On December 24, 1860, the state of South Carolina adopted a formal declaration explaining why it was withdrawing from the Union. The document was not long—readable in under ten minutes—but its contents were unambiguous. Every single grievance listed in it revolved around slavery. The state complained that northern states protected runaway slaves, that northerners called slavery sinful, that abolition societies helped slaves escape, and that northerners had just elected a president whose “opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.

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That was the entire list. There was nothing about tariffs, taxes, or government overreach. This was the same South Carolina that had nearly seceded over a tariff back in 1832, so its leaders knew how to complain about tariffs when they wanted to. In 1860, they did not.

The chain of events that led to the Civil War is often where the confusion begins, so it is worth laying out plainly. Slavery is why the southern states seceded. Secession is why there was a war. Take away slavery and there is no secession, and without secession there is no civil war.

This does not mean the North marched south to free the slaves. It means the entire conflict started because the South left, and the South left over slavery. The other southern states were just as explicit. Mississippi declared that its position “is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.

” Texas accused the northern states of “proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men irrespective of race or color, a doctrine at war with nature,” and insisted that the “servitude of the African race” was “mutually beneficial to both bond and free. ” Texas did have one additional complaint that was not about slavery—or at least, it was not entirely about slavery. The state said the federal government had failed to protect the frontier from indigenous raids and bandits coming up from Mexico. But Texas turned right around and claimed Washington refused to provide that protection “for the sole reason that she [Texas] is a slaveholding state.

” Even the one grievance that was not about slavery was made about slavery. Then there was Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy. In late March 1861, he gave what became known as the Cornerstone Speech, in which he declared that the foundation of the Confederacy “rest[ed] 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. ” Some later claimed the speech did not count because it was off the cuff, and Stephens himself insisted the reporter’s notes were full of errors.

But in June 1865, he wrote in his own personal diary that “slavery was without a doubt the occasion of secession. ”

Not every Confederate state issued a formal declaration of causes. Only four did: South Carolina, Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia. The others passed something known as an ordinance of secession, which was the legal document that actually took them out of the Union, and for most of them it was just a short paragraph saying they were leaving without explaining why.

Still, there were hints. Alabama claimed in its ordinance that Lincoln’s Republican Party was “avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions”—and everyone at the time knew that phrase meant slavery. Virginia complained in its ordinance about federal power being used “to the oppression of the southern slaveholding states. ”

Five states—Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana—went further.

Starting in late 1860, they sent out what they called secession commissioners to the other slave states to try to talk them into leaving the Union. A historian named Charles Dew went through the commissioners’ speeches and letters for a book called Apostles of Disunion. They were not discussing tariffs or centralization. They were discussing the threat of abolition and the fear of slave rebellions.

A few states did not give any reasons at all. Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Tennessee issued ordinances with no explanation, and Arkansas specifically cited Lincoln’s call for troops. A skeptic might point out that of the eleven Confederate states, only four issued declarations citing slavery, and Arkansas cited Lincoln raising an army. But Arkansas’s story is more complicated than that.

In March 1861, Arkansas held a secession convention during which it voted to remain in the Union, and during that same convention it issued a list of grievances against the Republicans, mostly about slavery and the fugitive slave laws. When Arkansas finally joined the Confederacy that May, it cited Lincoln’s call for troops in addition to all of those earlier complaints regarding slavery. Florida never officially released a declaration of causes, but it drafted one a few weeks after leaving the Union, and it was all about slavery. The document referred to Lincoln being elected due to “hostility to our institutions and a fixed purpose to abolish them.

” Louisiana never released a formal declaration either, but its commissioner, George Williamson, stood before the Texas Convention in February 1861, representing Louisiana and trying to talk Texas into leaving the Union, and he stated, “Louisiana looks to the formation of a southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery. ”

That left North Carolina and Tennessee, the only two states that never openly said they were seceding on account of slavery. But what they were asking for before they left tells the story. In February 1861, both states sent delegates to a peace conference asking the federal government for constitutional guarantees protecting slavery.

