by Nancy Reagin
The American Civil War is possibly the best parallel for the civil wars that afflict the Star Wars galaxy. There is no mastermind to rival Palpatine, of course, and his particular brand of political skullduggery was absent. Instead, the American Civil War is understood by serious scholars and students of history to have resulted, in complex ways, from slavery—and this was universally understood by Americans during the Civil War but forgotten by later generations. Nevertheless, the two plot lines of Star Wars and the U.S. Civil War contain some striking parallels in the events leading up to the outbreak of war. In both the Star Wars galaxy and America’s history, civil war sparked atrocities and featured charismatic freedom fighters, even as it divided and destroyed families and communities.
A street barricade in Moscow during the Russian Revolution—fighting filled the streets of many Russian cities.
“Have You Come to Free Us?”: The Roots of Civil Wars
The Star Wars saga includes two different civil wars. The first of these involves the Trade Federation, later included in the Confederacy of Independent Systems, fighting to separate from the Galactic Republic. This struggle is shown in The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith. In the remaining three films, A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi, a different but equally relevant civil war takes place, as individuals and star systems that are subjects of the Empire rebel. The Empire has ruled its subjects with absolutist and arbitrary force. Both of these civil wars echo events that have taken place in our own history, although in vastly different ways: “It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire . . . Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy.”3
As the opening text to A New Hope declares, the war between the Alliance to Restore the Republic and the Empire is a civil war. From Princess Leia Organa’s viewpoint, the Alliance represents the true political traditions of the galaxy that were abandoned with Palpatine’s illegitimate seizure of power. Subverting and corrupting the Republic from within, his Empire has become a force for evil and oppression. For Darth Vader and his master, Leia is the illegitimate force: a spy, a Rebel, and a traitor. This dispute seems purely about politics and ideology. The Alliance to Restore the Republic, as its name suggests, seeks a return to the old form of galactic government and the freedoms it protected. The Empire fights to maintain its control over the galaxy and all within it. In many ways, this deep divide over the ideals of legitimate government and how far centralized governments should control regional rulers resembles the split seen between the North and the South in the later stages of the American Civil War.
Compare this divide with the coming of an earlier civil war in the galaxy: “Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlaying star systems is in dispute. Hoping to resolve the matter with a blockade of deadly battleships, the greedy Trade Federation has stopped all shipping to the small planet of Naboo.”4
The opening words of the Phantom Menace set the tone for the Clone Wars to come. The conflict in the films begins with an economic motivation: in order to overcome the Republic’s confiscatory taxation, force is necessary.5 This has parallels in the complaints made by some colonists before the outbreak of the American Revolution: “No taxation without representation.” Similarly, the American Civil War resulted from attempts of the slaveholding class of the South to avoid any risk that the democratically elected government of the United States would confiscate the slaveholders’ property or endanger their political power. When Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860, the losers in a national political election refused to accept the result of the election for the first time in American history. The winners, the Republican Party, promised to both halt slavery’s expansion into new territories and to protect it in the states that had slavery—but this was nonetheless a threat to the means by which slave states maintained their wealth.
The American Civil War was thus caused by slavery and its course greatly shaped by the wartime actions of the slaves themselves—but it was not a war sparked by moral concerns with ending slavery. As the war began, nobody in the Lincoln administration professed a desire for a war that attacked slavery; instead, Lincoln proclaimed that he would not touch the rights of slaveholders in the existing slave states. Similarly, the Jedi and the Republic were willing to turn a blind eye to the moral issue of slavery, at least in Anakin’s day, as demonstrated in this exchange between Anakin and Qui-Gon Jin:
As a Jedi, Qui-Gon Jinn has the Republic, not the abolition of slavery, as his first priority. (The Phantom Menace)
Lincoln was reluctant to take up the antislavery cause, even when the Civil War began.
Anakin Skywalker: I had a dream I was a Jedi. I came back here and freed all the slaves . . . have you come to free us?
Qui-Gon Jin: No, I’m afraid not.
Of course, there were plenty of moral arguments against the continuation of slavery before the Civil War voiced by a small Northern minority, the Abolitionists. The Abolitionists were for the immediate emancipation of all slaves in the United States and didn’t want to reimburse slave owners for even a penny of their lost “property.” In contrast, Southern leaders were devoted to protecting slavery above all else: after the election of Abraham Lincoln as president in November 1860, they declared their states independent of the United States, in order, they said, to protect and perpetuate the slavery that was the foundation of their wealth and property. The rest of the United States refused to accept any act of secession, and civil war resulted. For the seceding states, it was a war to protect and expand slavery, and for the North, it began as a war to preserve the Union. Yet over time, the North’s war objectives changed, and it became a war of liberation, a war to save the Union by destroying slavery. Thus secession, meant to preserve slavery, produced a war that the North concluded could not be won without destroying slavery.6
Slavery was deeply rooted in both the American political system and in the economy of the Star Wars galaxy, however, and it was not easy to uproot.
