The Civil War Was Not Fought For Anyone’s Freedom

The American Notion of Slavery

As I was growing up there was something of a divide in the historical interpretation of the American civil war.  Some argued the war was not fought to end slavery but over differing economic systems.  Others said no, it was fought to rid slavery because slavery (the owning of human beings) had become socially unacceptable. 

I would like to take issue with both perspectives.  First of all, I question that there were differing economic systems.  Other than the southern plantations being essentially agricultural and the monied class in the north being essentially industrial.  I did not write that the monied class in the south were essentially agricultural,because the non-monied class in the south was also primarily agricultural.  But the economic system was exactly the same in the sense that the monied class in both lived off controlling the prime resources and exploiting labor to live economically superior lives and also exploiting others to serve their every whim–clean their houses, wash their clothes, prepare and serve their food, shine their shoes, and so forth. Frankly, the economic elites considered themselves entitled to the rest of society’s labor to support their own lavish lifestyle and their own insinuations that they were superior because of that, to the rest of humanity.  Humanity as a whole were vulgar (common) and they were rarus (uncommon) or personas superior that their proprietatis possessorem (possessing the “property”), i.e., resources that both the liberum hominem (free persons) and servus (slaves) depended upon for survival.  Servus can be translated as servant or slave, they mean exactly the same.  But inscribitur (entitled persons) alone had rights to   proprietatis possessorem  and were therefore  liberum hominem while rusticus (peasant) were rustic (rural, uncouth, uncultured) and their possessions were not   proprietatis possessorem  nor did it grant them the status of being liberum hominem so they were called liber homo.  Liber can be translated as a record or a deed and in English law refers to one who holds land and therefore has freedom of mind but stands indifferent, inclining neither to one nor the other.  But in Latin the liber homo is translated equally as free or unfree man. In other words a man who has only a small property is actually neither free nor unfree.  He is free in that he is not a servant or a slave but not free because he is rustic and vulgar and therefore unentitled.

So if those who own land but are indifferent and unentitled and those who serve are slaves there was essentially no difference in the economic system of either the north or the south’s economic exploitative system.  The debate between the north or south was not about paid or unpaid work either.  If you  get a clothing allowance from work, a subsidized apartment paid for by your work; or, in the case of recent vintage, Allen Weisselberg’s college tuition for his grandchildren or automobile put him in jail for undeclared taxable income.  And it is also untrue that no slave ever received any type of cash payment, nor that all “free” laborers never had so many deductions they received a negative “pay” balance, which often happened in “mill towns” where all of the goods and all of the shelters were owned by the same person who owned the business, as well as, in some instances, all of the land in the town.

The debate then was not about the economic system—ever.  It was about who was entitled to more.  Were the  northern entitled entitled to protecting their goods and forcing the southern entitled to pay more for supplies and reduce the southern entitled’ ability to sell for more.  This was the cause of the war.  Not was the issue of slavery as a good or bad thing the reason the entitled pursued the war; it was fought about which of the entitled could be entitled to the most.  

The southerners did, in fact, use the argument that their slaves earned more and survived better than northern laborers—that is not a new discussion being entered into just recently, but an old antebellum argument that slaves benefited from slavery. DeSantis and his ilk simply don’t have the intellectual capacity to devise a new theory.

Why American Slavery Was Different.

I find no need at present to define the entire history of slavery.  It can be summed up pretty easily though in a single line: slavery was part of the spoils of conquest.

Africa had slaves, the Middle East had slaves, Native-Americans had slaves, China had slaves, India had slaves, southeast Asia had slaves, some Polynesians (especially in the Hawaiian archipelago) had slaves. I don’t want to get into the debate over Africa’s participation in the slave trade, which is irrelevant because slaves did exist in Africa as elsewhere.  The Dahomians were conquerors and did capture slaves as spoils and I think it’s totally moot to debate whether the slave trade encouraged them to conquer more territories or not, the history of Dahomian kings actually appears to have arisen to defend themselves from encroachment and becoming enslaved and losing their own culture.  Slaves are spoils that conquest of other territories brings. Period.