Protection for slavery was their price for remaining in the Union. When Congress did not deliver, they joined the Confederacy. Georgia included a separate list of grievances in its declaration, everything from the cost of lighthouses to shipping bounties and tariffs. Some of those complaints were legitimate.

The federal government really did pay bounties to cod fishermen in New England, really did stop foreign ships from hauling cargo between American ports—which forced southern planters to pay northern ship owners to move their cotton—and really did subsidize northern steamships. But those were all national policies, passed by a Congress that the South held enormous sway over for the better part of seventy years. In return, the South got its own federal favors, like the Fugitive Slave Act, which was a direct infringement on the rights of other states. And Georgia never claimed those grievances were the reason for seceding.

They were just the state’s way of explaining how Lincoln’s party came into power. Georgia eventually got to its actual point: “The prohibition of slavery in the territories is the cardinal principle of this organization. ”

As for tariffs, the tariff in effect when the South seceded was the Tariff of 1857, the lowest the country had seen since 1816, and it had passed with southern votes. The tariff people like to blame, the Morrill Tariff, did not pass the Senate until March 1861, after seven states had already left the Union, and it only passed because the southern senators had walked out and were not there to vote against it.

The tariff did not cause secession so much as secession caused the tariff. What about the four states—Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee—that did not leave until after Fort Sumter, when Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand troops to put down the rebellion? For those states, the immediate reason for joining the Confederacy was Lincoln raising an army against their neighbors. Those four states had more white people in them than the original seven combined.

They gave the Confederacy its capital, its best generals, and a huge chunk of its soldiers. Someone could argue that the Confederacy that actually fought the war was mostly made up of people from states that left because Lincoln was sending troops, and conclude the war was fought over northern aggression. But then the question becomes: why was Lincoln sending troops south? He was sending them to put down a rebellion started by states that had left the Union specifically to protect and expand slavery.

That was the choice faced in Virginia—send sons to fight for the Confederacy, the side in open rebellion, or send them to fight for the Union against it. Virginia chose the Confederacy, the side that had just been founded to protect slavery. Tennessee and North Carolina had asked for constitutional guarantees protecting slavery, and Virginia was the state that actually called that conference in the first place. Arkansas’s own convention that March passed resolutions asking for the same protections.

The North actually tried to give them at least part of what they were asking for. This is where the Corwin Amendment comes in. In March 1861, Congress passed a constitutional amendment that would have permanently barred the federal government from stopping slavery in the states where it already existed, including all of the southern states that would form the Confederacy. Lincoln did not object to it; according to historian Daniel Crofts, he was most likely pushing for it behind the scenes.

Not every historian agrees, but at the very least Lincoln publicly said he had no objection to it. The argument goes: if Congress was willing to pass an amendment protecting slavery, and Lincoln was in favor of slavery becoming a permanent institution in the South, and the South still seceded, then they must have had other concerns. But there is a problem with that logic. Seven of the states had already voted to leave the Union by the time the Corwin Amendment passed Congress.

It was a last-ditch effort to keep the other slave states from following suit. And the Corwin Amendment only applied to states where slavery was already legal. It did not allow for the expansion of slavery. A few months earlier, in December 1860, Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky had proposed what became known as the Crittenden Compromise.

His proposal was simple: the North would remain free, and everybody south of the 36°30′ parallel could continue practicing slavery essentially forever. The catch was that it also applied to any future territories the country might acquire, places like Cuba or northern Mexico. If it had only protected slavery where slavery already existed, Lincoln almost certainly would have gone along with it, just as he did with the Corwin Amendment. But he refused to support the expansion of slavery, and that was something the South could not abide.

Rather than compromise, they left the Union and wrote their own constitution that guaranteed slavery in all future territories. The South wanted more than they already had—they wanted slavery in the entirety of the West, as well as places like Cuba and Mexico. So if the war really was over slavery, why did so many poor southern farmers enlist in the Confederate army? If they could not afford slaves themselves, why would they risk their necks for those who could?