Padmé Amidala: I can’t believe there is still slavery in the galaxy. The Republic’s anti-slavery laws . . .
Shmi Skywalker: The Republic doesn’t exist out here.
Leading up to the nineteenth century, the most extensive system of slavery in history—now called “Atlantic slavery”—developed in the Western Hemisphere under European colonialism. In Africa, countless wars were fought for the purpose of enslaving people and selling them into the transatlantic commerce in human beings. The trade in human beings was the most profitable and strategically influential commerce in the world—much as petroleum is today. People from Africa and goods produced by slave labor on New World plantations, including sugar, indigo, rice, tobacco, and coffee, were the dominant world commodities. Profits from slavery yielded about a third of the capital formation of Britain in the 1770s, and slave-grown products contributed immeasurably to the rising standard of living in the centers of the empire.7 In large part, the capital that financed industrialization was produced from slave labor and slave trading. Any proposal for the universal and immediate emancipation of all slaves seemed foolish and irrational to many: abolitionists seemed to be calling for a reduction in society’s wealth, just as foolish as Padmé’s expectation that antislavery laws will be enforced across the Republic.
After the invention of the cotton gin (a simple machine that extracted the fiber of the cotton plant from the burr mixed with seeds and thereby made the fiber usable) in 1793, cotton plantations spread quickly across the South. The cotton plantations were entirely dependent on slave labor, just as the vast Hutt empire relies on cheap slave labor, and slavery grew fast in the United States: in terms of territory, in its political and economic importance, and in the number of slaves. Cotton quickly became the key product for the new industrial
factories of England and New England alike. Consequently, cotton rapidly became the principal crop of the slave South and by far the most valuable product of the entire U.S. economy.
Working a cotton gin.
By the 1830s, cotton cultivation had spread, with slaveholders and slaves, westward from the original states into the new Gulf states of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, as well as into east Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. Cotton so dominated the economy and politics of the country that it was called “King Cotton.” Senator James Hammond proclaimed the power of the South and its master crop in 1858: “The slaveholding South is now the controlling power of the world” and “No power on earth dares . . . to make war on cotton. Cotton is king.”8 The Trade Federation and the Empire display similar levels of arrogance in their own time.
“Begun the Clone War Has”: How Wars Divide Republics and Empires
Civil wars don’t always begin with major confrontations or pitched battles. The Clone Wars might have opened at Geonosis, but the origins of the conflict date back at least to the Blockade of Naboo and the taxation of trade routes before that. The “Shot Heard Round the World” in Lexington, Massachusetts, where American militia held their own against British troops, happened more than a year before the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. Similarly, the American Civil War started small, in one specific state. South Carolina was the first of the slaveholding states to withdraw from the United States after Lincoln’s election, passing its “Ordinance of Secession” on December 20, 1860. A few days later, the state’s secession convention adopted the “South Carolina Declaration of the Causes of Secession,” which depicted Lincoln’s election as an “abolitionist” threat to slave owners’ continued right to possess slaves, the form of property deemed indispensable to South Carolina’s prosperity. With Lincoln’s oath of office, proclaimed the Declaration, “The guarantees of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The Slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.” Consequently, South Carolina declared it had dissolved its ties to the United States and “resumed her position among the nations of the world, as a separate and independent state.”
Other slave states followed South Carolina’s lead, but the Northern states and their elected officials did not willingly allow the United States of America to be dissolved. Despite this, it wasn’t until April 1861 that the war started with the attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The first pitched battle took place at the First Battle of Bull Run, two months later. From this perspective, the long gap between the isolated actions of the Trade Federation on Naboo and the Battle of Geonosis makes perfect sense: it often takes a long time to turn from civil dispute to civil war.
John Calhoun, the South Carolina senator who staunchly defended slavery and who championed South Carolina’s right to defy federal laws.
Count Dooku, leader of the Separatist Confederacy of Independent Systems. (Attack of the Clones)
In the Star Wars universe, the formation of the Separatist Confederacy and its slow road to civil war happen in a very similar fashion to the rise of the Confederate States of America. After the crisis on Naboo detailed in The Phantom Menace, the Trade Federation becomes cynical about the Republic and concludes that the corruption and bureaucracy in the Galactic Senate have become too much to bear. When Count Dooku rallies to their cry of unjust taxation, other systems begin to sympathize with their anti-Republic stance. As a result, other groups—the Corporate Alliance, the Commerce Guild, the InterGalactic Banking Clan, and the Techno Union—join the movement. These individual groups bring more than political support to the Confederacy: they are also in the business of battle droid manufacture. The battle droid army of the Confederacy is amassed to overwhelm the peacetime army of the Republic, as well as the few Jedi who are entrusted with keeping the peace.
