The Durant news. (Durant, Miss.) 1882-1985, 1943-08-12
Whot The Civil War Wosn't

CharIeS Wills thompson, contributing eOlUOT oI III
New York Sun, which appeared recently in the Summit
Sun, will be of interest to those readers interested in
southern history. Under the caption What The Civil
War Wasn't" Mr.. Thompson writes:
Recently l read an article by one of my favorite writ
ers in which he incidentally mentioned, as a fact undis-
puted by anybody, that the Civil War was a fight, on the
Norths part against the slavery system in the south. SO
it may well be that others, less known than that writer,
still hold that belief. 1t was not fought over. slavery
either by the North or the South. 1T would have been
fought if no slave had ever set foot on American soil.
The abolitionists were mostly confined to New Eng
land, a small minority much detested in the North, radi-
Gals and fanatics on all other subjects as well as slavery,
occupying the same position that the Communists do to-
day but not nearly so dangerous. The Republican party
was not an abolition party, and the aboitionists attacked
it with more venom than they poured on the Democrats,
for instance branding Lincoln as 1.-THE slave hound of IL
linois" because while in Congress he advocated arrest
ing fugitive slaves and returning them to their Southern
masters.
Before Lincoln was inaugurated the Republican
House passed a Constitutional amendment making slav-
cry perpetual. This was two months before the war. The
amendment provided that mo amendment shall be made
to the Constitution which will authorize or give Congress
the power to interfere within any State with the domes-
tic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to
labor or service by the laws of said State" No Demo-
cratic Congess had ever gone to any such length in pro-
tecting slavery as the Republicans then did.
It was drawn by that extreme Republican, Charles
Francis Adams of Massachusetts. 1t passed the Repub-
lican House by 1873 to 65 and then passed the Democratic
Senate. the majority of the Republican Senators voting
for it. 1t then went to the States for ratification. Two
ratified it, Ohio and Maryland, but before. any more
States could do so the Confederacy attacked Fort Sum-
Al ALL d UckdH.I idIHly II CUuIH d " Sutl "
protect slavey from a group of agitators who were de-
spised by both Northern parties, for all it had to do was
ment, originated by the Republicans and accepted by the
Democrats, when slavery would have been made eternal
and abolitionists forever powerless for harm.
The South had no illusions on that point then. An
army officer, William G. Oates of Alabama, urging on
Confederate Congressman the enlistment of Negro
troops accompanied by their emancipation, said that if
the army were told that it was fighting to preserve
slavery, the war would close in ten days; two-thirds OF
the men in the ranks never owned a slave, and they
would not offer their lives as a sacrifice for that consider
alton" There would be, he said, "a disarmament of the
armies; the soldiers could not be held together. The men
would lay down their arms and oo home"
This was in 1863, On January l, 1864, General Pat
rick r. Cleburne proposed a plan for Negro enlistment
with emancipation, which was approved by Generals
Polk, Lowrey, Govan and CRANBERRY. and later by Johns
ton and Hardee. President Davis thought it an "inexpedi-
ent' time, he said, and suppressed it but later in that
year he himself was pressing the idea on Congress. On
for general" emancipation. In that same month James
Murray Mason informed the British Government, by Da-
vis's order, that slavery would be abolished.
So much for the South. How about the North? my
paramount object Lincoln wrote Horace Greeley on
Aug. %, 1862, 'is to save the Union, and not either to
save or destroy slavery. II could save the Union by
freeing any slaves l would do it; if l could save it by
freeing all the slaves l would do it; and if l could save it
by freeing some and leaving others alone / would do it."
He tried the first of these ways in 1861-62, failed in it,
and in 1868 tried the third. His Emancipation Proclama-
ton is ignorantly talked of as if it freed all slaves, but
sides parts of two others. 1t was a war measure solely.
The Confederate use of slaves as man-power proved to be
a great military factor, and when ne seemed to have
lost the war he wrote, you must not expect me to give
up this Government without playing my last card"
That last card was the proclamation.
Except for the minority group of abolitionists, the
North. before the war was a unit on leaving slavery
alone. But many men in both the Democratic and Wing
parties were determined that slavery must remain in the
South and never be extended into the North. They re-
sisted all such attempts. When in 1854 the Kansas
Nebraska law authoized the extension of slavery to Nor
thern soil, these Democrats and Wings combined to pre-
vent it, calling themselves the Republican party; and the
first armed clash was the civil war in Kansas caused by
the attempt to establish slavery there under the Kansas
Nebraska law. In 1861 it merged in the greater war.
The political issue was not between shareholders and
abolitionists, but between slavery-extenders and slavery
restricters. But the war would have come if there had
been no such issue, and if slavery had never existed.
This government was formed as a loose confederation of
independent nations, from which each could withdraw at
will. Secession as an inherent right was the general UNI
derstanding, and at times leading New Englanders, New
Workers and South Carolinians urged that the time had
come for it in their States.
But as the nineteenth century advanced, the rapid
welding together of common interests brought into full
flower George Washington's rejected idea of a single
and unbreakable nation. Between 1920 and 1860 a nation
grew up where there had been none before. There was
soon an unbridgeable chasm between the national idea
and the sectional one. Sooner or later the original concep-