ABSTRACT
When it started, the Civil War was not fought to end slavery. But without slavery, the Civil War never would have been fought. In 1861, under the pretense of defending their individual rights, eleven Southern states seceded from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America. President Abraham Lincoln's remaining Union went to war against these breakaway rebels in order to keep the nation together, not to end slavery. For the Confederates, the war was a second American Revolution fought in the name of liberty and independence. To Southerners, slavery was the South, as an 1836 letter by John C. Calhoun (the former vice president) makes clear: "[Abolition] strikes directly and fatally, not only at our prosperity, but our existence, as a people."l White Southerners' liberty rested on slavery and the culture that came with it: a way of life; a skin-color social hierarchy; leisure for a few white people rich enough to own more than a handful of slaves; a thriving cotton economy; the chivalric myth of noble patriarchs, swooning ladies in hooped gowns, gracious manners, and a happy, servile black underclass. The South was also protecting its honor, maybe more than anything else. For the thirty years prior to 1861, increasing numbers of Northerners criticized slave owners and slave culture, often in the most insulting terms. With their way of life under attack, most Southerners responded by defending slavery and all that came with it as natural and good. When Lincoln's Republican Party came to power in 1860, dedicated as it was to stopping the expansion of slavery, the South declared independence, and the Civil War began.
