Prevalence of white supremacy

The argument

Those who hold that slavery caused the American Civil War point to the ideology that made slavery worth a war to the people who fought one. White Southerners did not treat slavery as a regrettable economic arrangement to be defended on narrow commercial grounds. They vehemently believed in the natural inferiority of non-white races, and they shaped both their culture and their political institutions around that assumption. A belief of that kind does not sit alongside a society's other commitments; it organises them, which is why the question of slavery could not be separated from the question of who the South took itself to be. The Confederacy said as much in its own voice. Its Vice President, Alexander H. Stephens, singled out the proposition that slavery “was in violation of the laws of nature” and the accompanying “assumption of the equality of the races” — the view he attributed to Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers — and declared it fundamentally wrong. The significance of that repudiation, on this reading, is that it was offered not as a defence of a labour system but as a correction of the founding premise of the republic. The Confederacy was being built on the opposite principle, and its leadership said so plainly rather than reaching for some alternative grievance. The same ideology explains why emancipation was experienced as a threat rather than as a reform. Southerners were deeply concerned that freeing the enslaved would lead to miscegenation and ultimately to the destruction of the white race. A section that understands abolition in those terms is not in a disagreement that could be negotiated away; it takes itself to be defending its own survival. Where white supremacy is that prevalent, slavery is the cause of the conflict, because slavery is the institution in which the belief is embodied.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Southern politicians that initiated secession were primarily driven by the Southern economy's need for slaves and by how Northern politicians sought to increase their relative political power by stripping Southerners of their rights.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Slavery was moral due as it was a way to bring slaves into civilization proper. [Rejecting P2] Racism was rampant across all of the United States. Southerners adopted slavery due to the need for agrarian labor.