Loewen: Five myths about why the South seceded
One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War began, we’re still fighting it — or at least fighting over its history. I’ve polled thousands of high school history teachers and spoken about the war to audiences across the country, and there is little agreement even on why the South seceded. Was it over slavery? States’ rights? Tariffs and taxes?
As the nation begins to commemorate the anniversaries of the war’s various battles — from Fort Sumter to Appomattox — let’s first dispense with some of the more prevalent myths about why it all began.
1. The South seceded over states’ rights.
Confederate states did claim the right to secede, but no state claimed to be seceding for that right. In fact, Confederates opposed states’ rights — that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery.
On Dec. 24, 1860, delegates at South Carolina’s secession convention adopted a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” It noted “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” and protested that Northern states had failed to “fulfill their constitutional obligations” by interfering with the return of fugitive slaves to bondage. Slavery, not states’ rights, birthed the Civil War.
South Carolina was further upset that New York no longer allowed “slavery transit.” In the past, if Charleston gentry wanted to spend August in the Hamptons, they could bring their cook along. No longer — and South Carolina’s delegates were outraged. In addition, they objected that New England states let black men vote and tolerated abolitionist societies. According to South Carolina, states should not have the right to let their citizens assemble and speak freely when what they said threatened slavery.
Other seceding states echoed South Carolina. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world,” proclaimed Mississippi in its own secession declaration, passed Jan. 9, 1861. “Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth. . . . A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”
The South’s opposition to states’ rights is not surprising. Until the Civil War, Southern presidents and lawmakers had dominated the federal government. The people in power in Washington always oppose states’ rights. Doing so preserves their own.
2. Secession was about tariffs and taxes.
During the nadir of post-civil-war race relations – the terrible years after 1890 when town after town across the North became all-white “sundown towns” and state after state across the South prevented African Americans from voting – “anything but slavery” explanations of the Civil War gained traction. To this day Confederate sympathizers successfully float this false claim, along with their preferred name for the conflict: the War Between the States. At the infamous Secession Ball in South Carolina, hosted in December by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, “the main reasons for secession were portrayed as high tariffs and Northern states using Southern tax money to build their own infrastructure,” The Washington Post reported.
These explanations are flatly wrong. High tariffs had prompted the Nullification Crisis in 1831-33, when, after South Carolina demanded the right to nullify federal laws or secede in protest, President Andrew Jackson threatened force. No state joined the movement, and South Carolina backed down. Tariffs were not an issue in 1860, and Southern states said nothing about them. Why would they? Southerners had written the tariff of 1857, under which the nation was functioning. Its rates were lower than at any point since 1816.
3. Most white Southerners didn’t own slaves, so they wouldn’t secede for slavery.
Indeed, most white Southern families had no slaves. Less than half of white Mississippi households owned one or more slaves, for example, and that proportion was smaller still in whiter states such as Virginia and Tennessee. It is also true that, in areas with few slaves, most white Southerners did not support secession. West Virginia seceded from Virginia to stay with the Union, and Confederate troops had to occupy parts of eastern Tennessee and northern Alabama to hold them in line.
However, two ideological factors caused most Southern whites, including those who were not slave-owners, to defend slavery. First, Americans are wondrous optimists, looking to the upper class and expecting to join it someday. In 1860, many subsistence farmers aspired to become large slave-owners. So poor white Southerners supported slavery then, just as many low-income people support the extension of George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy now.
Second and more important, belief in white supremacy provided a rationale for slavery. As the French political theorist Montesquieu observed wryly in 1748: “It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures [enslaved Africans] to be men; because allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians.” Given this belief, most white Southerners — and many Northerners, too — could not envision life in black-majority states such as South Carolina and Mississippi unless blacks were in chains. Georgia Supreme Court Justice Henry Benning, trying to persuade the Virginia Legislature to leave the Union, predicted race war if slavery was not protected. “The consequence will be that our men will be all exterminated or expelled to wander as vagabonds over a hostile earth, and as for our women, their fate will be too horrible to contemplate even in fancy.” Thus, secession would maintain not only slavery but the prevailing ideology of white supremacy as well.