The Confederacy relies on a massive battle droid force to fight the Republic. (The Phantom Menace)
Both the U.S. federal government and the Star Wars Republic, on the other hand, were vehemently opposed to secession. “I will not let this Republic that has stood for a thousand years be split in two,” says Palpatine in Attack of the Clones. Due to the growth of the Separatist Confederacy, in terms of both its membership and its military force, the Galactic Senate confers emergency power on the Supreme Chancellor, Palpatine. “And as my first act with this new authority, I will create a grand army of the Republic to counter the increasing threats of the separatists,” Palpatine declares in a later scene of Attack of the Clones. It is at this point that the Clone Wars are inevitable.
Lincoln and the Republicans were elected in 1860 on a dual promise: first, to leave slavery undisturbed in those states that permitted slavery; and second, to stop slavery from expanding into any additional territories or states. Most voters in the North supported this “free soil” position, but the slaveholders felt it was a dire threat to slavery’s perpetuation in the United States. It would ensure that over time the slave states’ dominance of the U.S. Senate would decline. Since the founding of the Republic, slavery’s perpetuation had relied much on the slaveholding class’s disproportionate power in the federal government, as well as on the slave system’s ability to replicate itself in new territories. Southern elites feared that halting the expansion of slavery into new states would ultimately undermine slavery throughout the nation and thus destroy the source of their wealth.
Lincoln won the 1860 election by securing an unprecedented majority of the electoral college vote, without even being on the ballot in the Southern states. That the North’s electoral votes alone could elect a president frightened the slaveholding class: Lincoln won a fair and constitutional election, despite his total lack of Southern support. This seemed to indicate that the Northern majority could enact its will against the slave states, and they would have no recourse.
We do not wish to suggest a parallel between Lincoln and Palpatine. We do suggest that in both instances, a political change at the top of the respective governments led to war. The granting of emergency powers to Palpatine is also the motivation for the second war, pitting Rebels against the Empire. By not ceding emergency power back to the Galactic Senate after the resolution of the Clone War and then dissolving the Galactic Senate later, in A New Hope, Emperor Palpatine dominates the galaxy with fear. “Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station,” proclaims Tarkin in A New Hope (with an arrogance comparable to Senator Hammond’s boast about “King Cotton”). This second war has parallels to the American Civil War in its later stages.
Plans and People
Across the South, as U.S. forces invaded Confederate territory, oppression weakened greatly. Wherever Union forces drew near, slaves challenged the order of the plantations, and many slaves escaped to Union lines, obtaining freedom and bringing military intelligence. The actions of heroic slaves who aided the Union, such as Robert Smalls in the first two years of the Civil War, together with Frederick Douglass’s propaganda linking the Union cause with the defeat of the slaveholding class, eventually convinced Lincoln’s administration and the Northern public that emancipation was the strategic key to defeating the Confederacy. Black communities across the North had organized militias and sought to fight for the United States since the firing on Fort Sumter. Their willingness to enlist, though rejected for the war’s first eighteen months, became compelling during the course of the war.
All of this laid the groundwork for Lincoln’s decision in the summer of 1862 that the war had to become a war of emancipation, as well as a war to save the Union. Lincoln did not announce his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation until after the battle of Antietam in September 1862, but he had concluded that summer that emancipation was a military necessity. He waited to proclaim emancipation as a war goal for the United States until after the United States had a victory in battle, so that the move would not seem born of despera
tion.
In A New Hope, the Rebels’ destruction of the Death Star is a key military victory, pivotal to the galaxy’s future. In the American Civil War, the shift of the North’s war aims into a war to destroy slavery, as well as a war to save the Union, was the epic turning point of the war. As Lincoln said when his emancipation policy was criticized in the North, “no human power can subdue this rebellion without the use of the emancipation policy, and every other policy calculated to weaken the moral and physical forces of the rebellion.”9 In A New Hope, the Rebels destroy the enemy’s most powerful weapon, the Death Star; in the Civil War, emancipation destroyed the Confederates’ reason for war, as well as the foundation of their economic system.
Lincoln recognized, along with many in the North by midway through the war, that the black soldiers were indispensable to the hopes of victory by the United States over the Confederates. By the war’s end, blacks made up 10 percent of the enlisted men in the U.S. Army and Navy. They proved to be an essential strategic element in the cause of the Union.
One of the most infamous events of the Civil War was the massacre of hundreds of black soldiers of the U.S. Army after their capture at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, by Confederate troops, on April 12, 1864. This massacre occurred after Fort Pillow was seized from U.S. forces by Confederate troops commanded by Nathan Bedford Forrest (a plantation owner who in later years was a leader in the creation of the Ku Klux Klan). These African American soldiers’ surrender was not accepted, because the Confederate position was that blacks were not eligible to serve in any army: the Confederates held that they were legally slaves and inferior beings, who could not be granted the status of either a soldier or a prisoner of war (much as the clones are in the Star Wars galaxy). W.E.B. Du Bois, the great historian and civil rights activist, described the massacre, noting that some black troops “were burned alive, having been fastened inside the buildings, while still others were nailed against the houses, tortured, and then burned to a crisp.”10