10.8 — Slavery Abolished, and the American Civil War

The Confederate Vice-President, Alexander Stephens, gave a speech in Savannah in March 1861, three weeks before the war began, explaining what the new state was for.

He said the old constitution had rested on the assumption that slavery was wrong and would pass away. Our new government, he said, is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.

He called it the cornerstone.

This is quoted at length because the question of what the American Civil War was about has been contested for 160 years, and the people who started it answered it themselves, in public, before the fighting.

The abolition movement

Chapter 8.6 covered the trade. This is the movement that ended the institution.

British abolition came in two steps. The trade in 1807. Slavery in the British colonies in 1833, effective 1834, with a transitional "apprenticeship" that ended in 1838.

How the campaign worked, because it is the template for modern political campaigning.

Mass petitions. The 1833 petition campaign gathered signatures numbering in the hundreds of thousands, at a time when the electorate was a fraction of that.

Consumer boycott. The refusal to buy slave-grown sugar, promoted with pamphlets and with sugar bowls labelled as from free labour.

A visual emblem. The Wedgwood medallion showing a kneeling enslaved man with the caption "Am I not a man and a brother?" — mass-produced in ceramic and worn as jewellery. It is the first mass-produced campaign badge.

Testimony from the enslaved. Olaudah Equiano's autobiography went through many editions and he toured to promote it. Mary Prince's narrative in 1831 was the first published account by a black woman in Britain.

And parliamentary work by Wilberforce, Clarkson and others over decades.

And resistance by the enslaved was decisive, as Chapter 8.6 argued. The Baptist War in Jamaica in 1831–32, a large rising suppressed with several hundred killed in the fighting and hundreds more executed afterwards, produced a public reaction in Britain and abolition followed within two years.

The compensation. £20 million to the owners, around 40 percent of the annual budget, paid by a loan finally cleared in 2015 (Chapter 8.6). The enslaved received nothing.

And the pattern spread. France abolished in its colonies in 1848 after the Second Republic. Most Latin American republics abolished during or after independence (Chapter 10.6). Brazil in 1888. Russia emancipated its serfs in 1861 — a related institution, covering around 23 million people, and one whose emancipation left them burdened with redemption payments for the land.

Why the United States could not compromise

The American case was different because slavery was not in distant colonies. It was in half the country and it was growing.

Cotton is the reason. Whitney's gin in 1793 made short-staple cotton — which grows across the whole American South — economically viable by mechanising the removal of seeds. Cotton production rose from a few thousand bales a year to millions. The enslaved population grew from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 4 million in 1860.

And the value. By 1860 the enslaved population was, as property, worth more than all American railroads, factories and banks combined. This was not a dying institution; it was the single largest category of wealth in the country, and it was becoming more valuable, not less.

The political mechanism that produced the crisis was the balance of the Senate. Every new state admitted shifted the balance between free and slave states, which is why the entire political history from 1820 to 1860 is a series of increasingly desperate compromises over territory: the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850 with its Fugitive Slave Act requiring northern citizens to assist in recapturing escapees, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 which produced a small civil war in Kansas, and the Dred Scott decision of 1857, in which the Supreme Court held that a black person could not be a citizen and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories.

Dred Scott is the decision that made compromise impossible, because it removed the political solution: if Congress could not restrict slavery anywhere, then the free states' only options were acceptance or confrontation.

Lincoln was elected in November 1860 on a platform of preventing the expansion of slavery into the territories — not of abolishing it where it existed. He was not on the ballot in most southern states. South Carolina seceded in December, followed by six more before his inauguration.

And the secession documents say why. Mississippi's declaration begins by stating that its position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world. South Carolina's cites northern states' failure to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Four of the states issued formal declarations of causes and all four are explicit.

The war

Four years, 1861 to 1865.

The North's advantages were overwhelming on paper: roughly four times the free population, most of the industry, most of the railway mileage, and the navy.

The South's strategy was not to conquer but to survive — to make the war costly enough that the North would let it go, and to obtain European recognition on the strength of cotton.

Recognition never came, and Britain's abolitionist public opinion is a substantial part of why. Lancashire cotton workers, thrown out of work by the Union blockade, held meetings supporting the Union anyway — a fact Lincoln acknowledged in a letter to the workers of Manchester.

