What dire offence from am’rous causes springs,
What mighty contests rise from trivial things.
–Alexander Pope
A few years ago, I was waiting to go into the prison with a group of other volunteers, and overheard some men from a local Bible study group discussing the idea of reparations for slavery. They seemed to think the whole thing was silly, and one of them said, “We had a war for that.”
I was a bit shocked at how flippant the remark was—especially coming from someone studying the Bible. Clearly, that “that” was meant to refer to the end of slavery, which was certainly a result of the war, at last nominally. But is that what it was “for”? That (seemingly) trivial word brings up an entirely different set of questions than asking what it was “about,” which I looked into in the first part of this post.
First of all, asking what the War, as a whole, was “for” is a teleological question, not a historical one, presupposing that it was purposed by a higher power instead of being the result of specific political and cultural factors. And it did take on that character for people at the time, who often wrote about it as a form of divine scourge or transcendent justice. A good example is the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Another is Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural:
The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
William Tecumseh Sherman is another interesting example. As he wrote to John Bell Hood, after the fall of Atlanta,
You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.
Even though Sherman’s relationship with religion—especially Catholicism—was strained, and even though his writings do not show the same level of divine madness as, e.g. John Brown, they do reveal a somewhat theological viewpoint. As I wrote in my article, “‘On, On, I Must Go’: An English Professor Reads Sherman’s Memoirs,” in historian Derek Maxfield‘s book, Man of Fire: William Tecumseh Sherman in the Civil War,
There is a certain dissociative quality to some of his language, a feeling that he considered himself merely a pawn in the hands of an external power, or the victim of other people’s actions, and not at all responsible for the actions—occasionally savage by our standards—that marked his time in the army, both during and after the War.
“War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it,” he wrote to John Bell Hood, after the fall of Atlanta. “You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm as against these terrible hardships of war.”
For the South—which had also claimed divine legitimacy—the loss of the War transformed into the idea of “The Lost Cause,” and its war heroes became positively venerated. According to an article at The American Battlefield Trust [emphasis added],
Robert E. Lee emerged as the most sanctified figure in Lost Cause lore, especially after his death in 1870. Lee himself became a symbol for the Lost Cause, and a “Cult of Lee” revered the Virginian as the ultimate Christian soldier who took up arms for his state. He was even called the second Washington. Lee was the most successful of all Confederate Army commanders, and after the war, Jubal Early and many former Southern officers placed Lee upon a pedestal. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson became a martyr, wounded by his men while defending the Lost Cause. Even the office building where Jackson died bore the name “The Stonewall Jackson Shrine” for decades.
From a practical viewpoint, the Army of Virginia was simply ground down by the overwhelming material and manpower superiority of the North, not to mention the bulldog tenacity of Grant. Southern General George Pickett, who had the most famous charge of the Civil War named after him, was asked by a reporter years later how he accounted for the loss at Gettysburg, and he answered, “I always thought the Yankees had something to do with it.” But his was an unusually clear-headed voice in a time when the loss of the War was being described in religious terms. If God really had been on the side of the Confederacy, their loss had to have a Christian explanation; If you can’t be triumphant, at least you can be a martyr.
But let’s reframe the question. What were the soldiers, themselves, fighting for? Well, it depends on who you ask. Southerners claimed they were fighting to protect their homes from Northern invaders and, more abstractly, for their rights—or, as one story goes, their “rats.” One of those “rights” was the institution of slavery. (There is a popular argument among Lost Causers that the War could not have been about slavery because most of the Confederate soldiers did not own slaves. I find that argument to be unconvincing. Soldiers rarely fight for their own personal interests, but for various abstract principles that they want to protect. For poor Confederate soldiers, slavery offered what economists call “positive externalities”—in this case, racial and societal privileges that were too valuable to lose.
Northerners, in general, claimed to be fighting “for” the Union, although, as mentioned in my earlier post, there was also a feeling that the South needed to be punished for certain impertinences. Lincoln, for example, in an 1861 proclamation calling for extra militia, wrote,
I appeal to all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate, and aid this And ineffor to maintain the honor, theh integrity, and the existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government; and to redress wrongs already long enough endured.
Sherman’s “March to the Sea” was as much punitive as it was strategic. And, in the words of Wisconsin’s Robert K. Beecham, “Sumter had been fired upon, and the old flag that waved above the fort riddled and torn…I had started out to lend a hand in righting that wrong and in avenging the insult to our national honor…” And let’s not forget that many soldiers fought under compulsion, as they were drafted and couldn’t buy their way out.
Aside from the approximately 200,000 Black men who fought for the Union, as well as certain exceptions like Robert Gould Shaw, abolition was not a motive. In fact, soldiers explicitly stated they were not fighting to free slaves, and many Northerners were outraged by the Emancipation Proclamation. In a letter written to a rally in Springfield, IL, in 1863, Lincoln wrote,
You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter. Fight you, then exclusively to save the Union. I issued the proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union. Whenever you shall have conquered all resistence to the Union, if I shall urge you to continue fighting, it will be an apt time, then, for you to declare you will not fight to free negroes.
And, far from going to war to free the slaves, many Northerners actually blamed them for being its cause, leading to mass murder in the New York City Draft Riots.
The North didn’t go to war to end slavery; the South went to war to protect and extend it. The Bible study guy’s claim is a national myth. And the way it so easily rolled off his tongue reveals that it is (still) being wielded to both “wash one’s hands” and to forestall any discussions about issues like Reconstruction and reparations.
In short, the Civil War was not “for” what it was “about.” Prepositions matter, and the seemingly most trivial parts of rhetoric can have the biggest impact.
the wrong font 
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