Often overlooked in Civil War history is the fact that non-southerners, abolitionists and non-abolitionists alike, were sick of the way that our undemocratic system allowed a minority of southern states to consistently overpower the majority and stymie all attempts at progress in the country.
This wasn’t just contained to the issue of slavery. Congress couldn’t event build a Pacific railroad to link the east and west coasts because of southern political interference. Slaveowners occupied the White House for 46 of the 72 years the US Constitution was in place before the Civil War.
Before the Civil War, there was a small but persistent Northern and North Western succession movement primarily concerned with unshackling themselves from the South.
The South, an agrarian society ruled by a small number of families ruling over a free labor caste, was the old world. Most of the globe resembled the South in 1776. The North was a new, dynamic and relatively egalitarian world that makes sense to us now but was novel and untested in 1860.
The South was absolutely fighting to preserve Slavery, but also to preserve their old world and its hierarchy that kept whites and white slaveowners with generational wealth at the top.
They were terrified of the new world that would topple them.
Today’s GOP is fighting for its own version of the old world in which they ruled. They’re terrified of losing their inherited status and privilege in an expansion of democracy. And they seem to be winning.
The Civil War ended slavery and America’s initial period of minoritarian Southern hegemony, and it’s unclear how either could have happened without the bloodiest conflict in US history.
I say this because I just don’t understand how we get ourselves out of this mess we’re in right now.
