The Civil War Sesquicentennial

April 12 marks the sesquicentennial of the beginning of the Civil War. 150 years ago, General Beauregard, commander of the Confederate forces in Charleston, South Carolina, demanded the surrender of the Union garrison located on an island just off the coast. When Major Robert Anderson refused, the Confederates opened fire on the military installation. Two days later, Major Anderson surrendered Fort Sumter to the Confederacy. The war had begun.

I find it amazing that nowhere is this being reported, considered, talked about…whatever you want to call it. The Civil War is the single biggest event in the history of this country. It formed who we are today.

In 1861, the population of the United States was 35 million. 24 million lived north of the Mason Dixon line. 9 million lived in the south. Of the 9 million who lived in the southern states, 4 million were slaves, leaving a white population of about 5 million people. The industrial capacity of the entire South was surpassed by the industrial output of New York State alone. It was a backward, rural economy. Ken Burns, in his PBS masterpiece, the Civil War, stated that when you crossed the Ohio River into the South, it was entering into another country, one of poverty and deprivation.

Over 600,000 people died in the Civil War. In case you can’t do the math, that equals 2% of the nation’s population that perished in the melee. More people died in the Civil War than in all other American wars combined to date. At Gettysburg alone 45,000 Americans/Confederates died in three days; that was the total number of American casualties in the Vietnam War.

Two periods of history interest me: the period leading up to the beginning of WWII, and the period leading up to the beginning of the Civil War. Both are fraught with miscues, misjudgments, mistakes, miscalculations, which if done some other way, would have avoided disaster.

In my reading, the Civil War should never have occurred. Slavery, that peculiar and morally disgusting institution, formed the foundation of the Southern plantation system feeding cotton to Northern and European factories. While the North industrialized, the South remained rural with capital tied up in enslaved human beings. On the other hand, slavery was on the way to becoming uneconomical, and several scholars have speculated that had there been no war, slavery would have collapsed under its own weight anyway over the next 10 years and die the ignoble death it so richly deserved.

While the moral high ground was on the side of the North, the political arguments rested with the South. The relationship between the Northern and Southern states had never been good…ever. The Southern states signed the Declaration of Independence reluctantly. The Constitution was a battle over slavery, and the South viewed its joining the Union conditional on the North keeping its word about slavery in the South. If the North broke its promises, the South could always leave the Union. But for seventy years, the South dominated politics in America, and controlled Washington.

It lost its control with election of Abraham Lincoln. He won the election with only 40% of the popular vote. His name didn’t even appear on the ballots of ten southern states. No wonder he was viewed as a threat and a usurper, even though in practicality he was a moderate who despised slavery, but never promised to abolish it in the South, but only to prevent the expansion of slavery to the West.

So the North viewed the Union as unbreakable. The south viewed it as a voluntary association, secondary to the sovereignty of the states. You were a Virginian first…and an American second.

As time goes on, and the Civil War becomes distant history…more so than now (the last Civil War veteran died in 1959), I wonder if there will be any revisionist history. Slavery was a horrible and despicable thing, but given that it was on its last leg anyway, was it worth 600,000 dead people to end it a decade earlier? Was it worth the catastrophic reconstruction of the South, which in turn led to the Jim Crow laws, segregation, the KKK, and many of the problems we still face in the area of race relations?

If you were a slave, the answer is a resounding yes. Morally, and as a Christian, the answer is yes, and again yes. How dare the question be asked in the first place? But 600,000 people died…and most of the south and its infrastructure destroyed. It at least gives one pause.

I think this is a question that should be examined by historians during this 150th year commemoration of the firing on Fort Sumter, and over the next 50 years as we approach the 200th anniversary. Not to say the war was just or unjust, or wrong or right, but to look at the stupidity of people causing the war in the first place. Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.