Leftist opinions on the American Civil War

What is the overall general opinion on wether or not the Union/U.S. should have fought the CSA?

Uhm, the Left generally considers the Civil War the most progressive thing the United States Federal Government ever did.

Civil War is the 2nd closest the bourgeoisie in the US ever came to being progressive; the closest they came was post Civil War, when Congress took over Reconstruction from the executive branch...

And since it's the bourgeoisie we are dealing with, the apex of their "emancipatory" impulse is at the same time the failure of that impulse and its abandonment to the commercial relations of building railroads in the South, restarting cotton production, and generally disciplining labor, black and white, before who knows? you get a commune of workers taking power in a city like St. Louis.

Anyway, the Civil War is the triumphal emergence of the Northern, and Northwest, bourgeoisie in all their miserable glory, incompetence, treachery, venality, pragamatism, and necessity.

Wouldhave been nice if the North fought harder, sooner; if Lincoln had gotten rid of the South-sympathetic generals; if emancipation had been declared sooner; if African-Americans had been armed sooner; and if the North had fought even harder even later-- suppressing the reconstitution of the plantation class, requiring more than just a loyalty oath before allowing secessionists to establish political, and commercial, rights and property; if the Union League Associations of the emancipated slaves had been armed by and protected by the Union army.

Would have been nice of the "stars and bars" were prohibited from every being displayed again; if all Confederate officers were permanently stripped of property, but hey then we're talking, if not socialism, something along the lines of a sans-culotte revolution, a black sans-culotte revolution, and we know where the white Northern bourgeoisie lined up on that possibility.

Other: the emergence of industrial capitalism at the expense of, and with the destruction of chattel slavery.

I think the Civil war was just for keeping the union togather, however the emancipation proclamation was the progressive thing.

I have been informed that the abolishment of slavery was just a moral excuse for the North and that only 6 % of the Southern population owned slaves. That this war was in fact more about the taxes the Southern nations had to pay. But I'm not an expert on this.

The Emancipation Proclamation was the good and progressive aspect of what happened. The war itself was not progressive at all and the Union went into the war with no intention of freeing slaves. The point was to preserve the Union. The war did start over differing opinions on the issue of slavery, though indirectly. Bourgeois wars are not waged for freedom or for the good of the people. Bourgeois wars are waged for control and profit.

The war was very much about slavery. Neo-confederates today like to say it was about taxation and "states rights" but none of that is true.

This guy wrote some good stuff on the Civil War as it was happening. He also dispelled Lost Cause nonsense before it even started. This is also a good, brief history on the causes of the war.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...1861/10/25.htm

Slavery was always the issue. Everything the South did from 1819 on was to preserve and expand slavery and limit the expansion of the "free" North.

The Missouri Compromise was about preserving and expanding slavery.

The Nullification and Secession crisis of 1832 was about protecting slavery from the expanding power of the industrial north.

The Mexican-American War was about preserving and expanding slavery, and it was a war taken by the South, for the South, with the South controlling the government and the military.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act was about preserving and expanding slavery. And it was this act, leading to "Bleeding Kansas"-- the rehearsal for the Civil War, that fractured the Northern from the Southern Democrats, destroyed the Whigs and led to the creation of the Republican Party-- an organization founded on the principle that "political compromise with slavery was no longer possible."

The South initiated the Civil War to protect slavery. That the North responded to "preserve" the Union does not change the fact that the Union could not be preserved without abolishing slavery.

Doesn't mean bourgeois wars aren't wage for control and profit, it just means that in this case, war and profit coincided with the abolition of slavery.

100% spot-on! The above statement is exactly what the likes of Marx said on the matter and in my opinion it is a complete truth on the underlying reasons for the war.

Excellent post Tsukae!

That is certainly not what Marx wrote in his articles on the Civil War.

Yes this was a bourgeois war. The bourgeois didn't end slavery at all, they still enforce it in other countries. The colonization of the US early 1900 of Cuba and the Philippines (in the last case they still occupy the country) is proof of this.

The abolishment of slavery was the only good thing that might have came out of the Civil War, but came at a terrible price and as far as I know was never the main reason for the war. If that was the only intention the Northern states would probably made a deal to buy out all the slaves. The same happened in the Netherlands. I think thats appalling too, cause here former slave owners gain huge amounts of money in compensation while it should have gone to the victims, but that would still be a better solution.

Thank you, I've read small parts of this analysis in Dutch, but couldn't find the whole text

It didn't go to war for that reason, but it did have that reason. It did legitimately want to abolish the slave system.

The civil war was a mix of progressive and not progressive, for the reasons S. Artesian laid out.

It would have been more progressive it the whole south had a John Brown/Nat Turner style rebellion.

