Stardate 20040507.1357

(Captain's log): Alan writes:

I was wondering if you could clarify something for me. In my high school studies I seem to remember that the US Civil war started over rules and regulations that the Federal government was attempting to implement on to the states. The said states disagreed with that and stated that the federal government had no right to tell a state government what to do or what laws to make. Slavery happened to be one of these laws.

Is this still happening and if it is, what prevents us from another Civil War? If is not happening, what was put into place to prevent it again? Or have I completely missed the mark?

I answered him by email, but I felt that my answer was inadequate and started expanding on it in another letter, and then decided to make it into a post. Here goes.

In history it's rarely the case that any major historical event such as a war can be attributed to one single straightforward "cause", and sometimes it's difficult to even explicate multiple causes. (World War I is a particularly good, or bad, example of that. It's really hard to explain just what "caused" WW I, in terms of explaining just why an assassination in the Balkans set off a chain of events which ultimately left millions of men dead.)

Was the Civil War about "states rights"? Or was it about slavery? The only real answer to both questions is "yes and no."

Is "it" still happening, and if so what prevents another Civil War? The answer I sent Alan, which I decided was inadequate, was "The US Army. (I'm not joking.)" That's actually not the right answer.

The US Army prevented the last attempt at secession. If any future president faced such a challenge, he would use the military. But that won't happen.

Lincoln set a precedent all future presidents would feel compelled to follow. The Civil War was the most destructive war in the history of the US, costing more military dead than any other we've ever fought, if one includes both sides. And it caused incomparably more civilian deaths and overall destruction within the US than all other wars we've fought combined.

According to this page, there were about 558,000 military deaths in the Civil War, compared to about 407,000 in WWII. (The numbers are credited to Al Nofi, who I respect enormously.)

The Civil War certainly included the most savage battles Americans have ever fought, in which tens of thousands of men were killed or wounded in days.

No president could ever ignore that, or decide to permit that which this nation sacrificed so much to prevent in the 1860's. Any president facing a similar crisis would feel Lincoln's presence behind him, watching what he did. And he would feel the shades of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, waiting to see whether he would choose to waste their sacrifice. That's a great weight. Sometimes the dead speak very eloquently with their silence.

No upstart state politician will ever doubt that, either. But there have been cases where it was tested, such as in Arkansas in 1957.

In 1954 the Warren Court unanimously issued the now-classic decision "Brown vs. Board of Education", which declared that "separate but equal" segregated schools were unconstitutional. Counsel for the plaintiff in that case was Thurgood Marshall, and his argument was taped. A few years ago that tape was released, and I heard it on the radio. It was extraordinary, and it was profound, and it was deeply moving. Marshall was a magnificent orator. The core of Marshall's argument was that segregated schools were just as unfair to whites as to Negroes and harmed whites just as much. If you have the opportunity, I urge you to listen to it; just reading it isn't the same. Marshall eventually was the first black to become an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, and he well deserved it.

Based on that SCOTUS decision, a lower federal court ordered an end to segregation in Arkansas schools, and in 1957 the governor there defied the court, and called out the National Guard to prevent black students from entering a white school. President Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne.

It certainly helped that Eisenhower had been a top military officer before being elected president, but I think that the main reason Eisenhower felt he could do this, and perhaps felt that he had to (rather than using lesser, slower means of resolving the situation), was because of the Civil War. When Governor Faubus attempted to use military power to defy a Federal court order, Eisenhower used military power to enforce that same court order. Military defiance by a state could not be tolerated, no matter what motivated it.

The proximate disagreement in the Civil War was about slavery, but in a sense the real issue was about the relative roles of the states and the Federal government, and the degree to which states were required to subordinate themselves to the Federal government, and that's how it's often presented (and how Alan remembers it). But it's quite common for those who try to explain the Civil War in those t