In the fall of 1990, like millions of Americans, I watched with great fascination Ken Burns’ story of the Civil War, the bloodiest war in American History. More Americans died in the Civil War than all the other wars combined—including World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam. The 620,000 dead in a population of 30 million was equivalent to more than 6 million dead in twenty-first–century America. I wondered what these Americans had been fighting for; whether the war could have been avoided; and if not, why not. Burns referred to his television series as “a chronicle of making permanent that which was promised, but not delivered, in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” This created my intense curiosity to understand the reasons for the Civil War; for surely part of the story was being withheld from the public.
The first episode of the story began with a searing indictment of slavery. Black slaves, I learned, could not marry each other, though some went through mock ceremonies by “jumping the broom.” Their children, born and unborn, were owned by the slaveholder. These were shocking revelations for me, though I had lived in the U.S. for twenty-five years. I asked a native-born American what Americans had been fighting and dying for in the Civil War. His answer: they were fighting to free the slaves. I then asked why blacks had not been allowed to marry each other. Although my friend had gone through school and college in America, he was unaware that black people were not allowed to marry before the Civil War. I realized then I was not alone in my ignorance of American history. Still, because I could not imagine why more than a half-million whites would die to free the slaves, I made it my mission to find answers to this enigma of slavery and the Civil War.
In 1965, I had come from India to the United States to pursue my Masters in Electrical Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Because I believed the United States to be a classless, democratic society, I chose to come here rather than go to the United Kingdom, which I knew to be a colonial power that had committed many atrocities in India for more than two hundred years. Shortly after I arrived, the foreign student advisor took us on a bus tour of Washington D.C. where I visited the Lincoln Memorial, a tribute to the “Great Emancipator”; the Washington Monument, commemorating the first U.S. president; the White House; and the John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame in the Arlington Cemetery. The guide told us about the separate bathrooms and drinking fountains for blacks and whites that had once been required by the segregation laws of the land.
Back in Chicago, I got my first taste of prejudice when some dark-skinned Indian students were called “niggers,” an experience that frightened all of us. What I saw as American segregation had first come to my attention through the story of Satish Kumar, a Nuclear Disarmament and world peace activist in India in Mahatma Gandhi’s tradition. In 1962 he decided to undertake a peace walk to the nuclear world capitals—Moscow, Paris, London, and finally Washington, D.C., where he intended to present a petition to John F. Kennedy.
After much planning and help from world peace American activists, Kumar began the last leg of the journey from New York to Washington D.C. On the way he and his friend stopped at a café and ordered tea and cheese sandwiches. The waitress told them, “Sorry, we have no tea and cheese sandwiches and nothing else” before she quickly disappeared. They went to the manager, who stood at the cash register. “Can’t we have a cup of tea?” Kumar asked. “No you can’t. Please leave immediately,” he replied. “Isn’t this a café to serve public?” Kumar then asked, only to be told, “It is my café, and I serve whom I like.” When Kumar did not move fast enough, the manager opened a drawer, took out a pistol, pointed it at Kumar’s chest, and said, “Are you getting out, or should I teach you a lesson?” Soon café employees and customers gathered around and pushed both Kumar and his friend out of the café.
Although American blacks had separate drinking fountains and could not piss in the same pot as whites, the character and legal basis for American segregation was different. Before the Civil War, blacks were not considered citizens of the United States. After the Civil War, the citizenship of the blacks was recognized through Constitutional amendments; however, the Supreme Court’s 1896 “separate but equal” doctrine became the law of the land, essentially creating two classes of citizenship. In the American Legal System. skin color became their badge of separation and justification for second-class citizenship.
According to Warren Buffet, who lived in Washington D.C. as a teenager, the nation’s capital was the most segregated city in the United States. Blacks could not work as streetcar conductors, motor men, or in any but the most menial jobs. They could not enter the YMCA, eat in most restaurants, rent hotel rooms, or buy theater tickets. A prominent black man who experienced Jim Crow laws noted, “blacks had to carry their urine bottles with them because there were no public facilities available to relieve themselves.” Even dark-skinned diplomats, embarrassed and scandalized by this provincialism encountered nowhere else in the world, had to be chaperoned.
When I was completing my MBA at the University of Pittsburg, reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X was a course requirement. In 1998 Time magazine named it one of the ten most influential nonfiction books of the twentieth century. Malcolm X, a mulatto born as Malcolm Little to a black mother and white father, changed his name because it constantly reminded him of white Americans whom he indicted in the harshest terms for their crimes against black Americans. While serving an eight-to-ten-year prison sentence for a number of criminal activities, he became a member of the Nation of Islam because of its message of equality of all men before God, whether rich or poor, and independent of skin color.
After earning my MBA, I was sponsored for the green card by Westinghouse Electric Corporation and had to register for the Selective Service draft. As a research engineer, I was routinely eligible for draft deferment during the Vietnam War; but just a month before my twenty-sixth birthday, my deferment was revoked and I was called to take a physical exam. I not only feared being sent to Vietnam because of war’s death and destruction, but I had never touched a gun and believed in the non-violence principle of Mahatma Gandhi. Colleagues at work advised me to submit an appeal to the draft board.