4. Abraham Lincoln went to war to end slavery.
Since the Civil War did end slavery, many Americans think abolition was the Union’s goal. But the North initially went to war to hold the nation together. Abolition came later.
On Aug. 22, 1862, President Lincoln wrote a letter to the New York Tribune that included the following passage: “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. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”
However, Lincoln’s own anti-slavery sentiment was widely known at the time. In the same letter, he went on: “I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.” A month later, Lincoln combined official duty and private wish in his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
White Northerners’ fear of freed slaves moving north then caused Republicans to lose the Midwest in the congressional elections of November 1862.
Gradually, as Union soldiers found help from black civilians in the South and black recruits impressed white units with their bravery, many soldiers — and those they wrote home to — became abolitionists. By 1864, when Maryland voted to end slavery, soldiers’ and sailors’ votes made the difference.
5. The South couldn’t have made it long as a slave society.
Slavery was hardly on its last legs in 1860. That year, the South produced almost 75 percent of all U.S. exports. Slaves were worth more than all the manufacturing companies and railroads in the nation. No elite class in history has ever given up such an immense interest voluntarily. Moreover, Confederates eyed territorial expansion into Mexico and Cuba. Short of war, who would have stopped them – or forced them to abandon slavery?
To claim that slavery would have ended of its own accord by the mid-20th century is impossible to disprove but difficult to accept. In 1860, slavery was growing more entrenched in the South. Unpaid labor makes for big profits, and the Southern elite was growing ever richer. Freeing slaves was becoming more and more difficult for their owners, as was the position of free blacks in the United States, North as well as South. For the foreseeable future, slavery looked secure. Perhaps a civil war was required to end it.
As we commemorate the sesquicentennial of that war, let us take pride this time – as we did not during the centennial – that secession on slavery’s behalf failed.
Written by James W. Loewen and published in The Washington Post, January 9, 2011
© 2011 The Washington Post Company
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Jackson didn’t compromise? From Harper’s Weekly, 3/9/61-
http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/civil-war/1861/march/abraham-lincoln-union-flag.htm:
Jackson, who is so often quoted as an example by the opponents of compromise, did directly compromise in the most open way to avoid a civil war with the little State of South Carolina – when the other Southern States were ready to crush her out at a moment’s notice. In a word, our GOVERNMENT, like all other Governments, like every collective body, like every family, rests upon the corner-stone of COMPROMISE – the yielding by each component part of something for the general good. It is not possible that in the present day of enlightenment, civilization, progress, and commerce these obvious truths should be ignored.
FROM THE SAME PAGE:
It would undoubtedly be a very mischievous undertaking to keep half a dozen States in the UNION against the deliberate WISHES OF THEIR PEOPLE. Whatever popular feeling – roused to frenzy by the seizure of forts, arsenals, revenue-cutters, and mints – might prompt on the spur of the moment, there can be no question but the enterprise of holding the UNION together by force would ultimately prove futile. It would be in violation of the PRINCIPLE OF OUR INSTITUTIONS…. If they can do better without us than with us, God forbid that we should keep them! If the UNION is really injurious to them, Heaven forbid that we should insist on preserving it! But we think that, if they have time to consider the matter coolly, they will discover that it is best for them as for us. When they do, reconstruction will become a fact.
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It wasn’t about tariffs? Not according to other nations. Here are three articles from Harper’s Weekly, 4/6/61 -
http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/civil-war/1861/april/civil-war-news-april.htm:
April 6, 1861.
THE London Times discusses the MORRILL TARIFF bill at some length, and pronounces it an extravagant and impolitic bill, which, if passed by Congress, would amount to virtual prohibition, and effectually prevent the importation into the States of English, French, and Belgian manufactures.
