Title: The war that became a revolution | Socialist Review
Headings: The war that became a revolution
The war that became a revolution
To what extent was the Civil War a war to preserve the Union and to what extent was it a war to abolish slavery?
How did the radicalisation of the North's war aims affect the military conduct of the war?
What role did slaves play in their own emancipation? Around 200,000 eventually fought in the Union armies.
What difference do you think Lincoln made as an individual to the outcome of the war?
Do you think the North's victory was inevitable, given its greater industry and resources?
What do we know about the views of the ordinary soldiers who fought in the Civil War?
Were the Civil War and its outcome the completion of the American Revolution of the 1770s?
Do you see the period of Reconstruction in the South that follows the North's victory as a continuation of the revolutionary process that begins in the Civil War? Why does it end in the racist system of Jim Crow segregation?
How do we explain the transformation of the Republicans from the party of Lincoln and the abolition of slavery to the party of George Bush and the Tea Party?
The level of rehabilitation of the old South seems remarkable, with the toleration of flying the old Confederate flag, the sympathy that often seems to be there in parts of Hollywood and in popular music for the old South.
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Content: It was primarily a war to preserve the Union and that was the sole objective at the beginning of the war for the North. Indeed President Lincoln said on many occasions in the first year and a half of the war that it was not a war to abolish slavery. Lincoln was very much concerned about reassuring those slave states that had not seceded - Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware - as well as trying to win back some of the secessionists in the South. So initially it was a war to preserve the Union as it had existed before 1861. But by the second year of the war it became increasingly clear that Southerners were not going to be wooed back into the Union. It also became increasingly clear that slavery was not only the purpose for which the Confederacy was fighting but was also an asset in the form of slave labour which grew the food crops and the cotton but also provided much of the logistical labour and support for Confederate armies. So the conviction grew in the North, and Lincoln shared this conviction, that in order to win a war against a nation fighting for and supported by slavery, they would need to strike against slavery itself. By the fall and winter of 1862-3 when Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, I think the two goals of preserving the Union and striking against slavery became merged into one. By the time of his Gettysburg Address in November 1863 Lincoln explained that the war was not only to preserve the nation conceived and born in 1776 but also to give their nation a new birth of freedom by purging it of slavery. How did the radicalisation of the North's war aims affect the military conduct of the war?