How Did Slavery Cause the Civil War: 'The War Before the War' Report

I chose to write a book report about 'The War Before the War' by Delbanco Andrew because he writes about relation on how did slavery cause the civil war. In this essay I will review this topic thought the lens of Delbanco's book because slavery has been apart of my culture as long as I can remember. Every time Black History Month occurs, we always talk about people that are significant to obtaining civil rights for black people such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and many others to be named. We never talk about slavery, or how much it took for us to get the rights that we have been previously promised due to the Emancipation Proclamation (or how the Civil Rights Movement could have been avoided). Although I do not enjoy History as much as I enjoy English, the book that I have read has been thoroughly researched to the point where I would be able to discuss the topic with my mother. She enjoys talking about how we’re still unequal in a society that proclaims that everyone is equal. I acquired my book from Barnes and Noble since they have a plethora of books in stock, including various history books as well.

I read this book in various locations, my most prominent locations of reading consisted of study hall, lunch, the bus ride to RC3, and the way back. I’ve only rarely needed to read at my house, but I do sometimes whether I like it or not. Since I knew I would be traveling during the Thanksgiving break, I saw it as an opportunity to read on the way there and back. It was an 8-hour car ride, so I figured that I could get some work done while on the way there. Doing that has prevented me from having to cram it all in within the past couple of days, and has allotted me a chance to review and reread my book to fully understand. I reread books that I do enjoy (to a certain extent), even if it’s my work from my blog.

The main historical issue that is addressed in the book is slavery. Slavery has been a big historical issue within the Americas as it has been present ever since Columbus discovered the West Indies, which we now know as the Caribbean. While it was pretty normalized back then (which would evolve to Social Darwinism, and eventually, racism), it did not mean that it made it right. As such, the American government in the late 18th and 19th centuries failed to realize that they were contradicting the words that were listed within not only the Constitution but also the Declaration of Independence. The historical issue of slavery was bad; they did not define slavery in the Constitution; it took “after more than three-quarters of a century and four years of savage civil war, the Thirteenth Amendment finally named the unnamed thing in order to destroy it”. The fact that they could not define slavery within the Constitution made it clear that there was no real target in order for Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3 (Fugitive Slave Cause) to be effective; they could go for indentured servants that have run away from service, or slaves that were born on the mainland. They also did not define who was responsible for capturing these slaves should they escape. In reality, they could mean anyone who had the will and capability to carry out those orders; however, this point of fault was fixed with a bill that allowed slave owners to seek out their property, along with opposing a fine for anyone who “knowingly and willingly obstructed the return of a runaway”. Even with the fixture of a Congress-approved bill, it was still not enough for the Civil War to have been prevented. There were a lot of things that needed to be done as to fixing the promise that should have been delivered at the end of the American Revolution; not only for American colonists but also for everyone who supported the Patriots through the war (which included black people).

The Prominent Theme: How Did Slavery Cause the Civil War

The effect of the issue of slavery in American history has shaped America’s history both positively and negatively regarding the effects it had on the population afterward. After the Revolution, James Madison proposed what would be known as the Fugitive Slave Law to the legislation. “From the viewpoints of it’s proponents [...] a new attempt to solve an old problem: slavery is a condition from which the enslaved will seek to escape”. After Congress adopted the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, slavery was banned from “these territories, which eventually organized into the states of Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin”. Since the nation was already so divided, state delegates met to clarify their mutual interests. The state delegates “produced a constitution that would weaken the state governments and strengthen the central government [...] they understood the need to make a concession to reconcile clashing interests [...] the most fateful proved to be the constitutional guarantee to slave owners of their right to reclaim escaped slaves”. Although there were provisions to help ease away from a conflict between slave states and free states by allowing slave owners to reclaim their property, along with accounting for their population through the 3/5ths Compromise and trying to enforce Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3 many times, all attempts failed to keep the nation secure and away from brewing conflict. The growing borders for slave states and free states grew with the addition of new states made things complicated. As Delbanco said, the topic “raised more questions than they answered about how to deal with human beings fleeing from slavery to freedom in the ‘United’ states”.

In Section 3 of Chapter 1, The Problem, Delbanco addresses the reason why the public dispute about fugitive slaves never came to light; the reason that he gives for the public dispute about slaves is that “they never amounted to a small fraction of the enslaved population. A survey done in 1850 [...] number of slaves missed annually are about 1,000 in an enslaved population of 3 million; 0.033 percent. Census data suggests that between 1850 and 1860, the number of slaves in the United States emancipated by their masters exceeded the number who ran away [...] by 50 percent and 400 percent”. Since the slaves did not account to the population, there was no need or reason to worry about them; after all, barely about a percent of them are missing due to the fact that the enslaved population had grown so vast and collective due to the Atlantic Slave Trade; there were already slaves over in America prior to and after the Revolution, along with many other factors for the rise of the enslaved population; birth of new slaves, in conjunction with bringing more slaves over from the Atlantic Ocean.

In the year of 1856, a year after Benjamin Drew published A North-Side View of Slavery, Samuel May Jr. came out with the literary work, The Fugitive Slave Law and Its Victims; the book itself was a list of the faults with the Fugitive Slave Law. The book contained various accounts of successful recapturing of slaves, along with the ones that did not succeed. One notable account of a slave not being recaptured was the story of Joshua Glover. He escaped from St. Louis and was held in a jail center located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Despite the men coming in to rescue Glover, there were still legal repercussions due to the case behind Glover. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled the act as “unconstitutional a judgment that had been overturned 4 years later by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Ableman vs. Booth”. Despite the case not occurring between a slave owner and a slave (rather, it was between a U.S. marshal and someone who participated in the rescue of Glover), it shows that the courts had the power to rule a law, act, or an Amendment as unconstitutional but the U.S. Supreme Court still followed the clauses and articles because it had already been approved; therefore, it should be right. Even if the Wisconsin Supreme Court thought of it as right and the U.S. Supreme Court let it slide, the other states would be upset (particularly the Southern states) because the Southern states favored slavery and the Fugitive Slave Act would have made the recollection of their slaves easier. Keeping the ruling as it was back then would have caused the evergrowing possibility of the South seceding or threatening to secede a lot faster since it would feel like the national government is playing favorites towards the Northern states and push towards trying to get rid of slavery as a whole, which would really hurt their economy (since their main source of labor was slaves).

