https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...
The racism wasn't a sudden thing. What was new was the movement to ban slavery, especially in new states, which would undo the political balance that had been put in the Constitution from the beginning. (The Constitution still gives extra power to those states.) The election of an anti-slavery President was the impetus that turned it into war before he even took office.
It's not just about owning slaves, but also the belief that some people are fundamentally an underclass. Poor people didn't own slaves but feared that they would be put in the slaves' position if the slaves were gone.
So yes, it's a basic racism that goes back to the beginning. It only seems sudden because the election indicated that the tide of history was against them.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization
The Three Fifths Compromise gave slave states extra power. The 14th Amendment nullified it. The Senate and Electoral College still give less populous states extra power. Most of those were in the north.
Abolition wasn't a new thing in 1861. All the northern states had banned it in the decades after the revolutionary war. Indeed, slavery was banned in Georgia in 1735 when it was founded. The British Empire abolished slavery in 1833. Southern states in 1861 were fighting to preserve an institution that many people had recognized as evil for more than a century.
> which would undo the political balance that had been put in the Constitution from the beginning. (The Constitution still gives extra power to those states.)
You're mixing up two different things. The creation of a House with representation based on population and a Senate with a fixed number of Senators per state, which continues to exist today, was a compromise between big states and small states. Four of the seven states that were smaller than average and benefited from that arrangement had few to no enslaved people: New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and New Jersey and Connecticut. Conversely, three of the six states that were bigger than average and were hurt by that arrangement enslaved large numbers of people.
Additionally, the Constitution did not "give extra power" to slave states. It reduced the power of the slave states using an anti-slavery argument. Look at the text of the 14th amendment, which governs apportionment:
> Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.
Compare that to the 3/5 clause:
> Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
Both then and now, the Constitution allocates votes based on the number of "persons" in each state, not just people who can vote. So today, the apportionment is based on a population count that includes children and non-citizens, not just adults over 18. Moreover, even in 1789, the Constitution deemed enslaved people to be "persons." It distinguished between "free persons" and "all other Persons" but both were "persons." So what would have happened if the 14th amendment text was in place in 1789? Slave states would have had even more representation, because the "number of persons in each State" would include enslaved people.
The anti-slavery argument was this: because slaveholding states treated some people like property, enslaved people should not be included in the "number of persons in each State." It partially succeeded in reducing the power of slave-holding states. It was a compromise with the devil, no doubt. But the idea that the Constitution increased the power of the slave states is false. Without the 3/5 clause, the slave states would have had even more power.
Look at the secession documents from the states:
At the very onset, on December 20, 1860, South Carolina declared that President-elect Abraham Lincoln’s “opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.”
On January 7, 1861, the ordinance signed in Montgomery that “it is the desire and purpose of the people of Alabama to meet the Slaveholding States of the South, who may approve such purpose, in order to frame a provisional as well as permanent government upon the principles of the Constitution of the United States.”
On February 2, 1861, Texas declared its decision to be “based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color—a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law.”
On March 9, 1861, Arkansas’s George B. Smoote added a resolution: “Resolved, that the platform on the party known as the Black Republican Party contains unconstitutional dogmas, dangerous in their tendency and highly derogatory to the rights of slave states, and among them the insulting, injurious and untruthful enunciation of the right of the African race of their country to social and political equality with the whites.”
On April 17, 1861 latecomer Virginia, provoked by Lincoln’s raising troops to suppress the already seceded states, declared “Lincoln’s opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery” as it cut ties with Washington. Tennessee was the 11th and last, its population divided on secession (eastern Tennesseans generally opposed it), but not on the slave issue.
If anything, the opposite is true. You can read the declarations of secession for the southern states; e.g. see South Carolina's [1]. They seceded to protect the institution of slavery. Surely some people had other reasons to support secession, but this is the primary one. Decades after the war ended, there was a push to deemphasize slavery as a cause for the war for reasons of propaganda and nostalgia.