First, owning slaves was far more common than many people think. It is often said that only one percent of Americans owned slaves, which is technically true if you count everyone, including northerners and children. But in the eleven states that formed the Confederacy, according to the 1860 census, roughly one out of every three families owned at least one slave. In places like Mississippi and South Carolina, it was closer to half.

Even if a man was too impoverished to own a slave, there was a good chance he had a friend or family member who did. There was also a great deal of effort put into convincing poor whites who did not own slaves that they still benefited from slavery. In December 1860, the same month South Carolina seceded, a man named James D. B.

De Bow published a pamphlet titled The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-Slaveholder. It was a sales pitch: slaves do the menial work so your wages remain higher; you are not competing with immigrants like they are up north; keep working hard and one day you too might have a chance to own a slave. They pushed the idea that slavery meant even the poorest white man was not at the bottom of the ladder. No matter how broke he was, there was always somebody beneath him.

Ministers defended slavery from the pulpit, saying it was ordained by God. A poor farmer might not own a slave, might not even want to own a slave, but the people he held in high esteem did own slaves, and everybody in trusted positions of authority—from his pastor to the editor of the local newspaper to his congressman—constantly told him slavery was a good thing making his life better. Once the shooting started, many poor farmers signed up simply because an army was coming toward their homes. Not everyone was fighting for slavery.

Soldiers have their own reasons, then and now. Some Confederate soldiers were drafted. Some fought to uphold the Union, some to avenge Fort Sumter, some to avoid being labeled cowards, some for adventure, some were immigrants recruited straight off the boat. The men who fought for the North did not all do so to liberate the slaves.

Individual soldiers from the 1860s to today all have their own reasons for serving, and those reasons do not always line up with the government’s reasons. Then there are the black Confederates. The claim that thousands of black men fought for the Confederate army did not happen, not even close. The unit people usually point to is the Louisiana Native Guard.

In 1861, about fifteen hundred free men of color in New Orleans offered to serve, and the governor accepted them into the state militia. But they were never armed and never saw any action. They marched in a couple of parades and that was it. In January 1862, the Louisiana legislature passed a law requiring militia members to be white, and the Native Guard was disbanded.

When New Orleans fell to the Union that spring, some of those same officers put on blue uniforms and fought for the United States. Black soldiers were not authorized by the Confederate Congress until March 1865, about four weeks before Appomattox, and there were at most a few dozen, maybe a couple of hundred, with no solid evidence any of them saw combat. There were tens of thousands of black men in Confederate camps, but they were cooks, teamsters, body servants, and laborers digging trenches—almost all of them slaves, not soldiers. As for atrocities committed by Union soldiers against southern civilians, those happened.

Farms were burned, women were assaulted, livestock was stolen, and in some cases civilians were killed or displaced. Some of those atrocities led people to take up arms against the Union. But how a war is fought and why a war started are two separate issues. The South fired the first shot.

By the time Lincoln was sworn in, the seceded states had already seized nearly every piece of federal property within their borders—forts, arsenals, custom houses, even the US Mint in New Orleans—and then they fired on Fort Sumter. Lincoln’s position was that the United States was still the United States, that those forts belonged to the federal government, and that federal law still applied. A government cannot enforce federal law over territory it is not allowed to set foot in. Lincoln did not wake up one morning deciding to conquer Mississippi.

The Confederacy took federal property by force and declared itself a separate nation. The only options were to let it go or to go and get it back. The South did not stay home either. Confederate armies invaded Kentucky, marched into Pennsylvania, sent a column up the Rio Grande to try to take New Mexico, and raided as far north as Ohio and Vermont.

Both sides went where the other side was. That is what a war is. So why do so many people still believe the war was fought over states’ rights rather than slavery? The short answer is that the Confederates wrote the textbooks.

The victors do not always write the history books, and that was definitely not the case when it came to the Civil War. Within a year of Lee’s surrender, the Confederates were already putting their own spin on things. A Richmond newspaper editor named Edward A. Pollard published a book in 1866 titled The Lost Cause, which is where the term comes from.

