Book Review: Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States

A review of Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States (Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2014) by Gene Kizer, Jr.

In all my growing up years I was taught that the War Between the States was fought over slavery.

That’s what the “history” books, so called, told us and it is certainly what the “news media” has screamed about as the cause of the War for decades now. It’s what the entertainment industry has thrown at us for decades also. I still recall watching the movie Gettysburg in which a Confederate prisoner of war asked a Union officer why he was fighting and the Union officer replied “To preserve the Union and free the slaves.” The fact that the Union had no right to free anyone in another country never seemed to occur to him. I’ve often asked the question–if the Union was so hot to free the slaves then why didn’t they start out by freeing those slaves in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, all of which, for various reasons, remained in the Union. I have yet to get a satisfactory answer. Mr. Kizer has asked the same question and I doubt he has gotten one either. Part of the reason for that just might be that the War was really not about slavery to begin with.