All language subtitles for KG-ACW 01-The Real Reason Behind the American Civil War_Full-HD.

On April 12, 1861, South Carolina troops
opened fire on Federal forces in Fort Sumter,

initiating the American Civil War. Four years
and two million casualties later, the North would

stand triumphant over a broken and devastated
South. What drove the Southern slaveholding

states to war is simultaneously complicated
and extremely simple. Numerous disputes

and confrontations had threatened the union
between the states since independence. However,

the only issue that the democratic process failed
to overcome was slavery. Ultimately, it was the

fear-driven need to preserve the institution of
slavery that caused the American Civil War. There

was no doubt of this at the time; there should be
no doubt now. Welcome to the introduction to our

new series on the American Civil War, where
we will discuss the leadup to the deadliest

war in American history and discuss the causes
that led to it. Spoiler alert: it was slavery.

In Their Own Words
The eminent Civil War

historian James M. McPherson describes slavery
as the basic and most deep-rooted cause of

the Civil War, a stance with which we wholly
and unequivocally agree. While the immediate

cause of the war was southern secession, and
numerous other issues exacerbated tensions, the

proximate cause was slavery. Absent that peculiar
institution, there would have been no Civil War.

However, you shouldn’t take historians’ word for
it, for the Confederates’ own words agree with

them as well. The Confederates were quite open
about slavery being their reason for revolt. In

personal letters, church sermons , newspaper
articles , and even their founding documents,

the Confederates repeatedly stated that
maintaining slavery was the entire reason

for secession. The second line of Mississippi’s
declaration of the causes for secession states

that “Our position is thoroughly identified with
the institution of slavery-- the greatest material

interest of the world.” It then proceeds to lay
out 17 grievances regarding the threat to slavery

by free states before declaring, “We must either
submit to degradation, and to the loss of property

worth four billions of money, or we must secede
from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure

this as well as every other species of property.”
The original seceding states who made their own

declarations had the same grievances and drew
the same conclusion, though far less concisely.

The Confederate Constitution was similarly clear
about defending slavery. It was mostly copied from

the US Constitution except for adding protections
for slavery and restricting internal improvements.

Article 1, Section 9, line 4 of the Confederate
Constitution states, “No bill of attainder,

ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing
the right of property in negro slaves shall be

passed,” while Article 4, Section 3 specifically
allows slavery in any new territories.

Founding Words
In defending this constitution,

the Confederacy’s Vice-President Alexander H.
Stephens explicitly confirmed that the Confederacy

was specifically created to defend slavery.
In his famous Cornerstone Speech , he states,

“The new constitution has put at rest, forever,
all the agitating questions relating to our

peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists
amongst us—the proper status of the negro in our

form of civilization. This was the immediate cause
of the late rupture and present revolution.” He

further asserted that contrary to the Declaration
of Independence’s proclamation that all men are

created equal, “Our new government is founded upon
exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are

laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth
that the negro is not equal to the white man;

that slavery, subordination to the superior race,
is his natural and normal condition.” Throughout

the speech, Stephens blatantly and unequivocally
rejects all American founding principles which

could threaten the institution of slavery. He made
no effort to hide the truth that the South was

seceding to continue the enslavement of Africans.
Confederate President Jefferson Davis preferred

to be more guarded about secession’s causes
and always couched them in terms of property

rights. However, he never publicly disagreed with
Stephens , and no evidence exists that he did so

privately. In fact, it’s quite clear from his
words that he had the exact same sentiments as

Stephens. In his farewell address to the Senate
, he repeatedly defended the idea that Africans

were inferior and deserved to be slaves, as in
the Constitution, “we find provision made for

that very class of persons as property; they were
not put upon the footing of equality with white

men.” In a speech to the Confederate Congress,
he celebrates their freedom from “a persistent

and organized system of hostile measures against
the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern

States,” ensuring abolitionists wouldn’t be
“thus rendering the property in slaves so

insecure as to be comparatively worthless, and
thereby annihilating in effect property worth

thousands of millions of dollars.” Overall, it
can be seen that there was never any ambiguity or

dissension. The southern states openly seceded in
order to continue the chattel slavery of Africans,

and they trumpeted that fact to everyone.
Lost Cause Myth

This leaves the question of how there came to
be any ambiguity or dissent over the Civil War’s

causes when those behind the war were so open
about what was happening. There are two reasons.

