I listen to a history podcast run by two popular British historians. They’re in the midst of a four-parter on the American civil war, with a leading (British) historian of the subject as a guest.
The question that seems to have stumped all three of them is why, after the confederacy announce they’re leaving, the North decide to take up arms to force them to stay rather than just letting them go off on their way, presumably to collapse economically in a decade or two and either petition to rejoin or be mopped up then. What is your understanding of why this happened?
I’m not doing full justice to what they say, which can be found here: https://play.acast.com/s/the-rest-is-history-podcast
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Because it was a part of this country going into rebellion to keep slaves? What is so confusing about it? Britain got into more wars for longer over less integral parts of its state.
How many countries are there that would just let half the country leave? Especially at the time?
Because Lincoln took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, which he interpreted as being permanently binding on all states.
There is a false impression that the south didn’t have a strong economy at the time. Their economy was MASSIVE and responsible for a big chunk of the US’s exports, it was just agricultural rather than industrialized. They also sent a lot of their output up north to feed the North’s industry with raw materials, feed the cities and so on.
All ideological issues aside, it made a great deal of economic sense to stay united.
Also keep in mind this was in the middle of manifest destiny and of course our sheer size and natural resource access is much of what has made us a power into today. Breaking that up would have had drastic impacts on the options and fates of both the union and the confederacy and the way things looked at the time even if they broke up “peacefully” they would have been antagonistic going forward. The last thing the union needed was a confederacy that had time to build trade relations, arm up and maybe call in allies to reinforce them and offset the population disadvantage.
It was absolutely a question back then too seeing as there were draft riots
However there are three major issues you can easily point to:
1-Transportation: The Mississippi River was absolutely critical to transporting Northern goods to the rest of the world. Losing access to the lower Mississippi would have been devastating and that was proven by the fact that Grant was tasked with retaking it
2-Cheep access to raw materials: Southern cotton was critical to keep northern looms running and that played out over tons of industries
3-Denying the British an ally on our other flank. We were not friendly with the UK in the 1860s and having a British ally on both our northern and southern flanks was just not tenable
Precedent.
If they’d simply allowed us to leave then what’s to stop everyone else from leaving? Giving half the country the freedom to walk away, and take half the economy with it, doesn’t bode well for the future integrity of a fledgling nation that’s still figuring itself out.
Why hasn’t the UK given up Northern Ireland yet?
When has any country just said “oh alright, you rebels can go do your thing”?
There were two main reasons.
1 – People in the north were vehemently (in many cases) opposed to slavery. These people were not fooling around. Many opposed slavery on moral grounds but would have been fine with the confederacy simply leaving, but a good proportion of people wanted slavery ended in the entire continent. New York outlawed slavery before the UK did and at about the same time France made it illegal in France proper. A **LOT** of people in the USA, at the time, hated the idea of slavery.
2 – It was an open question as to whether the Federal government should just allow states to leave. A lot of people, in that time frame and on both sides of the slavery debate, thought that it didn’t make sense to simply let states leave. If they could, what exactly is the point of having a Federal government? It would be like, in 2022, Northumbria deciding to become its own kingdom.
Books have been written about this topic, so I am surprised they didn’t at least have a clue.
The Confederacy fired the first shot, were they supposed to say no harm no foul? They could’ve abandoned the fort before I guess, but again why fold immediately?
Partly because they didn’t want slavery to expand to the territories that could eventually become new states. Partly because they feared that if the Union of states broke up into North and South, the North wouldn’t be able to remain stable. Partly because the idea of a hostile nation willing to engage in warfare in immediate proximity was unacceptable. And partly because no government wants to give up control over anything.
1. A sizable portion of the electorate in the north was anti-slavery and saw the war as a “Crusade” of sorts. This viewpoint became more popular as the war expanded in scope and duration.
2. To dispute the legality of secession. If you open up the door to secession, the people who are in favor will keep agitating for it until they get the answer they want, and the country Balkanizes. The south had to be reincorporated into the union in order for the country to maintain homeostasis.
3. To protect democracy. Lincoln had won the election, fair and square. Letting the south go would demonstrate that bullets > ballots.
4. To maintain navigation of the Mississippi to New Orleans, vital to the economy of the Midwest.
The Union wasn’t fighting to abolish slavery, although I’m sure many soldiers were convinced that was what they were doing. Lincoln was quite explicit that slavery wasn’t the issue – if he could have kept the Union together without abolishing slavery, he would have done it.
The compromise of slavery being acceptable in the South and forbidden in the North had remained stable for generations. But with new territories becoming states, the North became concerned that the South was trying to get those new states to become slave-permitting, particularly by illegally flooding the votes with outsiders. (Vote fraud was a massive problem at the time, especially in undeveloped territories with few checks of identity.)
