Was the Civil War About Slavery?

• Report rights infringement
• published: 10 Aug 2015
• views: 1844210

What caused the Civil War? Did the North care about abolishing slavery? Did the South secede because of slavery? Or was it about something else entirely...perhaps states' rights? Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point, settles the debate. Donate today to PragerU! http://l.prageru.com/2ylo1Yt Joining PragerU is free! Sign up now to get all our videos as soon as they're released. http://prageru.com/signup Download Pragerpedia on your iPhone or Android! Thousands of sources and facts at your fingertips. iPhone: http://l.prageru.com/2dlsnbG Android: http://l.prageru.com/2dlsS5e Join Prager United to get new swag every quarter, exclusive early access to our videos, and an annual TownHall phone call with Dennis Prager! http://l.prageru.com/2c9n6ys Join PragerU's text list to have these videos, free merchandise giveaways and breaking announcements sent directly to your phone! https://optin.mobiniti.com/prageru Do you shop on Amazon? Click https://smile.amazon.com and a percentage of every Amazon purchase will be donated to PragerU. Same great products. Same low price. Shopping made meaningful. VISIT PragerU! https://www.prageru.com FOLLOW us! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/prageru Twitter: https://twitter.com/prageru Instagram: https://instagram.com/prageru/ PragerU is on Snapchat! JOIN PragerFORCE! For Students: http://l.prageru.com/29SgPaX JOIN our Educators Network! http://l.prageru.com/2c8vsff Script: Was the American Civil War fought because of slavery? More than 150 years later this remains a controversial question. Why? Because many people don't want to believe that the citizens of the southern states were willing to fight and die to preserve a morally repugnant institution. There has to be another reason, we are told. Well, there isn't. The evidence is clear and overwhelming. Slavery was, by a wide margin, the single most important cause of the Civil War -- for both sides. Before the presidential election of 1860, a South Carolina newspaper warned that the issue before the country was, "the extinction of slavery," and called on all who were not prepared to, "surrender the institution," to act. Shortly after Abraham Lincoln's victory, they did. The secession documents of every Southern state made clear, crystal clear, that they were leaving the Union in order to protect their "peculiar institution" of slavery -- a phrase that at the time meant "the thing special to them." The vote to secede was 169 to 0 in South Carolina, 166 to 7 in Texas, 84 to 15 in Mississippi. In no Southern state was the vote close. Alexander Stephens of Georgia, the Confederacy's Vice President clearly articulated the views of the South in March 1861. "Our new government," he said, was founded on slavery. "Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, submission to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition." Yet, despite the evidence, many continue to argue that other factors superseded slavery as the cause of the Civil War. Some argue that the South only wanted to protect states' rights. But this raises an obvious question: the states' rights to what? Wasn't it to maintain and spread slavery? Moreover, states' rights was not an exclusive Southern issue. All the states -- North and South -- sought to protect their rights -- sometimes they petitioned the federal government, sometimes they quarreled with each other. In fact, Mississippians complained that New York had too strong a concept of states' rights because it would not allow Delta planters to bring their slaves to Manhattan. The South was preoccupied with states' rights because it was preoccupied first and foremost with retaining slavery. Some argue that the cause of the war was economic. The North was industrial and the South agrarian, and so, the two lived in such economically different societies that they could no longer stay together. Not true. In the middle of the 19th century, both North and South were agrarian societies. In fact, the North produced far more food crops than did the South. But Northern farmers had to pay their farmhands who were free to come and go as they pleased, while Southern plantation owners exploited slaves over whom they had total control. And it wasn't just plantation owners who supported slavery. The slave society was embraced by all classes in the South. The rich had multiple motivations for wanting to maintain slavery, but so did the poor, non-slave holding whites. The "peculiar institution" ensured that they did not fall to the bottom rung of the social ladder. That's why another argument -- that the Civil War couldn't have been about slavery because so few people owned slaves -- has little merit. For the complete script, visit https://www.prageru.com/videos/was-civil-war-about-slavery