Lazy Afternoon

There are two great myths associated with the American Civil War. The first, believed and beloved by the northern states, is that Union fought the conflict to end slavery. The second, cherished in the revisionist halls of southern sympathy, is that the Confederacy was not fighting to maintain the institution of slavery at all, that the southern states were merely standing up for their rights. Both of these myths are supported by incidental facts, and in as much as they are true, they are true.

But they also are just myths.

The Union fought to preserve itself. More specifically the northern states waged a war designed to maintain the economic hegemony of a growing industrial power over the North American continent. That power was contingent on the continued flow of resources into northern factories. Keeping southern cotton fields and other southern resources within the political sphere of influence of northern factory owners was a key motivation for the north’s need to maintain the Union. The end of slavery was largely incidental. Although the power of the Abolitionist movement should not be underestimated, they did not provide the primary motivation for the War of Northern Aggression.

And however fortuitous the result of the war, the necessary and correct end of the brutal and barbarous institution of human slavery, in itself the invasion and occupation of the southern states was a crime against humanity. There was nothing so sacred in this union of states that demanded it be reunited at the cost of so much bloodshed. If the seven original states to secede had been allowed to do so peacefully the next four, including Virginia, probably would have remained in the union. Those states would have likely seen an end to slavery within 10 years. The seven remaining states, increasingly isolated by an international community opposed to slavery and wallowing in the shadow of the economic powerhouse of the United States, would have eventually asked for readmission into the union, and given up slavery to do so. The entire crisis would have been resolved within 20 years with hardly a single life lost, as opposed to the bloody civil war that saw 620,000 causalities. A post slavery south that had not been torn apart by war may have been less prone to racial violence and easier to coax out of segregation, a trade off that might have made the delay in emancipation worth the additional time.

But residents of the southern states should not delude themselves into believing that the Confederacy was some bold and noble example of resistance to tyranny, or that it was motivated more by the ideal of state’s rights than it was by the desire to maintain slavery. The history of the north/south conflict was bound up in the issue of slavery from the founding of the republic, and it was the direct threat that the increasing number free states would vote to end that institution that led to secession and war. Whatever other common cultural and economic interests bound the seceding southern states together in their Confederacy, it was this desire to maintain the right to own other human beings that primarily motivated their secession and maintained their union during the war that followed. And even that was hardly enough to keep the Confederacy together. It was a weak and pathetic union that met resistance from its own citizens in its attempt to wage a successful war. The sole virtue of the entire enterprise was the military genius of Robert E. Lee and the individual valor of many Confederate soldiers. The rest of it was barely maintainable and, as previously observed, would have fallen apart within 20 years.

So on the issue of celebrating these, either a bloody pointless war or a weak mismanaged nation, neither thing would seem worthy of the effort. Better to honor the four hundred years of Southern History, the founding of Jamestown, the House of Burgesses, the literature of Twain or Faulkner, the first flight, the civil rights movement, the launching of Apollo 11, and to recognize the wars (from the Revolution to the surrender at Appomattox), the crime of slavery, the indignity of segregation, the horrors of lynching, as tragedies that deserve to be remembered. But in a month dedicated to remembering the rich history of Virginia and the South, this thing called the Confederacy, this short four year nation, an abject failure by every definition, is only worthy of so much time. In a month celebrating Southern History the whole of the Confederacy is due, at most, a lazy afternoon.