5 Myths About Slavery
1. Myth #1: There were enslaved Irish people in the American colonies.
As historian and public librarian Liam Hogan wrote: “There is unanimous agreement, based on overwhelming evidence, that the Irish were never subjected to perpetual, hereditary slavery in the colonies, based on notions of ‘race’.” The enduring myth of Irish slavery, which most often surfaces today in service of Irish nationalist and white supremacist causes, has roots in the 17th and 18th centuries when Irish laborers were derogatorily called “white slaves.” The phrase would later be employed as propaganda by the slave-owning South about the industrialized North, along with (false) claims that life was far harder for immigrant factory workers than for enslaved people.
What’s the truth? Large numbers of indentured servants did indeed emigrate from Ireland to the British colonies of North America, where they provided a cheap labor force for planters and merchants eager to exploit it. Though most crossed the Atlantic willingly, some Irish men and women—including criminals as well as simply the poor and vulnerable—were sentenced to indentured servitude in Ireland, and forcibly shipped to the colonies to carry out their sentences. But indentured servitude, by definition, came nowhere close to chattel slavery. For one thing, it was temporary; all but the most serious felons were freed at the end of their contracts. The colonial system also offered more lenient punishment for disobedient servants than enslaved people and allowed servants to petition for early release if their masters mistreated them. Most importantly, servitude wasn’t hereditary. Children of indentured servants were born free; slaves’ children were the property of their owners.
2. Myth #2: The South seceded from the Union over the issue of states’ rights, not slavery.
This myth, that the Civil War wasn’t fundamentally a conflict over slavery, would have been a surprise to the original founders of the Confederacy. In the official declaration of the causes of their secession in December 1860, South Carolina’s delegates cited “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery.” According to them, the Northern interference with the return of fugitive slaves was violating their constitutional obligations; they also complained that some states in New England tolerated abolitionist societies and allowed Black men to vote.
As James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader, wrote in the Washington Post: “In fact, Confederates opposed states’ rights—that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery.” The idea that the war was somehow not about slavery but about the issue of states’ rights was perpetuated by later generations anxious to redefine their ancestors’ sacrifices as noble protection of the Southern way of life. At the time, however, Southerners had no problem claiming the protection of slavery as the cause of their break with the Union.
3. Myth #3: Only a small percentage of Southerners owned enslaved people.
Closely related to Myth #2, the idea that the vast majority of Confederate soldiers were men of modest means rather than large plantation owners is usually used to reinforce the contention that the South wouldn’t have gone to war to protect slavery. The 1860 census shows that in the states that would soon secede from the Union, an average of more than 32 percent of white families owned enslaved people. Some states had far more slave owners (46 percent of families in South Carolina, 49 percent in Mississippi) while some had far fewer (20 percent of families in Arkansas).
But as Jamelle Bouie and Rebecca Onion pointed out in Slate, the percentages don’t fully express the extent to which the antebellum South was built on a foundation of slavery. Many of those white families, who couldn’t afford enslaved people, aspired to own slaves as a symbol of wealth and prosperity. In addition, the essential ideology of white supremacy that served as a rationale for slavery made it extremely difficult—and terrifying—for white Southerners to imagine life alongside a Black majority population that was not in bondage. In this way, many Confederates who did not enslave people went to war to protect not only slavery but to preserve the foundation of the only way of life they knew.
4. Myth #4: The Union went to war to end slavery.
On the Northern side, the rose-colored myth of the Civil War is that the blue-clad Union soldiers and their brave, doomed leader, Abraham Lincoln, were fighting to free enslaved people. They weren’t, at least not initially; they were fighting to hold the nation together. Lincoln was known to personally oppose slavery (which is why the South seceded after his election in 1860), but his chief goal was preserving the Union. In August 1862, he famously wrote to the New York Tribune: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”
Enslaved people, themselves helped make the case for emancipation as a military aim, fleeing in droves beyond the lines of approaching Union armies. Early in the conflict, some of Lincoln’s generals helped the president understand that sending these men and women back to bondage could only help the Confederate cause. By the fall of 1862, Lincoln had become convinced that acting to end slavery was a necessary step. A month after his letter to the New York Tribune, Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, which would take effect in January 1863. More a practical wartime measure than a true liberation, it proclaimed free all enslaved people in the rebel states, but not those in the border states, which Lincoln needed to remain loyal to the Union.
5. Myth #5: Black soldiers—slave and free—fought for the Confederacy.
This argument, a staple among those seeking to redefine the conflict as an abstract battle over states’ rights rather than a fight to preserve slavery, does not hold up. White officers in the Confederacy did indeed bring enslaved people to the front during the Civil War, where they cooked, cleaned and performed other labors for the officers and their regiments. But there’s no evidence to suggest that significant numbers of Black soldiers fought under the Confederate banner against Union soldiers.
In fact, until March 1865, Confederate Army policy specifically prohibited Black people from serving as soldiers. Some Confederate officers wanted to enlist enslaved people earlier: Gen. Patrick Cleburne proposed enlisting African American soldiers early in 1864, but Jefferson Davis rejected the suggestion and ordered it never to be discussed again. Finally, in the last weeks of the conflict, the Confederate government gave in to Gen. Robert E. Lee’s desperate plea for more men, allowing enslaved people to enlist in exchange for some kind of post-war freedom. A small number signed up for training, but there’s no evidence they saw action before the war’s end.