It laid out talking points people still repeat today: the South fought over states’ rights instead of slavery, and slavery was not really all that bad, just a mild form of servitude. In the years that followed, other Confederates did the same. Alexander Stephens, the vice president who had said the cornerstone of the Confederacy rested on the great truth that the negro was not equal to the white man, published his own two-volume book starting in 1868 arguing the war had really been over competing ideas of government and slavery just happened to be the issue they fought over. Jefferson Davis published his memoir in 1881 and wrote that slavery “was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.

” This directly contradicted what he had told his own Congress in April 1861, when he explained that southern crops—cotton, rice, tobacco—which made up nearly three-quarters of US exports, depended on “the labor of African slaves, which was and is indispensable. ” He had also said, “With interests of such overwhelming magnitude imperiled, the people of the southern states were driven by the conduct of the north to the adoption of some course of action to avert the danger with which they were openly menaced. ” In other words, slavery was where the money was, and the South left to protect it. Twenty years later, he tried to say slavery had nothing to do with it.

Even when he resigned from the Senate in January 1861, he stood up and said he concurred with Mississippi’s decision to leave the Union, calling it necessary and proper—and Mississippi’s own words were “our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery. ”

The United Daughters of the Confederacy took the states’ rights story and brought it to the classroom. A Georgia woman named Mildred Rutherford, who had been the historian general of the organization, wrote a pamphlet in 1919 titled A Measuring Rod to Test Textbooks. It was a checklist: any book that said the war was fought over slavery was automatically rejected, as were books that called Confederate soldiers traitors or said slave owners were cruel to their slaves.

The checklist was sent out to school boards all over the South. In 1957, during the fight over desegregation, the state of Virginia commissioned its own history textbooks that told seventh graders that life for slaves was “generally happy. ” Those books stayed in Virginia classrooms until the late 1970s. In Texas, the books used in the 1980s and 1990s had been through a state approval process policed for decades by people whose main concern was making sure nothing in the history books offended anybody.

A historian named James Loewen went through the most used American history textbooks of the 1990s for his book Lies My Teacher Told Me and found that every single one either muddied or watered down the cause of the Civil War. They did it to sell books in the South. When the Texas State Board of Education wrote its own standards in 2010, one board member, a retired teacher, stated on record, “States’ rights were the real issue behind the Civil War. Slavery was an afterthought issue.

” That person helped decide what Texas children learned as recently as 2010. This is the lost cause narrative: relentless propaganda, running since the war ended, with the specific goal of rehabilitating the Confederates’ public image, painting them as tragic heroes and the US government as vile tyrants. Another common misconception is that slave owners were by and large benevolent, treating their slaves almost like family. There were certainly some slave owners who were less cruel than others, but that is a low bar.

Slavery was a legal status. If you were a slave, you were property. You could be bought, sold, rented out, gambled away, or left to somebody in a will. It was hereditary—if your mother was a slave, so were you, and so were your children and their children forever.

Children were pulled from the arms of their mothers and sold at auction like livestock, advertised in sale notices right alongside mules and furniture. There were no laws stopping slaves from being assaulted by their owners. In 1850, a sixty-year-old Missouri widower named Robert Newsome purchased a fourteen-year-old girl named Celia. He raped her on the way home and continued raping her for about five years.

She bore two of his children. In 1855, when she was pregnant again and sick, she begged him to leave her alone. He refused. She hit him over the head with a stick and killed him.

Despite her lawyers citing a Missouri statute making it a crime to force any woman against her will, the judge refused to let the jury consider it, because she was a slave. The jury convicted her, and the same judge sentenced her to death. Celia was hanged on December 21, 1855, a few days before Christmas, for being a slave who killed the man who had been raping her since she was a child. In the eyes of the law, she was not really a person.

She was property, property her master was allowed to use and abuse however he pleased. If slaves were treated so nicely, why were there slave patrols? Why were there bounties for runaway slaves? Why did thousands escape north via the Underground Railroad?

Why did the South need a federal law to go fetch them back? The claim that there were more white slaves than black slaves is provably false. What people are talking about is indentured servitude, and it is true that three or four hundred thousand white people came to the colonies as indentured servants. Some signed up voluntarily to pay for the boat ride; others were sent against their will, and plenty were treated badly.