Nor were the Africans brought to America the first slaves to ever be transported long distances.  Traders in slaves had developed caravan routes from north Africa to China (as well as goods) at least twenty centuries prior to the Portuguese slave trade that began to bring the slaves to America.

The difference was not that the conquerors were superior (by virtue of conquering) but that the ethnicity (skin color) was superior that evolved from the early European enlightenment ideas, still rooted in the superiority of their religion (itself not unique) that somehow these thinkers evolving from their medievalism that had stifled culture and had, in truth, left them as the most uncivilized culture precisely because of  their dominant religious perspective had suppressed culture to enhance their dominance over an entire continent. (This would later also occur in Muslim religiously dominated states when religious dominance overpowered cultural enflourishment.)    As that dominance began to shatter, an “enlightened development brought a forth a group of thinkers, still somewhat under the dominance of the religious proclamation of its own superiority, somehow set upon a theory that they were superior by their ability to break free from that cultural development, while at the same time they were still trying to conquer each other, that somehow, so the thinking goes, since God had granted them superiority and the enlightened ideas were superior to the unenlightened medieval worldview that professing these ideals granted them superiority to all other ideas and that other cultures were therefore not their equal.  

Early in the history of the new world, a commentator from Europe wrote that slaves in Virginia were actually treated better than indentured servants.  Virginia, unlike the Carolinas or the Caribbean Islands, did not have a severe malarial problem that most northern Europeans had little immunity to (sickle celled blood)---if they had rounded up indenturees from the lower Mediterranean it might have had a different result.  But from the beginning, no matter the treatment (obviously slaves were paid for, indentured persons that survived could become competition), armed with enlightened and religious concepts of their superiority and not needing to march into battle themselves to have a ready supply of slaves that they could simply buy from established slave traders along the coast, they assumed immediate superiority to the spoils of the spoilers, and an undeclared (at first) since  being not only culturally superior to those they conquered (normal) but supra-superior because they were able to purchase someone else’s spoils.

And that these spoils were also of a different skin shade, that made them not only religious and culturally superior but more intellectually enlightened.  And while already the enlightened felt superior to those of their own background who were rusticus, they fashioned not a new hierarchy that included the rusticus class into their inscribitur class, but a new designation of the servus as inferior to the rusticus.  This contradicted the philosophical ideas of at least the Greeks and Romans as well as conquerors like the Babylonians and Persians who often recognized the servus were often more culturally important than the rusticus. Aristotle’s dictum that peasants were so undignified they could never become citizens, but (some) slaves were capable of becoming citizens is evidence in hand.

The Right to Be Unfree

Slavery was an emotional concept, like abortion became in the 80’s and trans has become today.  Lincoln came into office with an ideology of black inferiority to people like him–poor whites, and even upon election he was still not by any means considered the equal of either the monied in the north or the south or the west.  Slavery, for Lincoln, was not as much a wrong imposed on the enslaved, but a division that was tearing away the union.  His idea was not to “free” slaves, not black ones, into American society but away from American society. Like Jefferson, he thought they were not capable or equal to white Americans and should be transported elsewhere for American well-being and unity. It was really no different than the concept to deport slaves away from the south to a country of their own (that would become Liberia) by famed slaveholders Henry Clay, John Randolph, and James Madison (and with encouragement by Jefferson). The American culture that had been designed via enlightened ideas of racial superiority had no place in this country other than as property to some Americans or removal from the Americas.  But there was never an intention except by a few vocal extremists to meld the descendants of Africa and the descendants from Europe into one “free’ class, not even as equally libera homo.