All the English papers denounce the MORRILL TARIFF, and declare that if the law goes into operation the blunders of the statesman will be rectified by the hardihood of the smuggler. An important article upon this subject appears in the London Times of the 12th ult.
April 6, 1861.
A feeling akin to consternation pervaded a portion of the iron trade on ‘Change in Wolverhampton, at the intelligence that the MORRILL TARIFF would, in all probability, become law. If the bill should receive the signature of the President, its effects would be most disastrous to the iron trade in Great Britain, inasmuch as scarcely any iron of British make can, with such a duty as that proposed, find any sale in the American markets.
April 6, 1861.
The commercial article of the Paris Corstitutionnel, of March 3, says: “If the MORRILL TARIFF should pass Congress, as appears likely, exportations from FRANCE, ENGLAND, and GERMANY to the Northern States would receive a severe check, and, nolens volens, European commerce would incline to FRATERNIZE with the SOUTH in spite of its slavery institution and principles.”
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The question should be “Why did the North fight?” rather than why the South fought. Here is just one reason from Harper’s Weekly, 12/21/61 — http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/civil-war/1861/december/fugitive-slave-issue.htm:
December 21, 1861: “IT IS NOT, as foreigners suppose, a war for TARIFFs, or on account of SLAVERY. The United States Government has no other object in view than the assertion of its authority over the whole of its dominion…
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Forget the South for a moment. Did not England, France, and Germany already complain about the Morrill Tariff on April 6, 1961? Where is that cornerstone of compromise on which this nation was founded, as said before? Did these other nations not come right out and say that if the Morrill Tariff passed, they would trade with the South, slavery or not? THIS WAS COMPLETELY IGNORED BY THE NORTH. Why was it ignored? Because the North thinks that other nations would not put their own interests above the “righteousness” of the North. THEY NEVER DID GET IT.
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During the Civil War, Washington, D. C. of all places, had slavery, and were only, coincidentally, freed just months before the Emancipation Proclamation. When the North decided that the war WAS to free the (Southern) slaves (to please England), Harper’s Weekly asked on 5/27/65 – http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/civil-war/1865/May/black-suffrage.htm:
Why should we expect of the whites of North Carolina and Georgia, even when they are loyal, what we do not find in the intelligent Empire State? When the gilded clubs of the Fifth Avenue in New York refuse to recognize free colored men as equal citizens, how can we ask the HOVELS of Alabama and Mississippi to acknowledge the equal rights of those who have been always despised slaves? Five years ago the white citizens of the State of New York contemptuously declared that color should be a political disability, and that ignorance and drunkenness should not. Would it be very wonderful that the white citizens of Louisiana should declare that color shall he a bar to knowledge or to high wages?
If we are asked whether it is probable that the people of New York would wish to do in South Carolina what they refused to do at home, we reply that five years have undoubtedly opened their eyes and hearts, and that they will do it at home whenever the opportunity is offered. And even if we thought otherwise we should have no doubt what they ought to do; for the same principle that makes it right in one State justifies it in all. The opportunity is not now given to us to decide the question in New York; but it is in the late rebel States, through our Senators and Representatives. The colored citizens at the South are more than half the GOVERNED. In South Carolina a large majority of the population is colored. We have no more right to abandon them to the will of the whites because their color has been a badge of servility than we have arbitrarily to disfranchise the white’s because their color has been a sign of treason.
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I know there is no way for a Yankee such as yourself to shed his self-righteousness; if it weren’t for the Evil South, Yankees would dry up as dust and blow away for their superiority over the South is their only reason for living. But, just to be fair, why not read “Slavery in the North” at http://www.slavenorth.com/index.html. You can still feel superior to the South, we don’t mind; it’s rather flattering that the South consumes your every waking thought. Oh, and don’t forget that New England threatened to secede from the “Union” five times. I guess the reason it was “legal” for them was that everyone else was hoping they would secede.