The first is a lack of focus on slavery from
legitimate scholarly sources. Early historians who

wrote about the Civil War did not see the need to
write about slavery. That slavery was the primary

cause of the war was considered a settled point.
Thus, most scholars focused on untangling the web

of other contributing causes and let slavery fall
to the side. After all, there’s little academic

need to write about established facts when
there’s obscura to be investigated. This lack

of focus created a perception that slavery was
less important to the conflict than it truly was.

Another reason that slavery fell to the wayside
in Civil War historiography was deliberate

obfuscation by the Confederates themselves. Having
lost the war and facing the judgment of history,

they sought to distance themselves from
their indefensible championing of slavery.

In a post-war diary entry written while
imprisoned and in subsequent correspondence,

Confederate Vice President Stephens claimed
that his extemporaneous Cornerstone Speech was

misquoted and miscopied by a reporter and that
the real issues were Constitutional questions

over states' rights. His claim is undercut by
his other claim that the misquotes occurred

despite consulting with the reporter after the
speech, suggesting that Stephens is responsible

for his own “misinterpretation.” More damning,
Stephens was an avid letter writer and newspaper

contributor yet never mentioned being misquoted
nor offered to correct the record before his

incarceration. Davis would similarly change his
tune, claiming that the war had been fought for

“the inalienable right of a people to change
their government” and the right “to withdraw

from a Union into which they had, as sovereign
communities, voluntarily entered.” Slavery was

incidental to that issue, a complete reversal
of everything both men had said prior to the

war and everything their own states’ secession
documents said. Credible historians dismiss

Davis’ and Stephens’ obfuscations as
self-serving and blatant falsehoods.

This mythmaking was aided by the work of
Jubal Early. Acting on what he believed

were Robert E. Lee’s final orders to his
troops, Early sought to romanticize and

celebrate the Confederacy as a noble Lost Cause
in numerous articles for the Southern Historical

Society and newspapers in the 1870s. These works,
coupled with other former Confederates’ memoirs,

created a mythology to protect the South
from the bitter reality of what it had done

and the unjust institution it had fought to
preserve . This didn’t fool anyone post-war,

as Union General George H. Thomas noted in 1868
, “The greatest efforts made by the defeated

insurgents since the close of the war have been
to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty,

justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar
of the virtues of freedmen, suffered violence and

wrong when the effort for southern independence
failed. This is, of course, intended as a species

of political cant, whereby the crime of treason
might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of

patriotism so that the precipitators of rebellion
might go down in history hand in hand with the

defenders of the government, thus wiping out with
their own hands their own stains.” All in all,

the dedicated efforts of Lost Causers
enabled post-war Southerners to blur

slavery’s importance to the war, but there was
no true doubt then, and none should remain.

The South’s Fears
The exact reasons why the South was

willing to fight were as complicated and simple
as why slavery was the cause. Historians agree,

and Confederate rhetoric corroborates, that fear
drove Southerners to rebellion. Exactly what those

fears were and which were most important is still
a source of considerable debate, but three of

them stand out. The most visceral fear was of
the slaves themselves. This may sound absurd,

but as Thomas Jefferson eloquently observed in
1820, slaveholding is like holding “a wolf by

the ear; we can neither hold him nor safely let
him go.” Slave owners lived in perpetual fear of

slave uprisings, and with good reason. Many of the
richest slave owners were classically educated and

familiar with Spartacus and the Roman Servile
Wars . They drew parallels between themselves

and those ancient Italian slaveowners who had
been cut down by their slaves. More pressingly,

the Haitian Revolution, which happened only a
few decades before the American Civil War, was

still fresh in everyone’s memory. The brutality
and cruelty of that conflict were bad enough,

but far worse for the Southern slaveholders was
the 1804 massacre of surviving French citizens on

the island. Southerners, even those who didn’t
personally hold slaves, feared suffering the

same fate if they lost control of their slaves.
Demographics made this fate seem highly plausible.