There were two problems with removal—loss of workforce and the capital to replace the workforce in the south.  And the fact that the constitution left too much power in the individual states.  The idea of union was always tenuously balanced between the states and the union of the states.  Since the constitution was a compromise between states it had no ability to loosen the power of the states and yet to become “one nation” it had to be granted certain powers over the states.  And even though this began to be displayed based on regional differences, states have never felt the federal government should have supreme power over them and the union, especially the executive and judicial have always felt the federal government must have supreme power to function.  If you peruse the long conflicts that were decided by the supreme court from Brailsford to Moore one can see illustrated this unrelenting tug of war. 

Jefferson argued for nullification before he was executive then against his own state and Madison when he was executive.  Likewise, Madison negated his own nullification concepts as executive.  I am unaware of Jackson ever arguing for nullification, but certainly thought, before he was president, that states should have less control by the federal government, but as president told Georgia they could not defy a court decision even though I imagine he agreed with Georgia.  Of course he worked out a compromise and sent the Cheokees to their own Liberia in an as of yet unclaimed part of the American west.  

But the war to deunify what the constitution had attempted to unify was coming and almost certainly would have happened no matter who had been elected in 1860.  I don’t know if Lincoln truly had a change of heart, but he recognized the necessity of “freeing” the slaves to successfully maintain the union in his war efforts because union was not an emotionally unifying battlecry.  Lincoln’s proposals for allowing states to regain union status would have been probably even more generous than Johnson’s turned out to be and Lincoln might have had as tough of a time with Congress as Johnson would have had he not been assassinated.  

But the war was never fought to free anyone, it was fought to maintain a tenuous union and in that, the war was lost.  And black slaves “gains” during reconstruction were not as great as some proclaim—and the one thing they never gained, and in fact might have lost, was the recognition that they were in anyway not inferior to the most retarded white man (literal, not figurative); or that they anyway were not interlopers into a white nation.  It was okay if they were here as long as they were shackled in bondage; otherwise they didn’t really belong in a white nation, no matter the sector of the nation they might try to enter.  

The question remains today: are blacks servus and subject to the whims and needs of the lowest class of rusticus.  And even if the inscribitur were to cease, would the blacks who were brought here “against  their will” be able to successfully reside with those who need to be superior to them?  Can the classification that skin color somehow is an ethnicity that is not really an American identity but an African identity (Afro-American) ever be altered so that their ethnic identity as a color ever can assimilate into an ethnic identity aligned with what is perceived as a national identity.  Can a president or a vice-president even become not a “black leader” but merely the leader?  Can a professor of economics not be a black professor or a farmer not be a black farmer? Can a black person, defined by his  “black” skin color, though in America they are as various in shades as are those not so defined, and just be defined as a person of x and y qualities not connected to his shade.  I hate doing it, but I am trapped into it—I hate writing this shit but it is the only way to write about America or American history.  I don’t need to mention the lightness or darkness of the skin to speak of someone from China even though many are paler than I.  We don’t even refer to people from Latin America that are lighter, with a more European complexion from greater Spanish (or other European immigrant parentage) as Spanish-Latinos or Indian-Latinos. Alberto Fujimoro was a Peruvian president not a Japanese-Peruvian president.  But to the world over Barack Obama was the black American president.  And if we stood next to each other he would be identified as black, but I (despite blonde hair that gives me a “white” appearance am darker, or would have been when I was daily in the sun.  

So what is the answer? Maybe we must segregate.  Maybe we are too far gone into false ethnic identifications to ever all be Americans.  I can guarantee you my family came to America “against their will.”  My family came to America as spoils during a Cromwellian battle and were shackled and chained and sent here as indentured servants with no “contract” until they were “bought” at the docks.  How am I any better than someone sent to America that were spoils of the spoilers and not even spoils?  I’m not.  But in sun, my face remains pale looking because of my light hair, but the part of my body darkens enough that I never needed sunscreen.   

The answer is I don’t know the answer.  It is for those who are inferiorized to  answer.  Don’t always count on that answer to remain passive.  Or let me put it this way—maybe it shouldn’t always be passive.  

But even though I don’t know the answer, I do believe it is a false question that should never have needed  to be asked.