Militarily it was the first industrial war and it prefigures Chapter 11.3. Rifled muskets with far greater range and accuracy than smoothbores, against tactics still based on massed frontal assault. Railways moving armies. The telegraph coordinating them. Ironclad warships. Trench systems around Petersburg that look like 1916.

And the casualties. Estimates run from around 620,000 to 750,000 dead, in a population of 31 million — more American deaths than in every other American war combined. Roughly two-thirds died of disease.

The Emancipation Proclamation, effective 1 January 1863, declared enslaved people in the rebelling states free.

It should be read precisely. It did not free anyone in the loyal border states, and it applied to territory the Union did not control. Its immediate legal effect was small. Its actual effects were large: it made the war explicitly about slavery, which killed any remaining prospect of European recognition; it authorised the recruitment of black soldiers, and around 180,000 served in the Union army; and it meant that every advance of Union forces freed people permanently.

Slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.

Reconstruction, and its destruction

This is the part that determined the next century and it is the part most often skipped.

What was achieved between 1865 and 1877.

Three constitutional amendments. The Thirteenth abolished slavery. The Fourteenth established birthright citizenship, equal protection of the laws and due process — and it is the most litigated provision in American law. The Fifteenth prohibited denial of the vote on grounds of race.

And black political participation was substantial. Around 2,000 African Americans held public office during Reconstruction, including sixteen members of Congress and two senators. Black voter registration in some states exceeded 90 percent. Public school systems were established across the South, for the first time, for both races.

The Freedmen's Bureau provided food, legal assistance, and education.

And then it was destroyed.

Violence. The Ku Klux Klan and similar organisations conducted a campaign of murder and intimidation against black voters, officeholders and their white allies. The Colfax massacre in Louisiana in 1873 killed scores of black men after they surrendered.

Political withdrawal. The Compromise of 1877 resolved a disputed presidential election by withdrawing federal troops from the South. Northern political will had already faded.

And then the legal system was rebuilt to restore the substance of what had been abolished.

Voting was suppressed by literacy tests administered arbitrarily, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses exempting anyone whose grandfather had voted — which exempted whites and nobody else. Black voter registration in Louisiana fell from around 130,000 in 1896 to about 1,300 by 1904.

Segregation was legalised. Plessy v Ferguson in 1896 upheld "separate but equal" facilities, and the equal half was never enforced.

Sharecropping replaced slavery economically — a system in which a family farmed land for a share of the crop, bought supplies on credit at inflated prices from the landowner, and ended each year in debt, which was legally enforceable. Debt peonage was widespread and was prosecuted federally as late as the 1940s.

Convict leasing allowed states to lease prisoners to private employers, and vagrancy laws written to catch anyone without a labour contract fed the system. Death rates in some convict labour camps exceeded those under slavery, because a leased convict, unlike an enslaved person, was not a capital asset the employer owned.

And lynching. Documented lynchings in the United States between 1877 and 1950 number in the thousands, overwhelmingly of black victims, frequently public, frequently unpunished. Ida B. Wells's investigative journalism from the 1890s documented that the common justification — the protection of white women — was false in the great majority of cases she examined, and she was driven out of Memphis for publishing it.

The system was not fully dismantled until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a century after emancipation, and it required a mass movement using precisely the methods of Chapter 6.21.

Where this shows up in your life

The Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause is the model for equality provisions in constitutions worldwide, including India's Articles 14 and 15.

And the general finding is one this volume states repeatedly. Abolishing a legal status does not abolish the social and economic structure built on it. The formal end of slavery in 1865 was followed by a century of arrangements that reproduced much of its substance by other means, and the gap between formal equality and actual equality had to be closed by a second political struggle.

Chapter 6.28 makes the same observation about untouchability in India, which was abolished by the Constitution in 1950 and which persists in employment, marriage, housing and violence statistics seventy-five years later. Ambedkar's warning — that political equality alongside social inequality is a contradiction that must be resolved — is the same argument (Chapter 6.24).

What the next page covers

Between 1945 and 1975, the European empires that had governed most of the world ceased to exist. Chapter 10.9 covers decolonization — why it happened when it did, why some transfers were peaceful and others were savage wars, what was actually handed over and what was withheld, how the borders drawn by colonial administrators became permanent, and the honest assessment of what independence delivered and what it did not.