Why was the American Civil War not really a civil war?

Answer 1

It depends on where you're from as to what type of answer you'll get. Few people or history books will tell you that fewer than 3% of whites in the South owned more than 20 slaves. Most Southerners will tell you it was (and still is) about states' rights, however, most Northerners will tell you it was slavery. But keep in mind, slavery wasn't an issue to Lincoln until the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln himself said that if he could preserve the Union without freeing a single slave, he would do it. The Emancipation Proclamation was just a political tool to keep Europe from assisting the South against the North.

Answer 2

Contrary to public opinion, slavery was a very minor issue at the beginning of the war. States' rights, tariffs, unfair taxation, and the north's control of congress were by far the biggest issues in 1861.

Answer 3

Thet dependes on what you mean by "support slavery". To say a country supported slavery would seem to imply they had a foreign policy of spreading slavery, or at least maintaining slavery in the countries where it was legal, and I'm not really familiar enough with ther foreign policy to say. Slavery was, however, legal in every Confederate state, and illegal in the majority of Union states. The Confederate Constitution however did ban the importation of black slaves, except from the Union.

Some Southerners did believe that, after the Civil War, the Confederacy should form an American colonial empire in Latin America. If the South won, and if the Confederacy decided to create this American empire, slavery would likely have been legal in it. It would probably depend on how much support and opposition there was to slavery among southerners by the time this American empire was formed.

Answer 4

The origin of the term "civil war" dates to a time when it referred to a battle for control of England in the 1600s. In that case, the war was for control of the entire country and not a war of independence for a region. However, the term has come to mean any war between factions or regions within a country. Thus, in the modern sense, the Civil War was very much a civil war.

Answer 5

It was the war itself that had the effect of ending slavery, where generations of peacetime abolitionism had failed.

Lincoln's mid-war Emancipation Proclamation may have looked like a human rights document, but was actually a tactical move, to keep Britain and France from supporting the Confederates. (After the Proclamation, they could not do this without looking pro-slavery themselves.)

Also, the Proclamation authorised Union troops to liberate slaves wherever they found them in their Southern campaigns. Sherman, who had many Southern friends, commented that the planters could no more regain their slaves than revive their dead grandfathers.