In a recent
Huffington Post video, director-turned-historian
Gary Ross, of the film “Free State of Jones,” debunks what he calls “4
myths of the civil war era.” And since I’ve shown a propensity to answer
Mr. Ross in kind, I am quite likely the best candidate to tackle his
latest re-writing of history.
Myth #1: “The Civil War was NOT about slavery.”
To this Ross states that the war “was
absolutely about
slavery.” Absolutely? To quote Obi Wan Kenobi, “Only a Sith deals in
absolutes.” For me, at least, the conflict between North and South was
much more complex and far too complicated to lay the blame on the
placemat of one issue.
Ross’s evidence for his conclusion is the same old stuff we’ve heard
for decades: The state declarations, like Mississippi’s, that say
secession was all about slavery; and most notably the election of
Abraham Lincoln, who Ross calls an “anti-slavery” candidate, cited as
the immediate reason the South left the Union. So therefore it was all
about a threat to the institution of slavery.
Lincoln’s Republican Party, though, was not an “anti-slavery” party
and Lincoln was not an abolitionist, nor did he ever belong to an
abolitionist organization. Furthermore, the party platform in 1860 did
not contain an abolitionist plank, only a call to halt the spread of
slavery into the federal territories. Northerners heavily favored this
policy, not out of a concern for slavery, but out of a concern to keep
the territories free of black people.