But indentured servitude was a contract with an expiration date, usually four to seven years, and when the time was up, the servant walked away a free man. An indentured servant remained a legal person, could take a master to court for breaking the contract, could marry, and most importantly, bore children who were born free. Slaves had none of that—no contracts, no end dates, no courts, no legal marriages, and their children were born into bondage just like them. What about the fact that black people owned slaves?

It is true. But black slave owners accounted for less than one percent of slave owners in the United States. The slaves in the states that remained with the Union accounted for about eleven percent of the total. That still leaves the Confederacy holding almost ninety percent of the slaves.

And in many southern states for most of the 1800s, if you freed a slave, the law required that newly freed slave to leave the state, and if they did not leave within a certain time, they could be sold back into bondage. So in many cases when a black man in the South owned a slave, it meant he had saved up enough money to purchase his wife’s freedom and kept her as a slave on paper rather than risk her being put back into chains. There were also free black people who embraced slavery as an economic system and worked their own slaves like everybody else, and sometimes a man held his wife as a slave on paper while also having field hands out of self-interest. Hypocrisy and selfishness are not confined to certain races or regions.

The North had its own racism, its own black codes, and its own fortunes built on southern cotton and the slave trade. But the fact that there were black slave owners does not mean the war was not fought over slavery, and it certainly does not mean slavery was not all that bad. Murder is bad, yet people still commit murder. The reason this topic remains so divisive is that it has never really been an argument over the facts.

Nobody who has read the secession declarations doubts what they say. The fight is over what those facts are allowed to mean about people who are alive right now. For a lot of people in the South, the Confederacy is not some far-off abstract concept. It is pawpaw.

It is the name on the courthouse monument in the town where you grew up. When someone says the war was about slavery, what you hear is “your people were the bad guys. ” That does not feel like a history lesson; it feels like a personal attack. So people make up stories—the war was about states’ rights, slavery was a mild form of servitude.

Those stories have lasted 160 years not because they are well argued or backed by evidence, but because they allow people to keep loving their ancestors without feeling ashamed. For a lot of black people, it is not abstract either. Slavery ended, but the men who fought for slavery came home and ran the South for another hundred years. There are people alive right now who, as children, knew people who had been slaves.

Ruby Bridges, the little girl escorted into school in Louisiana during desegregation, is still alive, only seventy-two years old, the same age as John Travolta. A historian named David Blight wrote an entire book about this, Race and Reunion, arguing that the fight over what the Civil War meant turned into a fight over what kind of country America was going to be. That was not lost on the Confederates. Edward Pollard, the Richmond editor who wrote The Lost Cause in 1866, admitted the war had settled two things—the Union was back together and slavery was gone—but he added, “the war did not decide negro equality and it did not decide negro suffrage,” and that the new war in the South was a “war of ideas.

” He said that in 1866, and it is still being fought about today. There is some frustration from the other side too, because people who go on about the evil of the South sometimes ignore every other group who did the same thing. Almost every culture that has ever existed on the planet has practiced some form of slavery. Native Americans had slaves.

There was slavery in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. It is part of the human condition, not something solely practiced by white people in the South. But two wrongs do not make a right, and one does not fight bad history with more bad history. Two separate questions are being confused.

What happened, and what does that say about me? The first question already has an answer, and it is conclusive. We know why the Civil War started. We know what it was fought over.

The evidence is there, in the primary sources: the declarations of causes, the ordinances of secession, the commissioners’ speeches, the Confederate Constitution, the letters and diaries. A man can say the South seceded to protect slavery and still not think his great-great-granddaddy was a monster. Acknowledging that slavery was horrible and was the primary cause of the Civil War does not require anyone to burn their Dukes of Hazzard poster. Something either did or did not happen, and the only way to accurately determine what occurred in the past is to follow the evidence.

Slavery is what caused the Civil War. There were other factors, and a ton of nuance, but it was still slavery. Without slavery, the Civil War simply would not have happened.