we focus on the Southern sins of slavery to avoid thinking about the Northern sins of conquest, the sins of militant nationalism.

There were economic reasons for this nationalism, I suspect. In Empire of Cotton, a Pulitzer-nominated book I read a while back, the author Sven Beckert shows how British banks were finding arable land in the American south, finding planters for it, and lending the planters money to buy slaves to work it. This was all to grow cotton that would then be bought by the mills of Manchester, where an industrial revolution was taking place. In effect, the American South was functioning as a well-paid handmaiden for an industrializing Great Britain. I could see why this would anger Northern capitalists attempting to develop their own industrial base. But that’s just a guess on my part.

What I do see more clearly is that it took a hundred years, more or less, for the South to stop talking about the Civil War in primarily romantic terms like The Lost Cause. The statues of Confederate soldiers and generals that still dot the South were monuments to a shallow, one-sided conception of the war. Will we eventually look at the statues that populate Northern cities with more nuance, including the darker sides?

I am not trying to take away people’s heroes. Lincoln kept, by force, the country together and did, as an act of war, free the slaves in the states that attempted secession. But a fuller view of what motivated him and the North is in order.

I always appreciate comments, but I particularly appreciate them this time from readers who have a more heroic conception of what the country, the Northern part, was fighting for in the Civil War.

And full disclosure: the first draft of this essay took less than 90 minutes, but the final took a lot longer, spurred on in part by my diligent editor, Ms K.

Tummy Time: Battling Bones

The Portuguese are fearless when it comes to dealing with fishbones. No doubt this comes from eating more fish and seafood than almost anyone else in the world. They have practice!

This was on view today when I ordered one of the plates of the day at a nicer restaurant in town, fried fish with rice. 

The fish, abrotea frita, was wonderful in flavor and texture, light and flaky. I don’t know what you call abrotea in English. But yes it had bones, as is often the case here. And the bones were big and small in unpredictable patterns. This would never occur in the United States. You might get sued! It’s common here.

Well, I said to myself, you have to imitate the Portuguese, so I confidently took a big bite.  I was rewarded with a bone penetrating into the space between my gum and one of my back molars, and staying there. It hurt tremendously. I tried to get it out with my fingers, without luck. I got up and got a toothpick from near the cash register. Still no luck. Finally, my fish getting cold, I went to the bathroom and used the flashlight of my iphone. I could see it jutting out in the back of my mouth. But it was really hard to dig loose. I began to think I would have to leave the restaurant and come home to have K dig it out. But I finally did get it out. What a feeling of relief.

Back at my table, I watched all around me Portuguese eating the same dish without any trouble.

Immediately to my left, just a foot or two away, was one gentleman with his wife. He only used his knife and fork, never his hands. He would take bites and then daintily spit out bones onto the end of his fork. How he separated the flesh from the bones in his mouth I don’t know. I’ve never been able to do that.

Another couple I observed would spit the bones out into their hands, so they were less elegant than the gentleman next to me. But they were still better than me. I picked up each piece of fish with my hands, and carefully felt around for bones. I ate it all, but carefully.

Fried Abrotea waiting to be carefully eaten, by hand, by me.

Updates

In a previous issue, I complained about drop offs and gaps that were present around me here in Portugal.

I should report that one of them that I identified, a bus stop near me, has been filled in. Instead of a shelf with a drop-off, it now has gently sloping grass. Apparently the bus stop was opened with plans to complete it some months later. A temporary fence would have been appropriate and the fact that it wasn’t shows the casualness of such matters here.

My Leg

Thank you for all the well wishes. I am improving from my health event, even though I still limp. I still don’t know why my leg started bleeding inside, but the last doctor said I would probably recover completely in a few weeks. Good to hear.