Memento Moron has asked for a discussion about the causes of the Civil War. I wrote a resonse for his comment section, but since I am an unregistered commenter, I was unable to post a response of more than 1000 characters.
Our regular readers are chortling. The Smallholder answering an historical question in 1000 characters? In the words of Ralph Wiggum, “unpossible!”
So I beg Memento’s pardon, but here is my response:
First of all, the issue is NOT a source of great debate between historians. I am unaware of a single professional, peer-reviewed historian working today who challenges the contention that the war was against slavery. There were some historans writing after the war — “The Lost Cause” school who focused on other issues and there were several historians who wrote about the provocations of the North when viewing the world in a post-World War One light.
Many Sons of the Confederacy would like to obscure the issue because it is hard to realize that grandpappy fought for an evil cause. But the circumlocutions of the amateurs don’t unmake the reality of history.
The states rights issue is not the real issue; states’ rights, except perhaps for George Mason, has rarely been an end in itself; American history is replete with examples of the states’ relationship to the federal government being used as a fig-leaf to hide real motivations.
James Madison and the other framers of the Constitution insisted on ratification by conventions of the PEOPLE of the states rather than ratification by state legislatures precisely to avoid the use of state prerogative to void the will of the national government - they met in Philadelphia to replace a government rendered impotent by state prerogative.
But James Madison and his mentor Tom Jefferson were more than willing to revive the corpse of states’ rights when the Alien and Sedition Acts threatened their political party. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, which awakened states rights, were very much a partisan political calculation. That partisanship can also be seen as sectional since the South heavily supported the Democratic Republicans and the Federalists were supported by Northern mercantile interests.
The Democratic-Republican support of states’ rights bit them in the rear when the Northern states came to believe that they had nothing to gain and everything to lose from the war of 1812 and threatened (vaguely) secession at the Hartford Convention.
The issue of states rights popped up again when Georgia (with a wink and a nod from President Jackson) refused to abide by the Supreme Court’s decision on Cherokee removal. President Jackson wasn’t so indulgent when South Carolina nullified the Tariff of 1832, threatening military enforcement.
As the calls for abolition began to gather momentum in the North and the South’s peculiar institution became more and more entrenched socially, politically, and religiously, the South did try to use the concept of state’s rights to protect African enslavement. But it was a means, not an end. When federal power seemed likely to promote slavery, the South was eager to renounce the concept of states rights.
Examples of Southern support of federal supremacy can be seen at the outrage generated when Northern governors were reluctant to send funds and state militiamen to prosecute the Slavocracy’s land grab against Mexico in 1846.
Southerners certainly supported federal supremacy when Roger Taney ruled that states did not have the right to outlaw slavery within their own boundaries, opening the entire union to legal slavery in the Dred Scott decision.
Southerners certainly supported federal supremacy when many Northern states sought to nullify the Fugitive Slave Law.
So states’ rights, while certainly discussed - and I know the Southern partisans are turning to old Army of Northern Virginia Newsletters to find quotes about their heroes’ dedication to abstract legal principle - were used only with the intent of advancing the South’s real cause: the protection of perpetual bondage.
But I’m unlikely to convince anyone who proudly flies the Confederate flag with these examples. They will say a farmer out of Wisconsin is only trying to blacken the reputation of the noble antebellum South.
To which I respond:
Perhaps we should ask the leaders of the noble antebellum and South - and the secession movement - what they thought was the cause of the war. A quick review of the primary sources created by the state legislatures of the time finds that the people who led the Confederacy had a very clear idea of what they were fighting for.
South Carolina’s Secession Ordinance is one long litany about the wrongs of the abolitionists - a conscious emulation of the Declaration of Independence’sindictment of the George III. Read it yourself.
South Carolina was not unique. Other ordinances of secession, while not as longwinded, also indicate that slavery was the central cause of the war. Georgia’s declaration of the reasons for secession says:
“The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.”
Mississippi concurred:
“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world.”
Texas also knew what the war was about, starting their diatribe against abolitionist “incitement” with:
“She (Texas) was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery– the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits– a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and other slave-holding States of the confederacy. Those ties have been strengthened by association. But what has been the course of the government of the United States, and of the people and authorities of the non-slave-holding States, since our connection with them?”
If the primary documents are so clear, why are we still having this discussion?
