Wow, so many messages were included in my last Va-Hist digest, I don't know
which one I am replying to. But the discussion over slavery and the Civil War
made me think of a passage in David Blight's "Race and Reunion" in which he
quoted Mosby on slavery and the war. The quotes stuck with me, in part
because they are kind of funny, and in part because there is some truth there
too:

From David Blight, Race and Reunion, p. 298
"Most importantly, Mosby contributed some of the most candid expressions by
any ex-Confederate about the place of slavery in the South's cause. He
remained hostile or ambiguous on racial equality. But while a former
slaveowner himself, he viewed slavery apologetics by the 1890s as the most
debilitating element of the Lost Cause. 'I don't go to reunions,' he told an
old comrade, 'because I can't stand the speaking.' he despised the
'oratorical nonsense' of so many speakers who recycled the ideas that the
South neither fought for nor was responsible for slavery. Referring to one
such speech, Mosby reacted: 'Why not talk about witchcraft if as he said,
slavery was not the cause of the war. I always understood that we went to war
on account of the one thing we quarrelled with the North about. I never heard
of any other cause of quarrel than slavery.' Mosby spurned virtually all Lost
Cause arguments about slavery. 'I can't see how setting the negroes free
could have saved the Union,' he remarked in 1894, 'unless slavery was the
cause of the breach.' And in 1902, he left a telling guide to all lost causes
in a letter to a member of his battalion. 'Men fight from sentiment,' wrote
Mosby. 'After the fight is over they invent some fanciful theory on which
they imagine that they fought.'"

One thing that often gets lost in the discussion of slavery as the causation
of the Civil War is the extent to which the reach of slavery pervaded so many
aspects of southern life... economic, political, social, racial, etc., that
threatening slavery as a labor system threatened other parts of the system as
well. (I think historian James Oakes discusses this idea at some depth in his
book _Slavery and Freedom_.)  An outside assault on slavery could potentially
be perceived as threatening a larger "southern way of life," in which
non-slaveholders considered themselves invested.

But another respondant to Va-Hist made the excellent point that the soldiers
who serve in wars are often motivated for much different reasons than the
leaders who got the country into the war in the first place. So discussing
causation often gets tangled in trying to sort out the national vs. the
individual.

Michelle Krowl
[log in to unmask]
Arlington, Virginia

To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions
at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html