1. Slavery was abolished in Cuba in 1883, well before the Spanish-American War. The US did not restore or impose slavery upon Cuba after the war.

And slavery was never widespread in the Philippines-- there was no commercial basis for the slave trade in the Philippines as the islands themselves functioned as a warehouse, a transfer point, i.e the "Galleon Trade" than as a focus of production.

2. The domination of the US in the Philippines is much less than it used to be, and is not based on military occupation, with both Subic Bay and Clark Air Force base having been closed for years.

3. The North didn't go to war to abolish slavery, but the South DID go to war to preserve, protect, and expand slavery. To do that, the South need to dissolve the Union. To oppose that dissolution, the North had to abolish slavery. If you follow the course of the Civil War, it is evident that abolition of slavery grows in importance after 1862 and becomes the critical and defining purpose after 1863.

The issue was not directly slavery, the issue was states rights to make their own decisions. This all is a continuation of political division between the republican-democrats and the Federalists, only the opposing parties were now under different names. The issue that pushed the south to the point of wanting secession was slavery though. It is fair to say the issue was primarily slavery, but not directly. The war wasn't directly about slavery until the emancipation proclamation.

Okay, I agree with all of this.

The Confederacy did not really initiate the war. They did move to take Fort Sumter, but that was because it was in the Confederacy. They had no desire to go to war as they knew they were at a disadvantage with a smaller population and little production capacity.

Many in the North wanted an end to slavery, but that was not the reason Lincoln decided to go to war. The reason he did this was to preserve the Union. The reason the Confederacy was involved was to establish and maintain sovereignty.

Indeed.

Also, I would like to add that I cannot vote on the poll as there is not the third option of opposing both and supporting slave revolt.

It was directly about slavery, the idea that it was a states rights issue is southern conservative propaganda. The South, when they seceded and throughout the war even before the emancipation proclamation, were organized around the issue of slavery, it was their cause. And it was the only "states right" that mattered to them in the civil war.

Hell, even the Daily Show (which has basically become a more hip news source for centrism) did a segment debunking the idea that slavery was not the primary cause. I'll see if I can find it.

That's just ideological cover. The issue was always slavery. The issue was slavery in the drafting of the Constitution. Slavery is why there are 2 houses in the US legislature and every state is guaranteed 2 senators. Slavery is why there wasn't direct election of the President, but election of electors based on a state's congressional representation. Slavery is why slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person to bulk up the South's representation in the HOR.

This is not the split between the Federalists and the Rep/Dems as the economics had radically changed. Prior to 1815, you get the Northern intellectuals and political leaders opining that the South's treatment of slaves is no worse than the North's treatment of "wage-slaves."

Soon after, that falls away and is replaced by increasing abolitionist sentiment and demands for free soil and free labor.

The old parties, built upon the veneer covering this fundamental economic conflict, fade away and die. The Rep/Dems, the Whigs die and are replaced by the slaveholder dominated Democrats and the new Republican Party which was formed in direct response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the terrorist attacks the slaveholders in Missouri launched against the free soil farmers of Kansas.

The war absolutely was about slavery. Whether the North recognized it as such has nothing to do with the objective material basis of the war. Woodrow Wilson/FDR pushed the US into WW 1/WW2 as wars to save democracy. Does that mean the war wasn't really about capitalist overproduction, and declining profits?

Where did you come up with that? The South was preparing for secession and war from even before Lincoln was nominated much less victorious in the election. The North was the side unprepared for war as the South EDIT: had previously controlled the presidency, the Senate, and the US military.

The South didn't "reluctantly" attack Fort Sumter. It deliberately attacked Fort Sumter hoping thereby to be awarded "official" "national" status in Europe so that it might receive aid from Britain and France.

You're simply repeating your earlier unsubstantiated assertions. Lincoln worked mightily to conciliate the border states, to appeal to Union sentiment in the South to prevent the war. He did not lead initiate an attack on Richmond. He did not impose martial law on the South to prevent secession.

However, when the South did attack, Lincoln did recognize that this was a fight to the death, a fight for survival-- he realized that more clearly than most and more clearly than most of his generals.

The "sovereignty" of the Confederacy had only one purpose-- that was to preserve slavery. Civil wars are not initiated over abstract notions of sovereignty but over real issues of property and production. That's what historical materialism is based upon.

the civil war was about slavery because the people who were fighting in and commenting on the war said it was about slavery.

do a goggle search on the editorials of the day in papers north and south.

look-up the constitutions of the confederate states (I think the word slavery is mentioned something like 15 times or more in the SC constitution alone)

and if that is not enough, and you still think the civil war was just about states rights, then explain jim crow.