Remember, the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in areas NOT controlled by the Union army. Slaves in captured territory remained enslaved until slavery was abolished on the national level.
The south had an enormous agricultural economy that essentially fed the north, in the same way that the industry of the north supplied the south.
It’s something that’s swept under the rug often, but while the northern states had banned slavery, they were perfectly happy to benefit from slavery financially. Many slave ships came and went through the ports of the northern cities, and the economics of the north were reliant on the cheap agricultural products of the south.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kokes/why_did_the_north_go_to_war_during_the_american/
On a practical level, states deciding to leave because they can’t get their way is like voting on where to get food then getting out of the car when the vote doesn’t go your way. The South would have been a country competing for land to the west which would have made conflict inevitable anyway.
We can read [Lincoln’s own words](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln%27s_first_inaugural_address) on the subject, but by and large they believed that the very existence of the United States depended on it remaining whole. If states could secede, they believed that the Union itself would no longer be legitimate, even among the states that would want to remain. It doesn’t matter that the CSA might have failed or have been a backwater; the important thing was the legitimacy and perpetuity of the Union.
More bluntly – if a state is allowed to threaten to secede whenever it’s unhappy about the federal government’s actions, and you allow it, you no longer have a federal government because you will need an impossible consensus to do anything. Prior to the Constitution, there were the Articles of Confederation, which failed for precisely that reason.
> After the confederacy announce they’re leaving, the North decide to take up arms to force them to stay
Lest we forget the timeline here, the CSA said “We’re leaving,” the Union said, “No, you’re not,” and then the Confederates attacked Fort Sumter, which spurred the mobilization on both sides. “Those bastards attacked *us*” is a powerful motivator to what might have involved much more diplomatic wrangling had they not attacked.
The majority of money the US gov got at the time was from tariffs and the south imported almost everything.
A lot of it was to preserve the union and also end slavery though preserving the union was the major goal. States shouldn’t be able to leave simply for not liking who was elected. Plus would you want a hostile nation on your border?
>rather than just letting them go off on their way, presumably to collapse economically in a decade or two and either petition to rejoin or be mopped up then.
You’re making some pretty big assumptions there, not to mention talking with a great deal of hindsight. Sure, part of why the Union won was that the North was way more industrialized than the South. Just because one side has and advantage like that, doesn’t mean they can just skip the fighting entirely and assume the enemy will collapse eventually.
Any leader suggesting that in response to a potential civil war would be laughed out of office. If anything, allowing them to leave the Union and exist on their own for 20 years would give the Confederacy legitimacy as a nation in the eyes of many. And of course, let’s not forget the South fired on Fort Sumter first.
What you’re asking here is the equivalent of “After Pearl Harbor, the US had more resources than Japan, so why didn’t the US just wait 20 years for Japan to run out of resources and have its empire collapse?”
Why did the Empire fight to retain the colonies?
Same reason the British Empire fought to keep the colonies when we declared independence.
Governments don’t like to give up territory.
Because the south was a massive part of the economy
This is an extremely complex topic, and frankly not one that is taught well in the US. I am going to try my best to cover it all, but this is a topic that someone could write an entire thesis on and still not cover its entirety.
One of the answers to your question, why the Union wanted to keep the Southern States, was one of geography. The US didn’t want a European power in what the US considers its area of influence.
While Manifest Destiny/the Monroe Doctrine are often cited as the reason for the expansion West, what most people fail to realize why the US installed it to begin with. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the US government was terrified of Britain, France, or any of the other major European colonial powers coming in and taking US land for themselves. If the US could be big/strong enough, Europe would have to leave it alone.
Pre-1850 the US was in its infancy, and had a fraction of a percentage of might that would gain the the 20th century. If Europe wasn’t distracted by Napoleon and the fallout of the Napoleonic Wars (plus all the other fighting Europe got up to in the 19th century), there wouldn’t have been much to stop Britain from retaking the American colonies (assuming the British had the will to do it).
Evidence of this can be seen when France tried to conquer Mexico from 1861-1867, right after the Civil War was over, the US sent soldiers to aid the Mexico Republic in their fight against France, and the Mexican Empire. Mind you this was less than 20 years from the end of the Mexican-American War.
The US wanted zero European colonies in the continental US (or anywhere in the Western Hemisphere) and if bringing the rebellious Confederate States back into the mix meant that, so be it. Obviously, these sentiments caused their own issues (Reconstruction, Jim Crow, etc.), but to not act on them could have brought in another existential threat to a Nation that had just got done fighting a Civil War.
Economic and we’re stronger together- A divided US would have been vulnerable to outside threats. Even back then, the North and South’s economies were intertwined.