Fort Monroe would later become a refuge for slaves; notably, three enslaved men asked Butler, who was stationed there for refuge. They wanted refuge at Fort Monroe because “when they learned that their master intended to sell them or rent them [...] perform the same kind of work in North Carolina, they fled”. Despite Butler and the Union sentries accepting the three men for refuge, Butler seemed to play into both sides of the coin. Despite being a Union commander, he also has shown signs of supporting the Confederacy. “Just the month before, he had offered troops to Maryland’s governor to put down any slave insurrection that might break out in Baltimore”. He was also “accused of turning away hundreds of black men, women, and children desperate for sanctuary at Union headquarters in the New Orleans Custom House”. Despite being a Union leader, Butler conveyed that not all Union leaders had the same ideas, nor stayed true to the cause of the Union; defeating the South for the emancipation of slaves to occur (which he claimed to be a pioneer of). It garnered my attention because we never talked much about the Civil War; we were only taught the bare minimum, so this gave me an interesting perspective on the Union leaders leading the cause for emancipated slaves. Although they were fighting for the same cause, it did not mean that all of them stuck true to that cause; Butler has shown to be a prime example of this.

Well-Researched Structure of the Book

There were footnotes for the references that did not make much sense to me come first read, along with having various illustrations and excerpts of documents throughout the non-fiction, literary work. On page 361, there is an illustration of slaves trying to seek shelter to Fortress Monroe, which was featured in Frank Leslie’s newspaper on June 8, 1861. The illustration demonstrates the importance of Fort Monroe for slaves, along with using a supporting quote from Ta-Nehisi, who spoke at a Civil War Conference at Yale University on March 29th, 2012. He describes the situation as a “good mission creep”, as the times during the Civil War were progressing into the change of the course of slavery or a simple campaign of a regime change. As the fugitive slaves would be considered as good spies for the Union, many people at the time had mixed feelings about it. On Page 362, Delbanco states that “some who hoped for a broad emancipation suggested that slaves separated from their masters [...] shipped to Haiti; others envisioned their transfer to the North as servants or industrial workers”. Throughout the book, Delbanco shows the progression of bringing the Civil War before it officially began to terminate the status of black slaves. As said on Page 1, the United States was founded in “an act of accommodation between two fundamentally different societies”, along with the statement of “it was a sad satire to call the states United, because in one half of the country slavery was basic to it’s way of life while in the other it was fading or already gone. The founding fathers tried to stitch these two nations together with no idea on how long the stitching would hold”. Surprisingly, Delbanco seemed to keep a neutral stance throughout the book, despite the obvious bias of Delbanco being an old, white, college professor that has done higher education; namely, he attended Harvard University twice, along with being a current professor for Columbia University. It should also be worth noting that he has lived the Civil Rights Movement due to his birth occurring in the year of 1952, two years before the Civil Rights Movement had begun. Although he was young at the time, I find it interesting to see that he has lived through a time period when civil rights were only granted for white people, while black people had to demand for their rights (that had been previously granted due to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863) through the years of 1954-1968. Scholars that have read Delbanco’s work have not accused the work having plagiarism in it. Instead, the book has garnered a lot of praise for the extensive details and analysis of both slavery and the Civil War, which are both depicted in his non-fiction, literary work.

Something that surprised and intrigued me was the excessive, yet intricate and complex detail that Delbanco described the punishments and cruelties of slavery and what they were subjected to if they disobeyed. Normally, we were taught throughout our history classes that slaves were beaten and harshly punished, but they never went to detail due to finding it unnecessary for the curriculum at the time. And even then, despite talking about the history of slavery with my mother and father whenever we talk about modern issues and how there is still some form of inequality when it comes to making money based on race, I still wanted to learn more since it is apart of my history and culture. Described throughout Page 33, slaves were subjected to the following punishments: “being rendered immobile by cutting of insteps or Achilles tendons, stripped and beaten with a special paddle that contained small holes [...] could be shredded by a later beating or splashed with saltwater to prolong the pain [...], branded with an iron collar (if they have previously escaped) [...], but to fighting amongst themselves, sometimes goaded into entertainment [...]”. I found it interesting because not only I learned something new (aside from what my mother has taught me along with previous knowledge from former history classes), it also opened an eye to what was really happening behind the scenes. It also interested me because other punishments were often looked over in many history books and many History classes. I knew slavery was bad (and horrible), but the book opened a gateway in seeing the actual reality of slavery and the various punishments that they suffered. Listing all of those punishments that slaves received made me think that our ancestors were tough for going through all of the pain and torment to get where we are (as a race, collectively) today in modern society.

Conclusion

I would definitely recommend this book to other classmates and fellow people of mine! Although the book was long and tedious with all of the footnotes, acknowledgments, and the index for the various images and references that are listed throughout the book, I found the book to be very historically fun, along with providing a new perspective on the Civil War and slavery. I can name a couple of people who would enjoy the book; my mom, my dad, along with some of my friends of different cultures (Christina, who is half Puerto Rican) and former teachers of mine (Mr. Jones and Coach McCombs respectively).