In the video “The American Civil War Oversimplified,” we’re given a broad overview of the beginnings of the Civil War. This video spends quite a bit of time focusing on the motivations behind conflicts between the Union and Confederacy, and I was very intrigued by the simultaneous contrast and cohesion between these motives. States’ rights, regional economic needs, and moral belief in abolition are all given credit for causing the War according to different accounts, but these motives are very often tightly entwined.
It’s interesting to me that the issue of emancipation was not explicitly addressed by the Union until foreign powers began to show interest in allying with the Confederacy in order to regain their cotton imports. Despite continuous lobbying from prominent abolitionists such as Frederick Douglas, the Union had been very hesitant to state that the Civil War was motivated by a moral desire for emancipation. This leaves me to wonder what the true intentions of Union leaders were throughout the war. It’s understandable from a strategic standpoint that the North might refrain from explicitly condoning abolition for the sake of more cooperative diplomacy with the South, but it leaves some suspicion as to how this came to be seen as a moral war when it wasn’t from the start. Afterall, many Northern abolitionists hoped to abolish slavery mostly to gain an economic advantage for the industrial regions that didn’t rely on slave labor like agriculture, not necessarily for moral reasons. The video describes Abraham Lincoln as understanding the immorality of slavery, but he wasn’t known to be a full believer in racial equality, having expressed even after emancipation that though black people may be free, they were still lesser than whites. I’m not quite sure that someone lacking a true ideology of racial equality could be expected to be extremely morally passionate about abolition. Granted, the topic of slavery may have been brought up relatively late in the game because of the high risks it would have presented earlier, but its lack of constancy suggests a certain contingency in the narrative of Civil War motives, one that seems awfully responsive to economic discord.
Considering economic motives, I’d also like to make note of Zinn’s reference to class structure and its influence on the tensions regarding slavery. He reveals that lower-class whites were given slave monitoring positions to fabricate a divisiveness between the two demographics so they’d be unable to collectively mobilize against authority. Meanwhile, the middle class grew to more prominence in the age of industrialization. Had the middle class not emerged so significantly, and a stricter division been maintained between the lower and upper classes, how might motivations for the Civil war, as well as contribution to it, have turned out differently?
I think Abraham Lincoln is a good example of history being told through a “hero “. The Union movement behind Lincoln used him as a symbol for defending rights, but he did not even believe that some people deserved. After watching the video, it is so interesting to see how history portrays the past versus how the past really was, especially for portraying morals and motives.
I found the reasoning behind the Emancipation Proclamation to be both fascinating and disturbing. On one hand, Lincoln’s ability to recognize the need for a war with a deeper meaning was a political strategy that helped win the Union the war. However, this cannot overweigh the fact that Lincoln played politics with the lives of millions of African Americans. Thankfully, the politics wound up freeing the slaves but it is important to recognize the murky intentions to emancipation.
I think you raised an important point on how the “video describes Abraham Lincoln as understanding the immorality of slavery” while in fact, he considered black people -even after emancipation-inferior to the whites. I agree that a person having such a mentality was not driven by morals to abolish slavery but rather to gain an economic advantage. This is an example of how biased history can be depending on which perspective it’s being told from.