In 1861 Confederate General Beauregard fired on Fort Sumpter, South Carolina,
then held by Union Forces, and that was the spark which ignited the Civil War,
though it been brewing for a long time. To say that slavery
was "the cause" of the war is misleading. There were few serious demands for
its abolition. The real underlying issue was over its territorial spread beyond
the South and for a long time various compromises, most notably the Missouri
Compromise, preserved an uneasy balance between contending
forces. Three major destabilizing events, all occuring in the
1850s, upset that balance. First there was the Compromise of 1850 resulting in
the Fugitive Slave Act which required runaway slaves to be returned
from the North to their "owners"in the South. The Act was widely disregarded
in the North. Second was the Kansas-Nebraska Act which allowed slavery
to be introduced in northern territories by popular vote and, finally the
Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court, which held that Dred Scott, a
slave who had traveled north and had lived in several free states, could not sue
to affirm his freedom even though he had resided in states where slavery was
disallowed. If the Dred Scott decision had continued to be the law, the
emancipation of slaves might have become a dead issue, as slavery would have
become effectively a national institution, a result which was morally repugnant
to a great part of the population, mostly but not entirely in the
North.
Abolitionists were furious and a Kansas man named John Brown
led a band of armed men to Harper's Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia) to
free slaves by force. He was arrested by union soldiers and hanged. Tension
built with the secession of eleven states from the Union (or
thirteen if you count Missouri and Kentucky) and by the claim by both sides to
the control of Fort Sumpter, South Carolina, located in Charleston Harbor.
Although the attack on Fort Sumpter was the spark which ignited the keg, the
stage had been set long before by the Southern states' insistence on their right
to secede from the Union and Abraham Lincoln's refusal to concede that right and
his insistence that slavery be confined to the states where it then existed in
the South. Lincoln had denounced slavery all his life, contrary the modern
contention that he waffled on it, but he believed that the Constitution fixed
the status quo but that it would eventually end for moral and economic
reasons under its own weight, as it did in other countries. Southern
politicians claimed a right to secede at will and they feared being overwhelmed
by the North and outvoted by a hostile Congress if they remained in the Union.
Other issues were in the picture, including tariffs enacted at the behest
of northern industrial states, which raised the price of foreign manufactured
goods and diminished the economic influence of cotton. Cultural differences
cannot be discounted either, though that factor cannot be easily quantified.
The spread of slavery beyond the South was the great issue, however, not its
existence in the South itself, which was never seriously questioned by more than
a minority in the North until near the end of the War.
Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure with limited application,
and Lincoln never claimed otherwise. Slavery ended with the collapse of the
Southern war effort in 1865 and the enactment of the "Civil War Amendments" to
the Constitution, thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth. The War resulted
in some 620,000 battlefield casualties and severe economic injury to the
South.
