Civil War: The War that Bound a Nation

Maybe the Civil War saved the nation from itself.

As the country marks the 150th Anniversary of the start of the Civil War, scholars and citizens question its meaning. One scholar suggests the four year war prevented apartheid, no civil rights, and a uneasy marriage between southern slaveholders and northern industrialists

“We often talk about the Civil War as a tragedy. But I suggest the real tragedy would have been a Civil War that wasn’t fought, or a Civil War that didn’t end the way it did,” Steven Hahn, a Yale trained Ph.D., said during a Sunday lecture at the Wilton Historical Society.

More than 100 people attended the lecture, the second of four in a series about the Civil War. The Wilton Library Association co-sponsored the event with the historical society.

Hahn wrote the 2003 Pulitzer Prize book “A Nation Under Our Feed: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. ”  He offered some different scenarios that could have resulted from either not fighting the war, or a war that ended in armistice.

First there would be no 13th Amendment he said.

“Slavery would have been abolished, but gradually, and it would have involved compensation for slave holders,” Hahn said. “Because almost nobody had a plan. Even radical abolitionists who thought slaveholding was a sin didn’t have a plan.”

Many people don’t realize slavery existed in north. The emancipation process began unfolding around 1780, ending in 1804 in New Jersey. Almost everywhere, including Connecticut, slavery was abolished gradually.

In Connecticut children of slaves gained freedom at age 28, according to the state’s 1784 manumission. President Abraham Lincoln even considered a 35-year-long emancipation process. That meant slaves could have lived in the US in the 1900s.

“We are often presented with idea that slavery was receding in the US on the eve of the Civil War,” Hahn said.

It wasn’t.

 “I would argue this is a very serious misrepresentation of what was happening in the United States and the axis of power,” Hahn said.

At the time the South and slaveholders wielded an enormous amount of power, Hahn said. In fact most every president with the exception of John Adams and John Quincy Adams and Lincoln had owned slaves. Slaveholders sat on the US Supreme Court, and occupied many a seat in Congress, Hahn said.

By the time of the Civil War, the US was still a slave holding republic. Indeed about 75 percent of people coming to the colonies lacked freedom, whether they were slaves or indentured white servants.

Second, without the Civil War the federal government wouldn’t have established its authority, Hahn said.

In turn, the 14th Amendment would not have came to pass, which established what it means to be a citizen for the first time. And that 15th Amendment, which established the right to vote for the first time wouldn’t have come to pass either.

“A language of racial exclusion would have remained in state constitutions,” Hahn said.

Also, internationally, slavery might have gotten a new lease on life, Hahn said. Without the Emancipation Proclamation Cuba and Brazil might have retained slavery.

In the end the Civil War bound the nation together, Hahn said, where otherwise the nation could have become only a collection of rival confederacies.

Hahn is a specialist on history of nineteenth-century America, African-American history, the history of the American South, and the international history of slavery and emancipation.

His background taught him that historical outcomes are never inevitable. Indeed it’s history’s hiccups that can make big differences.

For example, had Lincoln listened to Secretary of State William Seward and not fought at Fort Sumter, the south might have called early victory.  Had Gen. George McClellan won the nomination in 1864, an armistice might have ensued.

“When the Civil War ended, the least likely outcome was the outcome that happened,” Hahn said.

And that, he said, is a good thing.