Much evidence from that time shows that the secession of seven Deep South states was caused mostly by concerns over the future of slavery. When Mississippi seceded, she published a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Include and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.” It stated:
“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery... Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money [the estimated total market value of slaves], or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property.”
As a somewhat related note, the term "The War of Northern Agression" was not used until the 1950s.
https://thereconstructionera.com/war-of-northern-aggression-civil-war-war-between-the-states-the-eternal-argument/
War of Northern Aggression, Civil War, War Between the States…The Eternal Argument (or was it?)
One of the most tiresome aspects of writing about the Civil War and Reconstruction period is encountering people who insist that the “real name” of the war is “The War of Northern Aggression.” If you spend any time on Civil War social media you will get “schooled” by people telling you that for the last 150 years the conflict has been called by that long name in the South. This, of course, is nonsense.
One way to assess when a word or phrase made it into general usage in books is to consult Google’s Ngram Viewer. If you are not familiar with Ngram, it is a tool that tells you how many books published in a given year contain a specific word or term. You can find the tool here. Here is an explanation of how it works.
While the Ngram viewer has some flaws, it is a great way to see when a word or term enjoyed popularity in published books. As you can see from the Ngram below, “War of Northern Aggression” was hardly used at all during the first eight decades after Fort Sumter was fired on. It only became popular in the 1950s when the Civil Rights Movement began to take hold. Southern segregationists used this distorting term for the Civil War because it bolstered their arguments that the effort to enforce the Civil Rights of Blacks in the 1950s and 1960s was a continuation of the war of 1861-1865. In this view, African Americans did not want Civil Rights, it was Northerners stirring up trouble, just as in 1865 the Yankees had imposed freedom on the slaves!
If you want to see the original Ngram for “War of Northern Aggression, here it is.
One thing is clear, the term “War of Northern Aggression” was not really used in books before 1950. The first time I saw it used in newspapers was in 1954, the year the Supreme Court issued its desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education. People may truthfully claim to have heard the phrase in their childhoods, as long as those “wonder years” were after “Massive Resistance” to Civil Rights had begun.
So what terms were used during and soon after the Civil War? Obviously, “The Civil War,” or variations thereof were the most common. What was the next most popular of these alternatives? You might think it was “The War Between the States.” The Ngram viewer tells a different story. For decades, the most popular name (after “Civil War”) was “The War of the Rebellion.” You can see a comparative Ngram of “War of the Rebellion,” “War Between the States,” and “War of Northern Aggression” below.
The green line is for “War of the Rebellion,” the most popular alternative name. You can see that the red line for “War Between the States” only rises above “War of the Rebellion” in the 1920s, during the emergence of the Second Ku Klux Klan. By the way, “War of Northern Aggression” is the laughingly flaccid line right along the bottom. You can view this Ngram here.
So, when someone demands that you use the term “War of Northern Aggression,” rest assured that they are parroting the segregationist historical revisionists of the 1950s, not their Confederate ancestors. Even real Confederate knew that was a dumb name!
A more historically accurate term than “War of Northern Aggression is “The Slaveholders’ War.” This was a somewhat popular name for the war until the 1890s, when Blacks were increasingly written out of histories of the period.
Addendum
I did a search of newspaper databases as well and found that The War of Northern Aggression begins to be used in 1954, the same year as the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In 1955 it gets wider attention when a press release from the State of South Carolina uses that phrase. Here is an article from the Richmond Times Dispatch published on March 25, 1955 on page 18 that originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post which clearly identifies The War of Northern Aggression as a neologism, or new phrase.
As the writer makes clear, the Civil War had many names before 1955, but The War of Northern Aggression was not one of them.
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