Slavery and the Civil War

Kush Oza

Mr. Paris

2nd December

U.S HIST 1130

Slavery and the Civil War

Charles Dew brings to life a society committed to white supremacy and the vile consequences of rigidly enforced segregation and brutal intolerance. slavery and white supremacy were the primary driving factors of the civil war according to Dew, obviously, the primary message was not to be confused with minor issues. The Civil War was motivated by a desire to defend slavery and a fear of what would happen if the "Black Republicans" took power. Whereas on the other side Gary Gallagher masterfully weaves a superb synthesis of the reasons why men fought and died to preserve the Union. Gallagher’s work is more balanced and reminds us how they eliminated the creation of regressive slaveholding tyranny, which might have to lead us to the destruction of our great nation, created by our founding fathers, who thought the slavery would die a natural death. According to Gallagher, the real reason was the idea of "union" and men were ready to die for that “union”. But the real question to ask from his document was what about the slavery and concept of north fighting set free the slavery?

“Our father made this a government for the white man,” Harrison told the Georgians, “Rejecting the negro, as an arrogant, inferior, barbaric race, incapable of self-government, and not, therefore, entitled to be associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political, or social equality” - (pg. 61) implies for Dew what Harrison’s motivation for secession is: racism or

slavery. After all, Dew contends that “it was Judge Harris who set the tone for what was to follow”

The curry of 1901 would hardly have recognized the curry of 1806, who told the governor of Maryland that secession meant “deliverance from abolition domination,”- (pg. 61)

The evidence in this document is truly the "smoking gun" that proves that secession was about slavery and nothing else. Call the Civil War what you like, Dew concludes, but we can no longer say it had nothing to do with slavery.

In the Union War, Gallagher argues that most loyal citizens “embraced emancipation as a tool to punish slaveholders, weaken Confederacy, and protect the Union from future internal strife.”- (pg. 68) while in this process Gallagher attempts to restore independence, where if we think about it the war for union became a war for slavery and basically, we set ourselves up for historical disappointment. We lose to explain why, after spending all this money, sweat and time over the war for independence, and still U.S turned its back on blacks for nearly a century. The north was always against slavery to a great extent just because the slaves were competition for free labor, slavery was basically key issue, but everybody thought that the whole war was all about whether we are going to be one nation or two, and whether we had ever been one nation at all. It was all about the union where it stands as a reminder that ideas have consequences, and provides us with exactly what good history does.

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