This is NOT new information. It has been well known for years and years.
True enough, the Civil War was not solely about slavery. But think of this way: If one subtracts the issue of slavery as the cause for the "irrepressible conflict," what ,then, forced the country to enter into its bloodiest conflict?
The best way to put it, I think, is that slavery was a necessary, but not sole, cause of the Civil War.
Exactly.
Without slavery, there wouldn't have been an American Civil War.
It is telling that, even at the bitter end, when the South was losing, the slaveowners were still ferociously opposing arming the slaves to fight for the South.
Probably for good reason. Arm the slaves to fight FOR the South, and the slaves might very well turn those arms on the South. That would have been the sensible thing to do, if you were in a slave regiment given arms. The slave owed the Southerner NOTHING, and having a regiment of slaves on a battlefield suddenly doing a right face and firing directly into the flank of another Confederate unit, would have been precisely the sort of treachery that Southern slaveowners could reasonably foresee, and fear.
Arm slaves, and you have an army of armed slaves. What makes anyone think that an army of armed slaves is going to obey some white officer with a sword telling them to fight the Yankees whom the slaves know will liberate them?
Bullet in the back, or the face, of the white officer, and you are a regiment of free, armed black men, equally capable of shooting down white Confederates as they are of shooting you down.
There's a good military reason why Southern slaveowners rejected the idea...in addition, of course, to their racism and refusal to even consider putting blacks on an equal footing with themselves.
"But think of this way: If one subtracts the issue of slavery as the cause for the "irrepressible conflict," what ,then, forced the country to enter into its bloodiest conflict?"
The correct question would be "what anticipated consequence motivated Lincoln to send the Navy to Charleston in April of 1861?"
Northern take over of the federal government. Look at the battle in Kansas. The South simply didn't have enough whites to colonize the West. They had to bring their labor system with them. Nothing kept slavery from being introduced into Iowa except the opposition of the more numerous freesoilers.
The only way to mauntain the balance in the Senate was to break up Texas into five states, and Texans didn't want that.
General Forrest also had black combatants serve with him all during the war. Cleburne also encouraged and used black soldiers throughout the war but was passed over in rank for his beliefs.
The Henderson Scouts were a black cavalry organization from Mississippi that also served during the War on the side of the Confederacy. There is a monument to them at Canton, Mississippi.
This new book just coalesces a significant amount of information that has been published elsewhere since the Civil War.