[1] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp
White supremacy was, and still is, an important component in the systematic oppression of Black people in the south. But the Confederacy went to war to preserve an economy that would be completely ruined if they had to pay their workers a living wage and treat them like humans.
Much of the Southern economy is still based on paying Black people shit wages. We throw a lot more of them into jail than we do white people, and so many of these jails are for-profit affairs designed to squeeze every penny possible out of their inmates and their families. We elect openly-racist sheriffs. We have literal KKK members get a hair's breadth from becoming governors. There is a case to be made that slavery never ended, it just changed shape.
Slavery was always the main issue. Anyone saying otherwise is just trying to divert attention from that fact or is totally ignorant or the history.
It’s an expansive topic; I’d encourage you to pick a few accounts of the era as well as biographies of Lincoln and generals Grant and Lee.
As soon as Lincoln was elected, without being on any ballots in the south, they knew what was coming (abolition of slavery), and the southern states attempted to secede.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_of_Abominations
> Wasn’t that a factor that was emphasized later?
States rights was a factor that was emphasized later. Historical documents indicate that the war was explicitly over slavery.
Yeah, it is stomach-churning to us folks with a modern colour-blind sensitivity. It is hard to believe that folks believed that sort of thing.
> Economic incentives are perverse
Not just that, cultural and partisan factors. We see an echo of that sort of thing with the current lunatic rage against facemasks: it makes absolutely no sense to argue against them, yet … people do. The crazier they are the louder they are. Prior to secession, pro- and anti-slavery advocates eventually lost all respect for one another and lost the ability to compromise. Slaveholders thought that abolitionists literally wanted to see them murdered in their beds (cf. the Haitian Rebellion, Nat Turner's Rebellion, the Pottawatomie massacre, Harper's Ferry), and abolitionists had an equally low opinion.
Opinions polarised and ossified. The extremists got more and more vocal, and eventually there was no middle ground. And then everything dissolved into a cataclysm of violence.
And despite the idea of it being over the abstract idea of "states' rights", the confederate constitution mainly reduced a state's right to make choices for itself. It was pretty much a clone of the US constitution, with a clause that states couldn't ban slavery if they wanted to.
But it took a long time though for the stored wealth (and associated power structures) to disappear. Around 50 to 75 years. It wasn't until the New Deal investments of the late 1930s (in the entire country, including the south) that the south stared to recover. Before that there were a lot of parallels to Iraq and Afghanistan. A destroyed country with US contractors taking an obscene amount of reconstruction money and not really doing much with it. Locals clinging to their existing way of life including secretly joining brutal militias to enforce the former power structures; some trying to bring "law and order" back to their locality in a distinct power vacuum, some trying to bring back power structures that they had internalized as moralistically correct. That's how the KKK started, with a lot of parallels to ISIS.
Train supply chains allowed the north to move troops and supplies an order of magnitude faster than the south.
But that doesn't explain why the average southern soldier—who didn't own any slaves (that was for the rich planter elite minority), who probably personally knew and possibly were friends with slaves, fought and died for the Confederacy. Claiming that "the entire southern United States were overcome by an irresistible race hatred" is as ridiculous (not saying that you are claiming that; you recognize that such a statement is silly) as stating that "every German soldier in WW2 was a Nazi", which was incorrect on both a literal sense (in terms of being a Nazi Party member) and a figurative sense.
Ultimately the average southern soldier fought and died for the same reason the average German soldier did: For his home (and homeland), his family, his friends and comrades, his way of life. Nothing more or less grand than that.
I have a hard time believing the entire southern United States was only fighting for the right to own slaves. Wasn’t that a factor that was emphasized later? What other reasons were there for the war? (Considering the slavery issue though, thank goodness they lost)
Edit: thanks for the responses. I couldn’t have imagined the pro-slavery position was so outspoken and blatant, it’s a bit of a culture shock. Economic incentives are perverse