Or was it about states’ rights? No, it was about slavery, and nothing else. I thought everyone knew this, but I guess it’s an old debate that still has a feeble existence. This video shows you why the Civil War was fought by the North to end slavery and by the South to keep it.
During the years after the Civil War a false narrative developed that slavery was not profitable nor that important to the South so it could not possibly have been the cause of the Civil War. This idea was imbedded in very titles the two sides gave to the Civil War. The South called it “The War of Northern Aggression.” To the North, it was “The War of Southern Rebellion.” Both seemed to be suggesting it was not a war about slavery. By the early 1900s, American historian U.B. Phillips (1877-1934) took up the cause of confusing the true causes of the Civil war by claiming that while slavery was enormously profitable to the slave masters, it wasn’t so for the great majority of Southerns who did not own slaves. In fact, people began to talk about “white slavery” resulting from black slavery keeping white workers wages at lower levels than they would be if slavery didn’t exist. Phillips argued that slavery was a dying institution and would have faded away if the Civil War had never occurred. Phillips thus asserted that the Civil War was a needless conflict.
By the time I was in college in the early 1970s Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman were working on their book, Time on the Cross: The Economics of Negro Slavery, in which they concluded their research proved that slavery was enormously profitable to slave owners, Southerners who did not profit directly still supported it, and that was the reason the South was willing to fight a bloody war to keep it.
In 2013 the Economist reported that another study, by Alfred Conrad and John Meyer, calculated the rate of return on investing in slaves. They reckoned that “slave capital” earned at least equal returns to those from other forms of capital investment—such as railroad bonds. The rate of return on slaves could be as high as 13%—compared to a yield of 6-8% on the railroads.
The controversy will continue. Even now, Walter E. Williams, a brilliant economist and retired professor at George Mason University apparently clings to the U.B. Phillps thesis.
The post Was slavery the cause of the Civil War? appeared first on TeeJaw Blog.