Understanding the Sesquicentennial — and the war's real causes

What is important to remember as we approach the Sesquicentennial of the start of a certain war is first that it was not a civil war, second that it was the Union that started it, and third that it was not started over slavery.

And unless we understand that, we cannot come to grips with our past.

What began 150 years ago this month was not a true civil war, except in the sense that there were two sides fighting in one country, because there was no attempt by the rebellious side to take over the other, as in such combats as the English civil war of Charles I, the War of the Roses -- or the Libyan war of the present. The South did not want to run the Union, it wanted out of the Union -- a completely different thing.

That makes it a war of secession, similar to the war of 1775-83, or, as various forms would have it, the War of Southern Secession, the War Between the States, the War of Northern Aggression, or the War to Prevent Southern Independence. But please, even though the phrase was common at the time, it was not a civil war with parties contesting for control of the nation.

And let us be very clear that it was started not by the South, not by the guns that fired on Fort Sumter on April 12. The dispute leading to the war had to do with Washington's unwillingness to give up federal forts and bases in states that had declared their independence, or even to negotiate some kind of settlement or payment, despite the assignment of two Southern delegations to the capital for this purpose. It seemed clear that Lincoln had something else in mind, and with his order to create and dispatch a fleet of eight ships from New York on April 6, with 26 guns and 1,400 men, to resupply and reprovision the forts in South Carolina and Florida it was soon obvious what that was.

Upon learning of this invasion fleet, in what seemed a clear and deliberate act of war, the Confederacy and the army command in South Carolina repeatedly demanded that the Unionists in the fort surrender. The first of the Northern fleet was spotted in Charleston harbor on the night of April 11, another demand for surrender was rejected, and at 4:30 that night the Southern cannons opened fire. The fort capitulated the next day, its soldiers transported by Confederate steamers to the Union ships, and the only casualties were two Union soldiers who blew themselves up by accident during a cannon salute lowering the U.S. flag.

Exactly what Lincoln wanted. It mattered not who actually committed the first act of war, which was sending the North's armed resupply fleet, but who would fire the first shot of war -- that could be spun by the Union propaganda machines so that not just the North but the Border states and Europe would see the South as the originator. After that, a Union invasion was only proper.

And what of slavery as the motive for the war? It played a part, for sure, in the South's desire to secede, but it had nothing whatsoever to do with its choice to resist the Northern invasion. As for the North, slavery had even less to do with it. The Union armies did not invade the South to eliminate slavery, or in the cause of abolition, or for the liberation of black people, ideas not formally or even informally in the minds of the soldiers or their civilian instigators. They were out to put down a rebellion and restore the Union.

The great falsehood that the Union was fighting for a high moral cause, the elimination of chattel slavery for four million people torn from Africa, was a myth concocted later in the war when the war was going poorly for the North.

The Emancipation Proclamation, remember, wasn't issued until the war was nearly two years' old, and it was so far from being a declaration of moral principle that its creator acknowledged it was only a military ploy, unconstitutional and illegal, designed to encourage uprisings in the plantations and black enlistment in the Union forces.

Nor was the Proclamation truly concerned with the welfare of the black population, North or South. It had no provision for their economic and social integration into white society, no plan for their resettlement north or west, no concern whatever for their future (it even gave up an early idea to finance their emigration to a foreign colony), and no regard for the wrenching consequences, economic and psychological, for the people and society who would be forced to give them up.

It was, indeed, an expression of American racism as deep in the North as the South, that had merely a pragmatic and hardly a moral purpose.

The sooner all that becomes clear, it seems to me, the sooner we can get on with the Sesquicentennial commemorations without all the distortions and misunderstandings.

Maybe.

Kirkpatrick Sale, a resident of Mount Pleasant, is a historian and the author of 12 books, including "Power Shift," "Human Scale" and "The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream."