On April 12, 1861, South Carolina forces fired on federal forces, who refused to leave Fort Sumter without a fight. This episode is traditionally considered the beginning of the American Civil War. Four years later, without three days, on April 9, 1865, the command of the southern army signed an act of surrender. The civil war, during which, as it is traditionally believed, killed 600 thousand North Americans (almost 2% of the then population of the country), became the bloodiest war not only in the history of the New World, but also in the history of the whole world in the century that has passed since the end Napoleonic Wars before the outbreak of the First World War.
US historiography attaches importance to the Civil War as one of the key moments in not only American but also world history. She is partly right that it was this event, or rather, the victory of the North, that laid the foundation for the building of modern US planetary hegemony. However, in assessing the many reasons, characteristics and consequences of the American Civil War, we do not need to follow either American researchers or Marx. With our more than a thousand years of historical experience, we Russians have the right to have our own original judgment about the events of the short history of the New World.
Meanwhile, so far in this respect, our thought, in the literal sense of the word - slavishly, follows stable stereotypes. Take, for example, the opposition of the “free” North to the “slaveholding” South, replicated from a textbook into a textbook. At the same time, the northerners, as a rule, are portrayed in the halo of "slave liberators", while the southerners are initially given the repulsive features of "slave owners" who by all means tried to maintain their power over black slaves and who had no other motives for the struggle besides this self-serving motivation.
The fact is that over 80% of the whites in the South have never had any slaves at all. And the position of African Americans in the slave-owning United States was not at all as intolerable as is often portrayed in historical literature.
The fact is that from January 1, 1808, the import of slaves into the United States was prohibited. The southern planters, willy-nilly, had to take care of the natural reproduction of the labor force. This automatically led in practice to a more careful attitude towards her than the industrialist took care of his free-wage white workers, which was constantly noted by his contemporaries. Digital indicators are eloquent evidence of this.
True, from 1810 to 1860, the proportion of African Americans in the US population fell from 19% to 14.1%. But this was due to the fact that immigration of whites to the United States continued in growing numbers, while the import of blacks, as we have already said, stopped. From 1820 to 1860, white immigrants and their descendants increased the US population by 23.2%, i.e. by 7.3 million. In 1860, the entire white population of the United States was 27 million. Thus, those who lived in 1820, and their descendants forty years later, totaled 19.7 million. And in 1820 the white population of the United States was calculated at 7.9 million. Consequently, over the next forty years, its natural growth was 150%. Over the same forty years, the black population of the United States, due to purely natural reasons, grew from 1.77 million to 4.44 million, i.e. by the same 150%!
So, excluding the factor of immigration, the black population of the United States in the last forty years of slavery has grown at the same rate as the white population of the United States. This truth must be considered in the first place when trying to assess the actual situation of slaves in the United States at that time. In any case, for the worse in relation to the position of the white proletariat in the factories and factories of the North, it was distinguished mainly by the absence of civil and political freedoms, but not by the general quality of life.
And one more important indicator. The number of freed slaves grew from year to year in the South. So, in 1860, in the southern state of Virginia (where the capital of the slave-owning Confederation was located during the Civil War), there were already 58 thousand free blacks out of 190 thousand black population of the state. There is no doubt that slavery as an institution would have gradually died out and for purely economic reasons, without the Civil War.
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"Emancipation of slaves" 150 years ago became for the US government an ideological and propaganda cover for a war of conquest - just as in later times, up to this day, the United States "defends freedom and democracy" in different parts of the planet.
If some of the then North Americans were "led" to this primitive trick, then now we can and must appreciate it, that is, as a standard propaganda trick. Yes, as a result of the victory of the North in the Civil War, former slaves in the United States were given personal freedom. But how did their actual state change? The deterioration in the financial situation of most African Americans in the first years after the abolition of slavery and the liquidation of the plantation economy has long been no secret to anyone.
What should first of all be paid attention to is that civil equality, granted to former slaves by the 14th and 15th amendments (1868 and 1870) to the US Constitution, very soon turned into a fiction. Moreover, for decades after that, the reverse process lasted in the southern states, rightly called racial discrimination with the formal equality of the white and black races.
The foundations of the social system of the southern states were destroyed not as a result of the "slave revolution", but during the policy of Reconstruction, which lasted 12 years after the end of the Civil War (1865-1877). It was a "revolution from above" carried out by the federal government in order to consolidate the economic and political dominance of the financial and industrial elite of the northern states in the US South. This policy was carried out by methods of direct military violence - the southern states were occupied by the federal army, the suffrage was granted only to citizens loyal to the North. This automatically included all former slaves, but excluded former Confederate soldiers and officers and other “politically unreliable” whites. This became an instrument of falsification of the popular representation of the southern states during the Reconstruction period. In several southern states, the actual number of black voters even exceeded the number of white voters, despite the fact that in no state did African Americans make up the majority of the population. Some former slaves even managed to make a career and fit into the new elite.
The situation of most black North Americans who turned into low-wage unskilled wage labor is materially worse than it was before the Civil War.
As soon as the formation of the new elite of the southern states ended, the so-called. the compromise of 1877. According to it, the Republican Party secured federal power for itself indefinitely, while the Democratic Party retained its dominant position in the South. At the same time, the feds undertook to no longer interfere in the internal structure of the southern states. There and then began a rollback even from those formal freedoms that African Americans received during the years of Reconstruction. Developed in the last quarter of the 19th - early 20th centuries. in the South, the system of racial segregation and discrimination surpassed the slavery system in some of its features.
The fact is that before the Civil War, a free Negro (as we have seen, such was no longer a rarity even in the South) automatically enjoyed all civil rights, and in the northern states - even electoral. Now, many open and unspoken prohibitions have made it impossible for the formally free masses of the black population to enjoy any of these rights, except for one - the right to sell their labor power a penny. And the main features of this system held out in the south of the United States until the 60s. already next, XX century. At the same time, with the gradual withering away of the institution of slavery, without its revolutionary destruction, the United States had a chance to avoid this subsequent long-term racist reaction, the consequences of which (including the response to it - the so-called “black” racism) still affect the life of this country. in the most negative way.
In other words, it is not slavery itself that is to blame for the long-term racial conflict in the United States, but rather the victory of the North in the Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction.
The southern states are usually portrayed as "rebellious", "separatist". These propaganda clichés of the time are still used in historical literature. Meanwhile, no one would think of calling the “founding fathers” of the United States, who gathered at the Continental Congress in 1775, as separatists. Although in both cases similar processes took place. The only difference is that the revolt of 1775 - 1783. American colonies against the British crown was crowned with success, and the revolt of the southern states against the federal government in 1861-1865. - not. The victorious rebellion went down in history as the American Revolutionary War, the loser remained a rebellion. In the best case, the Civil War.
The name Civil War in relation to the events of 1861 - 1865. in the history of the United States initially emphasizes that it was a war of two socio-political forces within one state. This name, given for ideological reasons, should not mislead us about the meaning of those events. It was an actual war between two states possessing permanent territory. Both sides even had a quasi-national identity, accentuated by the nicknames “Yankee” (Northerners) and “Johnny” (Southerners), reflecting the most noticeable difference in the pronunciation of the same name in the North and in the South. At the same time, one of the states (North) sought to completely capture the other (South), while this other only tried to defend its independence.
War of 1861 - 1865 was actually the Second War of Independence in US history.
The founders of the Confederate States of America (CSA), as the union of the breakaway states was officially called, in their right to secession, appealed precisely to the US Declaration of Independence of 1776, which was included in the CSA constitution.
Meanwhile, before the Civil War, it was the southern states that were most often the stronghold of federal unity, while separatist inclinations came from the North. In 1814, during the Anglo-American War, six New England states (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) made the most determined attempt to secede from the United States, convening a separate Hartford Convention. The US victory in the war prevented the fulfillment of their intentions. However, by the middle of the 19th century, already in the South, they began to increasingly tend to the idea of the need for a separate state existence in order to preserve the original southern order.
At the same time, the South took a defensive position, while the North wanted to extend its orders to the entire territory of the United States. One of the main motives of the secession was the tariff policy of the federal government, which prevented the development of the economy of the agricultural raw materials of the southern states, which provided 70% of all US exports. The South did not want to share its income with northern industrialists. Whereas the North sought to involve the lands of the southern planters in land speculation and had plans for the cheap labor of black Americans.
The question of maintaining or abolishing slavery was not the main cause of the Civil War. It became the subject on which the North could most easily demonstrate its imaginary altruism, to appear as a side defending a just cause.
Shortly before the Civil War, an ideology in defense of the institution of slavery began to take shape in the southern states, justifying it by the need for guardianship over "unintelligent blacks." She tried to liken slave relations to patriarchal-family relations. It received the highest development in the works of George Fitzhugh (1806 - 1881), eloquently titled Sociology of the South, or the Collapse of a “Free Society” (1854) and “Cannibals - everything! Slaves without masters”(1857).
Fitzhugh undertook a major revision of such a "pillar of Americanism" as "freedom." He argued that the welfare of society as a whole is superior to the rights of the individual. Fitzhugh tried to create a universal ideology that justified the existence of slavery in the South not by special local conditions, but by the universal laws of human development. Opponents called his views "the theory of natural slavery" as opposed to the theory of natural rights. An unbiased view reveals in Fitzhugh an anticipation of the neoliberal concept of social responsibility of the property owner, which gained wide acceptance in the 20th century. And not only this.
Fitzhugh, following the socialists of the time, sharply criticized capitalism. But he did not accept the conclusion of the socialists that one can liberate oneself from capitalist exploitation in a revolutionary way. In Fitzhugh's opinion, exploitation is irreparable. The reason for this is that people from birth have unequal abilities.
The so-called "freedom" serves only to enslave the weak by the strong. Most people are unable to enjoy the benefits of freedom. And this does not apply to blacks alone, Fitzhugh believed. Industrial workers in the North of the United States and in Western Europe are in a worse position than slaves on the southern plantations. After all, their entire existence depends on the sale of their labor to the capitalists. Whereas the master slave takes care of his slaves. Fitzhugh called the workers "slaves without masters."
To capitalism, which he considered a dead-end experiment of mankind, Fitzhugh opposed, in his opinion, a humane alternative to patriarchal relations that permeate all society - both blacks and whites. The prototype of this relationship is the family, where both the relatives and the slaves of the slave owner are subordinated to a single paternal authority. “This family association, this patriarchal government, is gradually merging into a wider association of people under a common government or ruler,” he wrote.
The laws of the Confederation prescribed not only the rights, but also the duties of its citizens. Among these duties, in the first place were the duties in relation to the family, which included both family members and slaves.
“If all people were created equal, then all would be competitors, rivals and enemies of each other,” which we observe in capitalist society, Fitzhugh emphasized. Whereas "subordination, different castes and classes, differences in sexes, ages and slavery give rise to peace and good will."
Of course, Fitzhugh's concept was a utopia even in the hypothetical case if the Confederation had won and defended its independence. But it had an orientation toward state paternalism. It meant a rejection of traditional American foundations, which have always implied that the interests of society are, first of all, the interests of individual strong individuals, the richest and most successful. Fitzhugh's doctrine overturned this notion and asserted: the good of society is in the subordination of any individual to the interests of the state as a whole, organized along the patriarchal family model. And this attitude could have an impact on the social development of America, if the history of the latter in 1861 - 1865. turned differently.
It is not impossible that the South could have won the Civil War. Several times during the war, the Confederates could take Washington and dictate their terms to the North. The separate state existence of the North and the South could last for quite a long time (if not even to the present time), despite the close economic ties and an extended border - after all, the USA and Canada exist separately in exactly the same conditions! And slavery in the South would have gradually died out by itself, without revolutionary upheavals and racist reactions. The South of the United States would have retained the features of a distinctive agrarian civilization longer. Of course, in this case, the United States would not have become the world hegemon. But this would hardly make the world worse than it is now.