What Caused the Civil War, Who Won It and Why, Answered From the Record

Ask ten Americans what caused the Civil War and you will get eleven answers, one of them from a person who confidently states that it was about tariffs, and another who says it was about nothing at all. The war cost more American lives than any other conflict in our history, and we have managed to make its causes sound like a matter of taste. It is not. The men who started it wrote down their reasons, in public, in formal documents, and the documents survive.

So let us do what an honest citizen should do and go to the record. This is a question-and-answer post. I have picked the twelve questions that come up most often, and for each one I give the direct answer first, then the evidence. Where the record is uncertain, I say so. Where it is not, I do not pretend it is. The Civil War is the central event of American history, and plain answers to the basic questions are the best defense against myths about it.

The causes

What caused the Civil War?

Slavery, and the fight over whether it would expand. That is the answer, and the strongest proof is that the states that left the Union said so themselves.

The long road to 1861 is a series of fights about slavery in the territories. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 drew a line across the Louisiana Purchase. The Compromise of 1850 patched a quarrel over lands won from Mexico and produced a stricter fugitive slave law. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the Missouri line and set off bloodshed in Kansas. In 1857 the Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford held that Black Americans could not be citizens and that Congress could not bar slavery from the territories. In 1859 John Brown raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. And in November 1860 Abraham Lincoln, whose party opposed the expansion of slavery, was elected President without carrying a single Southern state.

Every one of those events is about slavery. Strip slavery out of the story and none of them happens.

What did the states that seceded say about why?

They said it was slavery. Take the two documents that matter most.

South Carolina was first. Its convention voted to secede on December 20, 1860, and four days later it issued a "Declaration of the Immediate Causes" of the decision. It complains of "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery," and it complains that the Northern states had refused to honor the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution's Article IV. It objects to the election of a President "whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery." Those are its words. There is no paragraph about tariffs in the document's list of causes.

Mississippi followed, voting to secede on January 9, 1861. Its declaration opens with the sentence: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world." It goes on to say that a blow at slavery was a blow at commerce and civilization.

Other states said the same in their own ways. Georgia, Texas and others issued their own explanations, and slavery runs through all of them. A few weeks after the Confederacy was formed, its Vice President, Alexander Stephens, gave a speech in Savannah on March 21, 1861, which survives in a newspaper report, in which he said the new government's cornerstone rested on the proposition that Black people were not equal to white people and that slavery was their natural condition. That is a direct denial of the Declaration of Independence, and he said it was meant to be.

For readers who say these are only the opinions of a few politicians: they were the formal statements of the conventions that took the states out of the Union. If you want to know why a state left, you read its declaration. They are short, and they are available. Read them.

But wasn't it about states' rights?

It was about one particular right: the right to hold human beings as property and to carry them into new territory. That is the answer to the states' rights claim.

The objection deserves to be taken seriously, because the Constitution does reserve powers to the states, and conservatives care about that principle deeply. I do. But a principle is tested by its consistency. Look at what the seceding states demanded in the 1850s. They demanded a stronger federal fugitive slave law, one that forced Northern states and Northern citizens to assist in returning escaped slaves, over the objections of Northern legislatures. They demanded that the federal government protect slavery in the territories. Those are demands for federal power in the service of slavery, and they are the opposite of states' rights. The South did not defend states' rights as a general idea. It defended them when they served slavery and dropped them when they did not.

The declarations say as much. South Carolina's complaint is partly that Northern states used their powers to resist the federal fugitive slave law. In other words, the complaint was that states had too much freedom to act against slavery.

Wasn't it really about tariffs?

No. The tariff theory is one of the most persistent myths in American history, and the record does not support it. The seceding states' own declarations, as we just saw, do not rest on the tariff. The tariff had been a bitter issue in the 1830s, during the nullification crisis, and a compromise tariff had settled it. In 1857 Congress lowered the tariff. The Morrill Tariff, which raised duties, was passed in early 1861, after seven Southern states had already left and their members were no longer in Congress to vote against it. A bill that passed because the South had gone cannot be the reason the South went.