According to the 1860 Census, the United
States population was approximately 31 million,

of which about 4 million were slaves. The
free population in the states that formed

the Confederacy was about 5.5 million, with
about 3.5 million slaves. South Carolina and

Mississippi had more slaves than free citizens ,
which was a contributing factor in those states

being the first two to secede. In the event of a
widespread, dedicated revolt, state governments

feared they would lack the manpower to put
down the rebellion. Worse, the North might

simply watch the rebelling slaves exact just
retribution and do nothing, which certain

firebrand abolitionists certainly advocated . In
the slaveholder’s minds, releasing their slaves

from servitude could only end in disaster, even
as they encouraged the slave population to grow.

There had already been a number of localized slave
rebellions, which had been defeated more by luck

and the rebels’ mistakes than any competence on
Southerners' behalf. The Southerners foresaw an

oncoming disaster of their own making, which
an indifferent North might allow. However,

they needed slavery too much to make any
choice but to hold on as long as possible.

A related fear was the loss of political power.
Freeing the slaves would mean giving the black man

the right to vote, and even if things didn’t turn
violent, the sheer number of former slaves would

be a threat at the ballot box. Southern whites
feared newly enfranchised black voters taking

political power away from whites and possibly
using it to oppress them as they’d been oppressed.

A more immediate fear was their states losing
relevance. The South was rapidly losing power

to the North and West, and it feared that soon,
the other regions would simply stop caring about

their needs and push their own agenda. The
slaveholding states had agrarian economies

that depended on a favourable balance of trade and
low industrialization to be profitable. However,

both the North and West were rapidly
industrializing and were looking for

increased government spending on infrastructure
and protective tariffs. Given that most immigrants

were moving to the North and West, it was
only a matter of time before non-Southern

interests dominated national politics.
It was already clear in 1860 that the

so-called Slave Power was dying. 9 of the first
15 presidents were Southerners, and the ones from

the North had relied on Southern votes to win
their elections. However, when Abraham Lincoln

handily won the Electoral College despite not
even being on the ballot in much of the South,

it was clear that the slave states were now in the
minority, which was unlikely to ever change since

few areas west or north of Texas were suitable
for cotton production and therefore slavery.

This economic bottleneck was a key Southern
problem. The Antebellum South was utterly

dependent on slavery. Ever since they were first
settled, the economies of the southern states

had been built around agriculture, with large
plantations being the economic capstone.

This system was nearing collapse in the 18th
century due to the falling prices of southern

cash crops and the devastation of its soil.
Eli Whitney’s cotton gin changed everything.

Cotton was native to the South and grew well even
in depleted soil, but cultivation was minimal due

to the seeds being extremely hard to remove by
hand, limiting production to one pound of cotton

per day per worker. Gins, which had existed in
India and China for several hundred years but

never made it west, easily sorted the seeds from
the fibre and could process 50 pounds of cotton

per day. Meanwhile, Britain was in the throes of
the early Industrial Revolution, built around its

textile industry. Thus, at the same time that the
South began bringing cotton cultivation online,

Britain developed an almost insatiable appetite
for cotton. This turned cotton from a pesky weed

into white gold. The South traded cotton at top
dollar to British ships at their ports in exchange

for British manufactured goods. This trade was
phenomenally profitable for both sides and by

