I thought this was an interesting take, and I agree mostly but not completely. If I think back to my high school American History class, where I got my first quasi-adult version of Civil War history, the most persuasive argument I can remember described economic interests and states’ rights as factors that led to war. For the confederacy, preserving slavery may have been the stated motive, but there were underlying economic interests at play (more on that below). For the Union, it was about preserving the power of the federal government and the economic advantages of the industrializing northern states — not freeing the slaves. That is, the Civil War was not a battle strictly over the morality or racial justice of slavery, but over competing economic interests.
Even if slavery was the main issue for the South, it’s not clear that it was about preserving white supremacy as much as the favorable economics of free labor. In 1860, the two most valuable assets were land and slaves — and for the south these were inextricably linked in an agrarian economy that produced crops and sold them to the north. Southern whites were enjoying a first-world standard of living in an essentially third-world economy, because they had free labor. Meanwhile, the industrializing Union states were benefitting both from high import taxes on foreign manufactured goods and access to a free raw materials market in the southern states, where sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo and rice were being produced by slaves. That meant the north could buy raw materials on the cheap and sell goods in a protected market; a win-win for the north and a mixed bag for the south.
For the south, the prospect of falling further and further behind the north because of trade policies that were being negotiated in Washington was unacceptable. For the north, the secession of the southern states was unacceptable because it meant the north would have to strike a new trade deal with a foreign nation (the confederacy) to continue procuring raw materials, likely at much higher rates. Far from being a clash between good and evil, or even between opposite ideologies, the Civil War was the divorce of two economic systems that had become deeply and problematically dependent on each other.
It was also a major example of the Republican Party acting to quell insurrection in order to preserve law and order. If the fugitive slave laws weren’t bad enough, the secession of several states signaled a clear and present danger to the economic and political stability of the north. Deterring insurgencies to preserve the union has been a cornerstone of Republican orthodoxy pretty much ever since. We see that at home, with Republican administrations taking a hard line against civil disobedience, and abroad, with wars waged in the name of rooting out “insurgents”.
This is why it’s strange to hear Trump and other contemporary Republicans talk about Abraham Lincoln as the president who committed the Republican party to individual liberties. It would be more accurate to paint Lincoln, in his efforts to put down a revolt, as the first law-and-order Republican.
Mack Lannahan 