Stephens - Commanding the storm: Civil War battles in the words of the generals who fought them

The storm had been brewing for quite some timeperhaps more than a century. It was about many things, but at the heart of it all lay slavery.

A poll taken on the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War showed that most Americans believe that a disagreement over states rights was the primary cause of the warthis despite the overwhelming opinion of most historians and teachers, who have examined the records and documents that demonstrate clearly that the cause was slavery. The issue of states rights was a rhetorical smoke screen. As we will see from Secessionist documents, the states rights they wanted to preserve had to do with owning slaves.

This is all still hotly debated among nonhistorians, who often ignore facts, with just about everyone confusing the cause of the war with the reasons for fighting it. Slavery caused the war, but thats not what the fighting ended up being about. Some background material will help clarify the confusion. In order to understand the battles and the men who fought them, we need to know what led them there to kill their friends and relatives.

The first thirty of what later became known as slaves came to the Virginia Colony in 1619. But initially even slaves from Africa were considered indentured servants, released after a specified period of time or on conversion to Christianity. But wealthy whites didnt like losing their best-trained servants, so they turned slavery into an automatic life sentence for both the slaves and their descendants. A 1654 Virginia court decision designated John Casor, an African, as the first official slave in the colonies. Even though he had served well past his period of indentured servitude, the court defined him as his masters property and confirmed the designation as a life sentence.

The trade in Africans, which had gone on since the mid-1500s, escalated in the 1700s. As agriculture grew in the South, plantation owners relied on slaves to plant, tend, and harvest crops. Businesses increasingly used them to generate profits. As larger numbers of slaves were kept together in forced labor camps, the quality of their lives decreased to maximize profits, and increasingly brutal methods kept them in line. As slavery expanded, though, many questioned iteven some slaveholders, such as Thomas Jefferson.

The Revolutionary War complicated matters. It was a war for autonomy, the Declaration of Independence proclaiming that all men are created equal. Yet the newly formed United States was one of the largest slaveholding countries in the world. While framing the Constitution, the Founding Fathers compromised on slavery in order to gain the support of Southern states, particularly South Carolina and Georgia, which probably wouldnt have joined the Union otherwise. But the discussion of human rights resulting from the Revolution also led to talk of abolition.

The abolitionist movement grew rapidly in the early 1800s, particularly in the North, lobbying governments and eventually establishing the Underground Railroad to smuggle slaves to freedom. Their extremely vocal and sometimes violent activities sparked equally violent reactions from their opponents, pushing the two factions farther apart. Slavery became a major political issue, and the evolving political parties were forced to take sides, so that by the 1850s there were two main partiesthe Republican Party, favoring abolition, and the Democratic Party, favoring slavery.

These two political parties now have essentially inverted what they were then. In general, Republicans were reformers, favoring change, while Democrats favored maintaining the status quo. Then, most Republicans were liberal and lived in cities, while most Democrats were conservative and lived in the country. Up until the war each party had its own liberal and conservative divisions, but when considering the parties of the 1800s, in a general way Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans were more liberal, favored change, and opposed slavery, while Jefferson Davis and the Democrats were more conservative, favored the status quo, and championed slavery. Ultimately slavery defined their parties.

Linking the issue of slavery to individual states ended up dividing the country. Perhaps if the Founding Fathers had established a federal law one way or the other, taking the issue away from the states, the nation could have avoided civil war. But even then the issue was so contentious that the Founding Fatherswho had other matters to handlefor the most part avoided it.

As slavery expanded in the South after the Revolution, Northern states began abolishing it, sometimes converting slaves automatically to indentured servants. By 1810 the Northern states had freed 75 percent of their slaveswhich wasnt all that difficult since there werent many slaves in the North. Only 1 percent of enslaved and free African Americans lived in the North, primarily in cities, while 95 percent lived in the South, with the rest in the territories.