On Bouie and Slavery (4)

PROPOSITION 4: The Civil War was the result, not of polarized opinions on the issue of slavery (these had always existed), but of the election of a candidate who opposed the expansion of slavery to the territories. Expansion was an economic necessity for planters due to the impacts of growing cotton on the soil. The threat to the economic survival of the planters was a good enough reason to risk it all. There will be no second Civil War today because there is no similar threat to the pocketbooks of red America.

Whew! There’s a lot to analyze there. Let’s break it down:

  1. Bouie is right about the Civil War and polarization, although anti-slavery opinion had been galvanized in the North to a much greater extent than in the past by 1860, due largely to the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act in the North.
  2. He is also correct that the planter class viewed slavery as being essential to its economic survival, and that this was an adequate reason to go to war.
  3. The election of Lincoln in no way guaranteed that slavery would not be expanded. Lincoln didn’t have the legal authority to stop it by himself, and there was the Dred Scott decision to overcome. Secession was a rash act; given the checks and balances in the system, it was not necessary to protect slavery expansion, let alone to save it where it already existed.
  4. While it is true that the growing of cotton exhausts the soil pretty rapidly, expansion to the territories was not a solution to that problem. It was universally understood that the cultivation of cotton was not a realistic possibility in the desert, or in the Great Plains. The real concern of the planters was that the balance of power in the Senate would be upset by the creation of numerous new free states, and that slavery would consequently be abolished where it already existed.
  5. Bouie is right when he says there is no economic threat to red America on the scale of the slavery issue. However, red America is constantly being told that it faces cultural annihilation; is that a good enough reason to go down swinging? Bouie’s Marxism says no. History says yes.