Did Lincoln go to war to end slavery?

Not at the start, and he said so. In his First Inaugural Address on March 4, 1861, he said he had "no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists." His stated aim was to preserve the Union. In August 1862, in a public letter to Horace Greeley, he wrote: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."

That is the whole argument for why the war began as a war for the Union. It is also true that Lincoln had long thought slavery a moral wrong and that the Republican Party stood against its expansion. The secession states understood the stakes better than the North did. By late 1862 Lincoln had decided that freeing the slaves in rebel territory was a military and moral necessity. The war that began over whether the Union could be broken became, within two years, a war that ended slavery. See Was America Founded in 1619 or 1776 and What the Historical Record Shows for how the founding principle made that turn possible.

Secession and Sumter

Why did the war start at Fort Sumter?

Because a federal fort sat in the harbor of a state that had declared itself outside the Union, and neither side would give way.

After South Carolina seceded, the garrison of Charleston Harbor, under Major Robert Anderson, moved into Fort Sumter, on an island in the harbor. In the months that followed, six more states left, and the Confederacy was organized at Montgomery, Alabama in February 1861. When Lincoln took office on March 4, Sumter was running short of supplies. He notified South Carolina's governor that an unarmed supply expedition was on its way. The Confederate government decided to take the fort first. At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate batteries opened fire. Anderson surrendered on April 13 after some thirty-four hours of bombardment, with no one killed in the bombardment itself.

Lincoln's inaugural address had said, in a passage that has been read ever since as the most moving appeal in American politics: "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors." The Confederates fired first. Lincoln responded days later by calling for 75,000 militia, and four more states, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina, then left the Union, bringing the Confederacy to eleven.

Was secession legal?

The Constitution does not mention it, and after the war the Supreme Court said no. In Texas v. White (1869), Chief Justice Salmon Chase wrote that "The Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible States." The Court held that a state could not leave the Union on its own, so the acts of secession were void. The argument that the Founders meant to allow exit rests mainly on the idea that a compact among states can be dissolved. The argument against it rests on the Preamble's "more perfect Union," on the Constitution's supremacy clause, and on the fact that the Articles of Confederation had already declared the union "perpetual" before the Constitution was written to make it stronger. I think the case against unilateral secession is the stronger one, and a document that provides for its own amendment in Article V is not one that lets any member walk out because it lost an election.

The cost

How many people died?

For more than a century the standard figure was about 620,000, a number compiled around 1900 from military records. It is still the figure you will find in many textbooks, and it counts both sides, though the Confederate part of it rests on incomplete records and a rough estimate of deaths from disease. In 2011, the demographer J. David Hacker published a study using census data that argued the toll was higher, around 750,000, with a plausible range from about 650,000 to 850,000. The difference comes from his census-based method, which does not rely on the incomplete military records. The most honest summary is that at least 620,000 Americans died, that a higher number is probably closer, and that disease killed about twice as many soldiers as combat did.

Put it in perspective with the country's size. In 1860 the nation had about 31 million people. The dead were a much larger share of the population than the dead of any later American war. For one day of it, see Antietam Was the Bloodiest Day in American History and It Changed the War, and for the turning point in the East, see Gettysburg in Three Days and the Charge That Failed on July 3, 1863.

Why the North won

Why did the North win?

Several things, and none of them was inevitable. People sometimes say the North was bound to win on numbers alone. That overlooks how many wars are lost by the bigger side.

