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Before the Civil War, slavery was very common in the South. They were not treated as human beings, but as property and that led to exploitation and oppression of the slaves. ... The use of slaves in the South were a lot more ordinary than in the North, mostly due to the need of work that had to be done on plantations.

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The Black Codes, sometimes called Black Laws, were laws governing the conduct of African Americans. The best known of them were passed in 1865 and 1866 by Southern states, after the American Civil War, in order to restrict African Americans' freedom

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In the South, the economy was based on agriculture. The soil was fertile and good for farming. They grew crops like cotton, rice, and tobacco on small farms, because of this great need, the farmers began to depend on slave labor instead of trying to hire people to work in their fields.

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The South fought to defend slavery. The south wanted to keep slavery and not affect the union but the north wanted to end slavery because they were lead by Abe Lincoln. The south needed slavery because it benefits them and their crop growing.

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The Civil War that raged across the nation from 1861 to 1865 was the violent conclusion to decades of diversification. Gradually, throughout the beginning of the nineteenth century, the North and South followed different paths, developing into two distinct and very different regions.

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The North was not only fighting to preserve the Union, it was fighting to end slavery.

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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IT IS GENERALLY accepted that the Civil War was the most important event in American history. Yet, as two recent controversies remind us, we disagree on what that war was about.

The question of whether the nation should make a formal apology for slavery has brought forth from such authorities as former history professor Newt Gingrich and columnist George F. Will the declaration that we fought the war to end slavery.

Meanwhile, across the South, where battles continue over the display of Confederate flags and related symbols, white defenders of their "heritage" argue that the Civil War was not about slavery but about states' rights and "Southern independence."

Orlando Sentinel columnist Charley Reese has gone so far as to assert that the Confederacy was fighting for "liberty."

All of these beliefs are based on misreadings of history, and, taken together, they have the reality exactly backward. The Civil War was not fought to end slavery; it was fought to defend slavery.

The confusion stems from the failure to realize that the two sides in a war need not be fighting over the same issue.

The objective of the North was not to end slavery but to preserve the Union. What the South sought was not to end the Union but to preserve slavery.

Few major historical events can properly be attributed to a single cause. But it is accurate to say that slavery was the cause of the Civil War.

There would have been no secession, no Confederacy and no war had the South not been intent on maintaining its "peculiar institution." Slavery was the raison d'etre of the Confederacy. The "liberty" the Confederacy sought to preserve was the liberty to own human beings.

The question that must be asked of those who believe that the Confederacy's purpose was to defend states' rights is this: Just which rights of the states were so important that they were worth splitting the nation in two and fighting a terrible war over, at the cost of 600,000 lives?

Can anyone seriously contend that the tariff or any other matter of disagreement between the states and the federal government, besides slavery, would have produced majority sentiment for secession anywhere, save possibly South Carolina?

The only "right" that Southern states were sufficiently intent on perpetuating that they would destroy the Union and fight a war over was the "right" to hold people as property - and that is in no sense a right.

The Confederate flag never has been a symbol of states' rights. The state powers it has represented during and since the Civil War - slavery, segregation, lynching, racism - are all states' wrongs.

Many whites, particularly young whites in the South, say that they should not be blamed for what their ancestors did. Fair enough. But if they want to be emancipated from that legacy, they must reject it.

The first symbolic step for the younger generation in separating itself from the wrongs of its forebears is not to apologize for slavery but to stop venerating a heritage that was centered on slavery and a flag that came into existence to represent the defense of slavery.

It is time for white Southerners finally and unequivocally to accept the obvious truth:

The Lost Cause was a bad cause.

It also is time for other white Americans to recognize that, although the cause for which so many Northern soldiers died was a good one (preservation of the Union), it wasn't about ending slavery.

Leaving aside the question of whether a national apology for slavery at this late date would be wise or meaningless, this much can safely be said:

The Southern cause in the Civil War is part of what the nation would be apologizing for, but the Northern cause in that war did not constitute such an apology.

Robert S. McElvaine teaches history at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. He wrote this article for the Los Angeles Times.

Pub Date: 8/31/97

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Civil War wasn't to end slavery Purposes: The South fought to defend slavery. The North's focus was not to end slavery but to preserve the union. The slavery apology debate misses these facts.

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IT IS GENERALLY accepted that the Civil War was the most important event in American history. Yet, as two recent controversies remind us, we disagree on what that war was about. The question of whether the nation should make a formal apology for slavery has brought forth from such authorities as former history professor Newt Gingrich and columnist George F.

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His election served as the immediate impetus for the outbreak of the Civil War. Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation freed about 20,000 of slaves in Confederate-held territory, and established emancipation as a Union war goal.

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Gregory Downs is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author of the forthcoming "The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic."

Everyone knows that Confederates fought the Civil War to preserve and extend the slave system that produced their wealth and shaped their society. But what, exactly, did white Northerners fight for? In her often-riveting "Armies of Deliverance," Elizabeth R. Varon answers that question in a new way, with important ramifications for how we understand the nation's most significant conflict, the meaning of anti-slavery politics and the disappointments of postwar Reconstruction.

