The Irrelevance of Sumter & Slavery
I am struck by the amount of words written on subjects which are quite incidental to the war itself: the attack on Fort Sumter and the institution of slavery.
If the war was actually started by the firing on Sumter it follows that it was a conflict between two independent nations caused by one attacking the armed forces of the other. Such a war could be expected to conclude in a peace treaty. Was that what happened? No, because the war was fought by the U.S. government to suppress a rebellion. So was the firing on Sumter the key act of "rebellion"? Of course not. The key act of "rebellion", in the case of each state, was the passing of the act or ordinance of secession. The war happened because of these acts of secession and would have happened if Sumter had never been fired on. So Sumter really is an irrelevance.
And now for slavery. If the peculiar institution had been abolished throughout the United States long before 1861, and 11 states had seceded in that year, would the United States government have fought a war to drag them back into the Union? The answer has to be “yes”. Lincoln himself said often enough that he was fighting to preserve the Union rather than to free the slaves. It follows, therefore, that the issue dividing us on these boards is whether the departing states had the right to unilateral secession from the Union. That, and nothing else. Slavery is important only to the extent that it was, or was not, a motivating force behind secession. But the motives for secession and the right to secession, if such a right exists, are completely different things and should never be confused. Any yet they have been confused, constantly, for the last 140 years.
And one has to suspect that the confusion is quite deliberate. Dressing up a war against secession in the clothing of emancipation can hardly hurt the Union cause. And there has also been an awful lot of wilful self-deception. How many of the Federal soldiers who mutinied after the Emancipation Proclamation, or who mistreated the contrabands who came within their lines, sat around with brandy and cigars at G.A.R. meetings 30 years later, congratulating each other in maudlin style on their grand, humanitarian behaviour in freeing the slaves? How many of them probably even believed their own words?