It became obvious that getting a draft deferment, especially for whites in colleges, was a routine affair without negative consequences (as would be confirmed when both Bill Clinton and the Junior George Bush escaped the draft yet went on to be elected President). But the rules for blacks were different. For example, World Heavyweight Champion and Olympic gold medalist Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Clay, Jr. refused to be conscripted into the U.S. military, based on his religious beliefs and opposition to the Vietnam War. His conversion to Islam so angered the military establishment and the government that he was arrested and found guilty on draft evasion charges, stripped of his boxing title, had his boxing license suspended, and was barred from boxing for nearly four years while his appeal worked its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Although his appeal was successful, the message for the blacks was clear: in spite of the Supreme Court’s Brown v Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, blacks could become targets for racial discrimination..
In the 1970s I was sent to Brazil as a consultant to the Sao Paulo Metro system, which has a carbon copy of the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit control system. While living there for seven years, I married a Brazilian girl whose parents owned three coffee farms and came to understand a bit about the history and social life in Brazil. As a colony, Brazil achieved independence from Portugal in 1822. Slavery in Brazil shaped the country’s social structure and ethnic landscape. During the colonial epoch and for over six decades after the 1822 independence, slavery was a mainstay of the Brazilian economy, especially in mining and sugar cane production. Brazil obtained thirty-five percent of all enslaved Africans traded in the Atlantic Slave trade.
Although slavery in mainland Portugal was abolished in 1761, it continued in Brazil until its final abolition in 1888. From the late eighteenth century to the 1830s, slaves were owned by the upper and middle classes, by the poor, and even by other slaves. The foreign slave trade was abolished by 1850, and new laws controlled slave traffickers and speculators. Then, by 1871, the sons of the slaves were freed. The Paraguayan War contributed to end slavery, since slaves enlisted in exchange for freedom. The point is that Catholic Brazil could abolish slavery gradually without a violent and bloody Civil War. Also Brazil had no need for separate but equal laws because slaves of various shades of black and white were always considered human beings and citizens entitled to the equal protection of laws. During the Carnival every February, for example, I witnessed this mixing of the races with no boundaries. My experience in Brazil confirmed that even though whites controlled the power structure and the economy, there was no need for separate public facilities for the races.
My experience in America was completely different, and I was even more certain that 620,000 white Americans did not give their lives in the Civil War just to free the slaves. My mission and obsession was to find verifiable answers to this enigma of slavery and the Civil War. To do so, I first became a member of all the public libraries in the San Francisco Bay Area and began checking out history books related to slavery and the Civil War. I soon came across Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen, which suggested that American Protestant Slavery was unique because it denied the humanity of the black slaves and asserted that they could never be freed. In contrast, Catholic slavery implemented in South American countries such as Brazil acknowledged the humanity of the slaves. Although Catholic slavery could be as brutal as Protestant slavery, because it defined slaves as citizens included in the legal structure of the state, it could be abolished gradually—without Civil War. My experience in Brazil led me to accept Tannenbaum’s interpretation as a reasonable hypothesis. To investigate this theory, I followed every lead applicable by taking full advantage of the interlibrary loan system. At first, I got more questions than answers. Once the puzzle pieces began to connect, I decided to put what I discovered into writing to benefit others interested in American history and affected by the Constitution of the United States.
My major insight was the discovery of the American class system, which became the slave capitalism paradigm of the Constitution. Once the legal status of slaves was defined by skin color, the white race automatically divided into slaveholders, non-slaveholders, and poor whites. The slaveholder was, of course, the beneficiary of Black Protestant Slavery; but because he could never free his slaves, he was obligated to feed and shelter them, even in sickness and old age. On the other hand, the white non-slaveholder became a victim of slavery because he had to compete with the slaves in commodity markets, which often reduced his economic status to the level of a black slave. This class system created dilemmas for the races that are examined and documented extensively in the book.
Another way to find answers to the slavery enigma and the Civil War is to follow the actions and speeches of the participants at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, as well as Presidents, members of Congress, Governors, and Supreme Court Justices during the seventy-year period leading up to the Civil War. In addition, writings and actions of Presidents Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan, and Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney illuminate the issues in a straightforward manner.
Finally, to get to the bottom of the issues and controversies of slavery and the Civil War, it is only necessary to follow Abraham Lincoln’s articulate speeches and debates, and his writings leading to his election as President of the United States.
In the end, 150 years after the Civil War, all the dots have been identified in thousands of books examining these subjects from every angle. My effort was to connect the dots and follow leads provided by the Constitution and the players in the greatest drama of American History. My objective in writing this book is to inform and promote understanding of why the South seceded from the Union, why Lincoln did not let them get away with it, and why 620,000 Americans died in the Civil War. By reading on, you will learn why the Civil War was inevitable and why ordinary Americans were ready to fight and die to protect their rights under the decidedly undemocratic slaveholders’ Constitution. You will get answers for frequently asked questions about slavery and the Civil War—questions and answers that Ken Burns omitted in his series.