Because Confederates launched the first assaults of the Civil War, and because Confederates so eagerly trumpeted their defenses of slavery, Northern motivations can seem irrelevant. Confederates attacked the United States, and the United States fought back. Yet historians have debated Northern motivations vigorously over the past few decades, because those motivations tell us a good deal about why the Civil War came, what kind of war it was and what its impact would be upon U.S. society. One loosely defined group of historians argues that most white Northerners aimed primarily to restore the Union: to preserve the nation and not to transform it. Other historians, meanwhile, claim that white Northerners generally sought to extend freedom by creating a new nation without slavery. The answer turns on which Northerners one examines - common soldiers, female teachers and nurses, free black activists, Ohio Valley politicians, officers in high command - and how one evaluates inherently slippery evidence about motivation.

This debate has real ramifications for how we understand the Civil War era. Did secessionists have genuine reason to fear white Northern intentions? Was the war restrained, or did it approach a total war? And did the Civil War fundamentally transform the lives of the 4 million enslaved Americans and undermine the nation's foundations in white supremacy? Historians who emphasize the desire to restore the union generally argue that secessionists miscalculated white Northern intentions and that many white Northerners saw their job as returning, not remaking, white Southerners - even secessionists. Thus, they argue, white Northerners favored restraint during and after the Civil War to ease the reintegration of white Southerners. Those historians who emphasize the freedom story are more likely to see Southern secession as a reasoned response to transformative Northern goals, to trace increasingly bold war measures and to narrate ambitious plans for national re-creation in Reconstruction.

The argument between scholars on either side of the union and freedom debate is important but in danger of becoming repetitive. So it is a relief to watch Varon strive elegantly to escape that binary perspective and establish her own interpretive framework for white Northern motivations. Her answer is deliverance. Christians, North and South, looked to biblical stories of deliverance to explain how society could be transformed. For Confederates, deliverance was simple: They would be delivered from the tyranny of Northern political opinion. Enslaved people similarly saw deliverance in stark terms: escape from the tyranny of masters.

But how did white Northerners understand deliverance? Varon argues that many of them believed that white Southerners needed deliverance from their "scheming leaders," the despotic planters who shut down public debate and dominated the political system. Once freed, the great mass of white Southerners would begin to think for themselves and, ineluctably, emulate the prosperous and free North. White Southerners' political independence would then free the nation from the sway that planters exercised over politics and policy, a sway Northerners denounced as a despotic slave power. Deliverance, Varon writes, "resolved the tensions within the Union over war aims" between conservative Democrats and anti-slavery activists because a language of deliverance "could serve so many ends" - it supported everything from conciliatory war measures to abolition.

The imprecise nature of deliverance allows Varon to fold parts of both the union and freedom arguments into her own. Freedom scholars are right that the North intended to remake the South, but union scholars are right that the North didn't act from a desire to free slaves so much as a will to free the South's white farmers and small planters from the tyranny of the slaveholding owners of vast plantations.

Varon's argument is at times more novel than persuasive. Although she is a distinguished historian of antebellum politics, she rushes past the coming of the Civil War; the conflict is underway already in Chapter 1. This might be fitting in a work about wartime tactics but less so in a book about deeper motivations. The Civil War was an ideological conflict, developed over decades of painstaking political and intellectual fights that she largely skims past. Those conflicts shaped the concepts of deliverance, freedom and union. To understand the power of deliverance, we would need to see more about how the concept developed over time.

So, too, does Varon rush through her argument about the consequences of the Civil War. Deliverance may have fueled white Northern overconfidence in the efficacy of Reconstruction, and unconcern for freedpeople may have spawned apathy. But still, deliverance cannot explain the boldness and resilience of Republican support for civil and voting rights, nor can Republicans' mixed motivations tell us much about the efficacy of their steps toward emancipation in 1861, abolition in 1865 and enfranchisement in 1867. A thorough reckoning with Reconstruction must engage with other issues: the fog of war, the idealistic vision of a self-perpetuating democracy, the resilience of local power, the weakness of the federal government. And above all that lies what seems the ultimate explanation for the disappointments of Reconstruction: an unbearably bloody white Southern counterrevolution. After all that is taken into account, it is not clear how much is left for notions of deliverance to explain.

While Varon doesn't quite deliver on her argument about deliverance, she narrates battles and campaigns with an unusually deft, at times even gorgeous touch. This is some of the finest battle writing around, and a sweeping analysis of both United States and Confederate strategy and tactics. While the book can't displace James M. McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom," still perhaps the single greatest volume ever written on the Civil War or even on United States history, it belongs beside it on the shelf. Given the volume of writing about the Civil War over the past 150 years, that is no small feat.

Armies of Deliverance

A New History of the Civil War

By Elizabeth R. Varon

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Review | Why did the North fight the Civil War?

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Gregory Downs is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author of the forthcoming "The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic." Everyone knows that Confederates fought the Civil War to preserve and extend the slave system that produced their wealth and shaped their society.