Understanding Secession and the start of the Civil War

I have been wondering about the causes of the U.S. Civil War as we enter the 150th anniversary of its start.

What did the power elite think about slavery? These were the male property owners -- essentially an aristocracy of plantation owners. The large majority of them had been raised by slaves, many had slave mistresses, and many had children by those mistresses who were also slaves. Slaves were very differential to them. Somehow I assume that the slaves in their employ were regarded as less than members of their nuclear families, but as closer than the local community. The station in life of such a man was graced by the respect not only of his wife, children, and slaves but also that of less affluent whites and the community of his aristocratic neighbors.

It is, I think, impossible to empathize with these people from our modern vantage. I think about Jane Austin characters, also of a petty aristocracy, whose station in life was based on the land that they owned, or that was owned by their immediate relatives. Reading Austin one can not but be struck how normal they found the institutions in which they lived, and how an Austin heroin and her family were so completely focused on making the right marriage which will bring happiness and maintain her station in life.

I used Google NGram Viewer to trace the frequency of the word "honor" over the last two centuries, showing that the term was used frequently in the run up to the Civil War, and has trailed off ever since.

The southern aristocracy were very concerned with honor. That is they were very concerned with retaining the good opinion of themselves and their peers by living up to a code of honor. That code could demand that the person fight a dual or attack a person of lesser status with cane or whip if the person perceived himself to be insulted. There was special sensitivity to perceived insults to ones wife or children. It would seem that an attack on the institution of slavery was seen also as a personal insult to one's honor, as it insulted the plantation community in which the person lived, as well as the plantation communities of his peers. It was not only a challenge to the economic basis of his income and wealth, but more fundamentally an insult to his relations with those around him and indeed to his ancestors who had similarly lived in slave holding society.

Think of how the more conservative members of our modern society are responding to the proposal to change the institution of marriage to allow same-sex marriage. That change seems to be received by many as an insult to their own commitment to the marriage vows in their heterosexual marriages.

The Constitution had not only recognized the institution of slavery in the states, but had required states to recognize the property rights of the owners of fugitive slaves and return them to those owners. Southerners felt that the northern states were at fault in not living up to that constitutional obligation. Perhaps more to the point was that the a violent response was defined by the honor code to what was perceived to be an insult, and the anti-slavery people were perceived as insulting slave holders and their communities very personally.

It has been estimated that 80 percent of southerners were pro-Union when Lincoln was elected. The popular support for secession increased after Lincoln called for troops in order to militarily take back federal property in the states that had seceded. Here I suppose our modern experience helps to understand southern attitudes. Think of the American response to Pearl Harbor or to 9/11. We are still warlike when we feel threatened by force.

I was wondering about Robert E Lee, who famously anguished over the choice between staying with the Union and joining the Confederacy. He saw, I suppose a duty to his state and his community in Virginia, but also to the Army in which he had served and to the Union to which he had pledged. In both cases, honor came into play. A soldier's honor is surely to follow his flag, to serve with his fellow soldiers, and to face enemy fire. Lee then would have been seeking to find a course between two competing codes of honor.

I suppose that it was easier for southerners to go to war in 1860, when they had no idea how terrible the war was to be. During the war, as defeat became more visibly possible and the cost of the war became more apparent, apparently some southerners began to rethink their commitment to the war.

Even if I can not empathize with the southern power elite as they took their states to war, perhaps I can form an intellectual understanding of why doing so seemed appropriate to them. Perhaps too, that exercise can help me to form a similar intellectual understanding of why Al Qaeda and other groups with which I can not empathize are committing us to the defense against terrorism/