1. Population and industry. The Union, counting the border states, had about 22 million people. The Confederacy had about 9 million, of whom about 3.5 million were enslaved. The North had the great majority of the factories and of the railroad mileage.
2. The blockade and the river war. The Navy cut the Confederacy off from much of its trade, and Union forces took control of the Mississippi River after the fall of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863.
3. Command and persistence. Ulysses S. Grant understood that the way to win was to keep pressure on the Confederate armies everywhere at once. William Tecumseh Sherman's capture of Atlanta on September 2, 1864 helped secure Lincoln's reelection in November, which was the point at which the Confederacy lost its last political hope.
4. Emancipation and Black soldiers. About 180,000 Black men served in the Union Army, and many thousands more in the Navy. Their service helped the North win and changed the argument about who could be a citizen. See The 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner and the Soldiers Who Proved Doubters Wrong, Harriet Tubman Led Rescues, Spied for the Union and Raided the Combahee River and Robert Smalls Took a Confederate Ship and Sailed His Family to Freedom.
5. The Confederacy's own contradictions. It was a government founded on states' sovereignty that had to fight a war requiring central control, and it never won the foreign recognition it hoped for.

Emancipation and the end

What did the Emancipation Proclamation do, and what did it not do?

It was a war measure, issued under the President's power as commander in chief, and it did a great deal, but not everything.

Lincoln issued the preliminary proclamation on September 22, 1862, five days after the Battle of Antietam, and the final one on January 1, 1863. It declared that enslaved people in the states and parts of states still in rebellion on that date "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." It also stated that freed people of suitable condition would be received into the armed service of the United States.

What it did not do: it did not free people in the loyal border states, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri. It also excepted named Union-held parts of Louisiana and Virginia. And as a war measure, it did not by itself abolish slavery as an institution. In practice, it turned every Union advance into a march of liberation, and it made the war's purpose plain. The institution itself was ended by the Thirteenth Amendment, which Congress passed in January 1865 and the states ratified in December of that year. Its first section says: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Lincoln's own account of the Gettysburg dedication a few months after the proclamation set the war's purpose out in three sentences. It is worth reading again: The Gettysburg Address Read Closely Sentence by Sentence.

How did the war end?

In a series of surrenders, and the first and most famous came at a courthouse in Virginia. General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, on generous terms: the men were paroled and allowed to go home. That story is told in Appomattox and the Generous Surrender Terms That Began to Heal a Nation. Lincoln was shot on April 14 and died the next morning. General Joseph Johnston surrendered to Sherman in North Carolina on April 26, and the last major Confederate forces west of the Mississippi surrendered in late May and June. On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger announced in Galveston, Texas that all enslaved people were free, the event commemorated as Juneteenth.

Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865, had set the tone for what he hoped would follow: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds."

What it changed

What did it change in the Constitution?

Almost everything. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery. The Fourteenth (1868) defined citizenship for everyone born or naturalized in the United States, and forbade any state to deny to any person "the equal protection of the laws." The Fifteenth (1870) barred denial of the vote on account of race. They were adopted by the process Article V provides, and they changed the relationship between the states and the federal government more than any other amendments in our history. The rebuilding that followed, and what the freedmen did with it, is in Reconstruction's Promise and the Freedmen Who Built Schools, Churches and Towns.

Why does the answer matter today?

Because a nation that will not say what its worst war was about cannot learn from it. The record shows that the generation of 1861 went to war over slavery, and that the Union fought to save the principle of the Declaration against those who said it was a lie. A people who forget that will be told other stories, and some of them will be flattering and false.

Two cautions follow. The first is for those who want to rehabilitate the Confederate cause: the record is against you, and your own ancestors' words prove it. The second is for those who say the Civil War proves that the American founding was rotten: the war was fought, and won, on the strength of the founding's own principles, and the Union's soldiers died for a country whose best ideas condemned the thing they were fighting.

The case in brief

1. Slavery, and the fight over its expansion, caused the Civil War, and the secession declarations of South Carolina and Mississippi say so in plain words.
2. The war began at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, when Confederate batteries fired on a federal fort, and Lincoln's aim was first to save the Union and then to end the slavery that had broken it.
3. At least 620,000 Americans died, and recent demographic work suggests the figure may be near 750,000.
4. The North won through population and industry, naval power, persistent generalship, Emancipation and Black soldiers, and it ended the war at Appomattox on generous terms.
5. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments wrote the war's result into the Constitution.

What you can do: read the South Carolina and Mississippi declarations of secession and Lincoln's two inaugural addresses, and then ask your child's teacher which primary documents the class reads on the war.