Most historians agree with the title of this post. So do many Americans. But there are others who still claim that the Civil War was about something other than slavery.
Watch:
Yesterday I showed this video to my Civil War America class. It comes from Brian Zahnd’s documentary Postcards From Babylon. The video focuses on Scott Hancock, a historian at Gettysburg College. He is a friend and we attend the same the evangelical church here in south central Pennsylvania. He has also written for Current.
I used this video as an introduction to our class discussion of Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. Here is a description of that book:
In late 1860 and early 1861, state-appointed commissioners traveled the length and breadth of the slave South carrying a fervent message in pursuit of a clear goal: to persuade the political leadership and the citizenry of the uncommitted slave states to join in the effort to destroy the Union and forge a new Southern nation.
Directly refuting the neo-Confederate contention that slavery was neither the reason for secession nor the catalyst for the resulting onset of hostilities in 1861, Charles B. Dew finds in the commissioners’ brutally candid rhetoric a stark white supremacist ideology that proves the contrary. The commissioners included in their speeches a constitutional justification for secession, to be sure, and they pointed to a number of political “outrages” committed by the North in the decades prior to Lincoln’s election. But the core of their argument―the reason the right of secession had to be invoked and invoked immediately―did not turn on matters of constitutional interpretation or political principle. Over and over again, the commissioners returned to the same point: that Lincoln’s election signaled an unequivocal commitment on the part of the North to destroy slavery and that emancipation would plunge the South into a racial nightmare.
Dew’s discovery and study of the highly illuminating public letters and speeches of these apostles of disunion―often relatively obscure men sent out to convert the unconverted to the secessionist cause–have led him to suggest that the arguments the commissioners presented provide us with the best evidence we have of the motives behind the secession of the lower South in 1860–61.
Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century after the Civil War, Dew challenges many current perceptions of the causes of the conflict. He offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were absolutely critical factors in the outbreak of war―indeed, that they were at the heart of our great national crisis.
I can’t think of a better book for teaching undergraduates about the causes of the American Civil War. The video of Scott Hancock at the Robert E. Lee monument at Gettysburg Military Park was a great framing device for our class discussion.
The question isn’t, What were the causes of the Civil War?
Anyone can read even just the Declarations of Secession on the web, or Alexander Stephens’s “cornerstone speech,” also on the web, and in minutes go from knowing nothing about the event to having most of the critical information needed to get an accurate understanding of it.
The question is why so many Americans–and not just southerners–are so adamant about denying that slavery was the cause of the Civil War?
The answer to that will unlock one of the central mysteries about America, and why it is as it is today.
I teach a class called Art in CUlture. I start each semester with a section on Confederate Monuments. It is a great way for students at a University in Tennessee to consider how art, of various forms, reflects our cultural ideas. It is also close to home since we have a Confederate Monument on the edge of campus that was protested in 2020. I show this Scott Hancock video along with one about our local monument.
https://www.faithonview.com/a-small-southern-town-and-her-monument/
When your teaching undergraduates you begin with the stuff on the web.
I was a doctoral student in the History Department at LSU in the early 1970s under T. Harry Williams. Professor Charles Dew was part of the history faculty. He was a very good teacher and a man whom I have admired over the years(I completed my doctorate in history but then taught in a college of business). I remember when Apostles of Disunion was published and I briefly talked with him about it. I have family members and friends who still deny or our ignorant about slavery as the main cause of the Civil War. This book is useful in correcting ignorance and even willful denial.
Unfortunately , even a book with facts – primary source facts! – will not persuade those who do not want to be persuaded. Just watch the video. I understand those represented in the video are probably on the end of the spectrum in terms of reasonableness, but we seem to be living in a time when “facts” are questioned if they are not coming from the right person or source. I live near Gettysburg and went up today and participated in a Ranger Hike – a free and highly recommended activity- you will learn something new each time. The first question from our group of about 20 was if slavery was really the cause of the war. I think the ranger answered it very well and the answer was Yes. Thankfully the ranger did not get yelled at like the courageous professor in the video.
I good conversation between John and Scott Hancock:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/way-improvement-leads-home-american-history-religion/id1071244872?i=1000478889620
Yes–thanks for calling attention to this!
A ranger may not have answered the same way fifty years ago. Good scholarship finds it way to public presentations of the past.
Thanks for this, John. Dew also wrote a memoir titled “The Making of a Racist.”