What caused the Civil War? Try sex with slaves

Surprising facts about America’s darkest chapter

The Republican presidential race is really heating up, so naturally they’re talking about their views on the Civil War. Nikki Haley was asked what caused it.

As a two-term governor of South Carolina, one might think she’d have a clear sense of this subject. That seems not to be true. Her reply was:

“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run — the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”

Many stepped up to specify the cause of the Civil War.

According to them, one word apparently answered the question. As President Biden posted to X: “It was about slavery.”

I myself have been very puzzled about the causes of the Civil War. Was it about ‘slavery’? What I felt sure did not happen is that white people in 1859 went to war to free Black people because of moral qualms about slavery.

I’m white. I know white people. It’s not something white people would do.

Throughout American history, certainly, white Christians have generally approved of slavery, and Evangelicals advocate for it to this day. That Christian America went to war to free slaves did not seem possible.

Wars often have very unclear beginnings.

Just as romantic couples fight over issues that are not the ‘real’ issue, to look back on wars is to see conflicts swirling in a hazy mix.

If you go looking up the cause of the Gulf War of 1990, you’d see talk of Iraq invading Kuwait so as not to have to pay back debts incurred during a war with Iran. But when interrogated years later, Sadaam Hussein said the reason was his anger at the Kuwaiti emir saying he’d bankrupt them and turn “every Iraqi woman into a $10 prostitute.”

Human motivations do tend to linger around the basic subjects, like money and sex. So what caused the Civil War?

Was it sex with slaves?

This isn’t a subject I heard about in school. But there is clearly a case that is not reflected in typical histories of the war. Try a startling 1973 paper, “The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism,” by the historian Ronald G. Walters.

He details how slavery in the Old South was often sex slavery. As he writes, white “men could indulge their erotic impulses with impunity.”

There are many suggestions that white men in the South, as one put it, “became addicted to fornication at an early age.”

Slave women working as prostitutes were common. Then white men would often have a white wife and slave wives. The legal crimes of ‘adultery’, like ‘rape’, didn’t apply since slaves weren’t recognized as persons.

White Southern women weren’t too pleased.

One woman, the sister of President James Madison, said: “We southern ladies are complimented with the name of wives; but we are only the mistresses of seraglios.” Another white wife called herself “the chief slave of the harem.”

The wife of a Confederate general writes in her diary in 1861:

“Under slavery we live surrounded by prostitutes… God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system… Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattos one sees in every family resemble the white children.”

Christians in the North were deeply horrified.

In the case made against the South, many aspects of Southern life were held up for distain. ‘Vice’ was seen everywhere: drinking, gambling, abuse of slaves. But the sex with slaves had a special horror, and was a common subject for abolitionists to discuss.

One abolitionist writes of the “polluted intercourse between the whites and the blacks, now so common, it may be said so universal, in the slave states.”

As the Liberator newspaper put it in 1858: “The sixteen slave States constitute one vast brothel.”

As another abolitionist put it:

“THE SOUTHERN STATES ARE ONE GREAT SODOM”

In 1856, Charles Sumner’s famous attack on slavery on the floor of the Senate was about sex slavery.

That’s the event which led to Sumner being caned by a Representative from South Carolina and badly injured. The historian Michael D. Pierson’s amazing 1995 paper on this subject is an exposé of a sexual subject that is typically suppressed for being “tasteless.”

Sumner discussed the sexual slavery of the South in very graphic terms. That is what generated the agitation that led to the attack on him, as the violent scene did much to advance the build-up to war.

It was a religious speech. Sumer was citing Christian sexual teachings to detstabilize the Southern claim that God approved of slavery. If the result was a lot of sex, Sumner suggested, how ‘Christian’ could slavery be?

This starts to sound like a story I can believe.

I grew up in white Baptist churches with Southern Baptist leanings. To think about this world is to think about people who live in terror of God’s punishments over illicit sexuality.

The core idea of Evangelical Christianity in general is that humans can avoid divine punishments only if they regulate sex completely, down to eliminating ‘lusty’ thoughts.

This is the story told in abolitionist commentary on sex with slaves. They believed the sex had opened America to divine wrath. One abolitionist writes that it “infects the whole land with the leprosy of Sodom.”

I realize how little I’d understood the basic terms of the lead-up to the Civil War.

I might’ve thought of an abolitionist as someone who was typically Christian, and deeply moved by the plight of slaves in the South.

I now think of an ‘abolitionist’ as a racist Christian mulling the problems of nudity of slaves and the serious violation of sex with slaves.

But the abolitionists were interested in many kinds of erotic regulation. Their core concerns were often to safeguard white Christian sexual chastity. As Walters writes:

“There was also a considerable interest among abolitionists in exercise and gymnastics, programs that, like proper diet, helped in bringing the body under control and in preventing it from interfering with man’s spiritual nature.”

The abolitionists were actually Christian ‘purity’ crusaders.

And the Southern situation gave them a serious case of religious heartburn. There was unmarried, interracial sex happening without religious punishments.

There was the problem of Christian clerics being involved. Ministers, the abolitionists said, were also given to “constant illicit intercourse.”

The very public image of Christians as “special people” whose specialness manifested in ordered sex lives was threatened.

Northern whites viewed the slaves as a threat.

The slave population was being made to reproduce as quickly as possible, since offspring were seen as commodities. The white slave owners were often busy helping sire children.

The result was a Black population producing far more rapidly than a white population. As one abolitionist writer fretted, all that childbearing would “enable them to overpower the nation.”

The biracial children further complicated the issues. To a racist system that gave white people the idea of being special because they were white, every value was in crisis.

Many issues were involved in the lead-up to the Civil War.

The problems would cross religion, politics and economics. But deep down, I wonder if it was all about sex. 🔶