The Scorpion’ Sting; Antislavery And The Coming Of The Civil War, by James Oakes

One of the realities of the Civil War, and something that many students of the war have not come to grips with, is the way that the commitment of even moderate antislavery Northerners to the peaceful and gradual eradication of slavery, via nonviolent means, was intolerable to the Deep and Middle South in 1860. This book is a short one–coming in at less than 200 pages–but it builds upon the work of authors like Freehling to make a succinct case that the Civil War was absolutely about slavery, but not necessarily in the straightforward way that is often claimed to be the case. Where this book shine in particular is looking at the ways in which the slavery issue animated a whole host of issues that made the Civil War inevitable once a northern antislavery majority was able to elect a president who would be able to use the power of the federal government to bring slavery under increasing threat with the possibility that it could eventually be voted out of existence by enough states that had become free. Among the more tragic ironies of the situation, at least for the rebels, is that the secession that the Deep and Middle South states sought to use to protect their beleaguered “peculiar institution” of slavery instead brought on a war that ended slavery far faster, and at a far greater cost, than anyone had thought would be the case before 1861.

The author lays out the structure of the book in an introduction that discusses what was at stake in the Civil War for both the Union and the Confederacy. It shows that the Confederates were not ignorant about the true aims of Northern antislavery advocates, including Abraham Lincoln, and rebelled not against the prospect of immediate emancipation–which no one saw coming at the time of Lincoln’s election, but against the threat of gradual emancipation brought about through the desperation of Southerners themselves. The first chapter of the book discusses the Northern antislavery plan for placing a barrier around slavery forcing it to endure in places where it could not expand and would eventually become less profitable due to exhausted soils and the decreased value of slaves in areas where slave breeding kept slavery profitable (in the border slave states and Upper South in general) (1). This is followed by a discussion of the different conception of property rights, contrasting the Southern view of the justness of property rights in people and the Northern view of labor as granting all–including slaves–just property rights in their own labor (2). The third chapter of the book examines the different conceptions of race that were at the heart of the antebellum debate over slavery, where Southerners by and large refused to see blacks as being granted citizenship while Northerners insisted on a color-blind definition of citizenship that nevertheless did not grant blacks full equality, at least at the time (3). The fourth chapter discusses the way that wartime emancipation was used first in a traditional and then in a revolutionary way to bring about a crisis in slavery and to eventually encourage the successful end of slavery in amending the US constitution, as occurred in the 13th amendment. The book ends with an epilogue that discusses the way that the British tended to misunderstand the Civil War in characteristic ways, acknowledgments, notes, and an index.

To this day, even after reading this book and many others about the Civil War, I remain confused about why it is that the Southern states risked the Civil War in the full knowledge that a majority of Northerners had elected an antislavery president whose commitment to ending slavery was gradual and peaceful in nature but who would have faced a majority of hostile Congressmen had the 11 states of the Deep and Middle South not seceded from the Union. Far from having a strong sense of security in their domestic institutions, the states who attempted to leave the Union were, by their paranoid rhetoric about the threat to their safety that would result from Lincoln’s presidency–had there been no war–demonstrated the fragility of their sense of security. If slavery was a positive good, why had it brought exhausted soils and economic stagnation wherever it was used to plant crops like tobacco and cotton? Why would the mere presence of postmasters who allowed antislavery materials to be sent through the mail threaten the social collapse of slavery, if slaves were supposedly loyal to their masters and content with their lot? How would seeing blacks as human beings possessed of the God-given rights that should be enjoyed by all human beings and as citizens of the nation and states and communities in which they were born and seeing them as possessing a property right in their own labor be such a horrible and unacceptable proposition? I am as baffled by these things as I am baffled by the contemporary claims of black activists that one cannot be racist against white people, or that the freedoms of speech and religion need to be curtailed because of the fragility of those who cannot handle the rebuke of the Bible against sins, which is all the more evidence of the way that the Civil War and its context continues to inform the American cultural and political experience.