To assert the dogma that slavery caused the war of the 1860s sanctifies the North, vilifies the South, glorifies the Blacks, and mythologizes the war. This dogma has been thrown out there as an unchallenged “given” for a hundred and fifty years to put the South on the guilty defensive and keep her there, but it all collapses with one question: How? How, exactly, did slavery cause the war?
Slavery did not cause the war. The North itself admitted it in the New York Times (quoted in the Richmond Whig of April 9, 1861, just before Ft. Sumter):
“Slavery has nothing whatever to do with the tremendous issues now awaiting decision. It has disappeared almost entirely from the political discussions of the day. No one mentions it in connection with our present complications. The question which we have to meet is precisely what it would be if there were not a negro slave on American soil….” [emphasis theirs]
Yet Lincoln insisted it was the cause, when he issued his Second Inaugural:
“All knew that this interest (slavery) was, somehow, the cause of the war.”
“Somehow!” He attempts to explain precisely how by going on to say:
“To strengthen, perpetuate,
…
Read more at the Abbeville Institute
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