1860, 57% of US exports were Southern cotton
worth $191 million. This made cotton planters

the richest men in America for decades. “King
Cotton” completely rewrote the South’s economy,

and production soared.
The Trap

This system could not exist without slavery.
The most profitable type of southern cotton

could be harvested up to seven times a year.
Cotton had to be picked by hand, which was

unpleasant in the southern heat and dangerous
due to the plant’s rock-hard and razor-sharp

bolls. The profit-maximizing amount of labour
was one hand per 10 acres, picking 200 pounds

of cotton per day. Cotton would readily grow in
any warm, humid climate, but it wasn’t possible

at the time to increase yield per acre. Growing
more cotton required more land, which required

ever more workers. Luring non-enslaved workers
to such a backbreaking job would have required

extremely high wages or them having literally
no other choice. With the American frontier

promising limitless possibilities and the rapidly
expanding Northern factories always hiring,

southern planters couldn’t compete in the labour
market and maintain their profits. Therefore,

the lowest cost option was slavery, which was a
steep investment up front in exchange for very low

maintenance cost over the long run . This resulted
in plantation owners pouring money into buying

increasing amounts of slaves and land unsuitable
for anything but cotton farming. An 1860 estimate

suggests that the total value of American slaves
was at least $2 billion at a time when total

government revenue was about $4 billion. Almost
all Southern wealth was tied up in slavery.

The Problem
By this point, the Southern States were totally

reliant on a dangerous economic system. Known
alternately as Dutch Disease, the Resource Curse,

and a Rentier Economy, it created a system of
dramatic inequality and economic stagnation in

which extraction of a high-value resource
is so profitable that all other industries

struggle to compete. The easy money in resource
extraction leaves little incentive to invest in

other economic sectors, and so they are left
to wither and frequently die. Thus, a rentier

economy becomes dependent on the resource and
should that sector decline, the entire economy

collapses . This causes an enormous wealth gap
between those who profit from the resource and

the general population, leading to instability.
Most rentier states in the modern world use a

combination of violent oppression and social
welfare to quash dissent . The slaveholding

South certainly used extreme violence to keep
the slaves in line, but not the white population.

While the cotton economy created a highly
privileged class of plantation aristocrats, the

vast majority of Southerners were poor farmers.
About 25% of southern families held slaves, but

only about 8% had more than ten, and only 0.1% of
planters had more than 100 slaves. However, even

southerners who held no slaves heavily supported
slavery and the overall Southern economic system.

While the reasons for that support are complex
and controversial, one important reason was

aspiration. In theory, a poor subsistence farmer
needed only one year’s food surplus to switch to

cotton growing. The profit from one year’s cotton
harvest would be enough to start buying slaves to

take over the work. Once slaves were working the
land, wealth came quickly and exponentially. How

often this actually happened is hotly debated,
but it was at least theoretically possible. Thus,

the allure of being an elite planter was enough
to keep the majority invested in the system.

Compared With Other Emancipations
A common talking point of the Lost

Cause myth is that if slavery was the issue which
caused the war, why didn’t other nations have one

to end slavery? All the New World empires were
built on slavery, and they peacefully emancipated

their slaves, so it can’t be the main reason
America fought itself. However, this ignores the

unique aspects of emancipation in those empires.
Britain passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833,

which provided for the gradual emancipation
of slaves outside of India over the following

ten years. This was accompanied by slaveholder
compensation of 20 million pounds, roughly 40% of

the government’s budget. This compensation quelled
most dissent, which was already limited because

slaveholders in the British Empire held less
political sway than American slaveholders did.

Moreover, members of the British Parliament
were elected by voters in Britain proper,

where slavery had never been legal, and few
politicians had reason to ally with slaveholders

beyond limited commercial interests. Thus, slavery
could be, and was, abolished without significant

political backlash. A better comparison is
Brazil, which didn’t outlaw slavery until 1888.

The slaveholders there had very similar fears
to the Americans and had resisted ending slavery

until the entire plantation system was beginning
to fail. The final end came by Imperial decree,

almost on a whim, and directly contributed to
the fall of the monarchy the following year.

Without the American Civil War, it is probable
that the United States would have followed Brazil

in allowing slavery to continue for the benefit
of the politically powerful slaveholding Southern

elite. As it was, their desperation to maintain
the system triggered the war that caused their

downfall. It could not be any clearer that
slavery was the powder keg that set off the

American Civil War. In the next episode of this
series, we will discuss the opening stages of the

seminal showdown between North and South. To make
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