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: At first the Northern military tried to protect the property of Southerners, including the slave property, when they were in the South. But it became increasingly difficult to justify protecting the property of a planter whose sons were away fighting for the Confederacy. And to return slaves who had escaped through Union lines, sometimes bringing information of value, became increasingly difficult. I think by the second year of the war, and certainly by the third, the Northern military was operating in the South on the assumption that almost every white person in the South was the enemy, and that their property, including slave property, was fair game to be seized, confiscated and expropriated. Indeed by 1863, under the Emancipation Proclamation, the Union army was recruiting slaves to become part of that army, and as a consequence the war increasingly was carried on as what has been called a "hard war" instead of a war of conciliation. It went step by step with the larger transformation of the war into a war not only for the preservation of the old Union but also for a new one purged of slavery. What role did slaves play in their own emancipation? Around 200,000 eventually fought in the Union armies. There's a strong current of interpretation now that slaves played a key role in their own emancipation by coming into Union lines from almost the beginning of the war. This forced on the Lincoln administration a series of decisions on what to do about these slaves.