Bye y’all
Here is a quote from the Richmond Enquirer reflecting the “Southern Ultimatum” just before hostilities began:
Richmond Enquirer
Saturday Morning, March 23, 1861
The True Issue
….. The Northern States have driven the Southern States out, the Northern States must bring back the Southern States. ….. The ultimatum of the seceded States is left in no uncertainty; it is to be found in the solemn action of the Montgomery Constitution and may be analyzed as follows:
1) That African slavery in the Territories (Kansas) shall be recognized and protected by Congress and the Territorial Legislatures. (Keep in mind, Kansas had just voted 98%-2% against slavery, and fought a four year war aginst slavery.)
2) That the right to slaveholders of transit and sojourn in any State of the Confederacy, with their slaves and other property, shall be recognized and respected.
3) That the provision in regard to fugitive slaves shall extend to any slave lawfully carried from one State into another, and there escaping or taken away from his master.
4) That no bill or ex post facto law (by Congress or any State,) and no law impairing or denying the right of property in negro slaves, shall be passed.
5) That the African slave trade shall be prohibited by such laws of Congress as shall effectually prevent the same…………..
Thus, it was clear that the expansion and protection of slavery was the key issue before the Union just prior to the Civil War. Many have tried to “shift the truth.” It remains the essential component behind “The Lost Cause” – Southern soldiers and men of virtue – they would never fight FOR slavery, they instead were fighting for the Constitution and “States’ Rights.”
Without the need to disparage brave soldiers in the field fighting for either side, the overall history of events as they unfolded speak to something much more stubborn.
I am afraid that the impact of the Dunning School has had its impact on our understanding of history.
The period of Reconstruction, and then the awful period that followed from 1890 to 1940s does not speak to the upholding of Constitutional Rights for freed African-Americans. Those who argue that Civil War was about State’s Rights seem to forget the inconsistency that is clearly demonstrated by the denial of Constitutional Rights to African-American citizens for much of our post-Civl War history – I refer readers to Blackmon’s work “Slavery by Another Name” and its stories of convict leasing and debt peonage.
Debt peonage was unconstitutional and convict leasing demonstrates how institutionalized racism became post Civil War – how it impacted multiple generations. Segregation was overtly about different facilities – institutionalized racism throughout the South was much more insidious.
In my lifetime, I have met and I have spoken with who were not permitted, or were intimidated from, their Constitutional Right to vote. I have witnessed injustice. I have witnessed hatred.
If the Civil War was not fought to maintain the subservience of a race of people – please explain why subservience was demanded of blacks after the Civil War? Why were black leaders targeted with lynchings and beatings? Why was their such an objection to African-American Congressmen? Why were blacks denied the right to vote? Why was the trickery of poll taxes and literacy tests implemented to curtail black voting?
Someone please explain the violence along the Red River?
Someone please explain the forced labor at Chatahoochee Brick and the Pratt Mines?
Someone please explain the Tulsa Riots?
Someone please explain Emmett Till?
Much of this I have learned after my formal schooling – I was shocked. Like many making comments, I read what was in the textbooks. In my adult life, and on my own, a very different story has been revealed. The journey to understand history as it occurred and why it occurred was an amazing journey. To truly understand the hardships faced by others throughout history has made me a better person and a better citizen. I hope any who read this comment find their journey as heartfelt as mine.
This is a new century – a new era. How will we, as Americans, shape our world to come? Perhaps it is time to truly bring an end the CIvil War. Will we see this future as a united people. Today is not July 3, 1863 – the field that must be crossed today, must be crossed in this century and must be crossed together.
While your point about the tariffs is correct, I believe you have a major misunderstanding. I completely agree that the states seceded because of slavery. They felt threatened (and rightly so) by the abolition movement in the North, so they decided that it would be better for them to leave the Union. But secession did not necessarily mean war. The war was fought over whether the states had the right to leave whenever they wanted.
A note on Lincoln – while he said in public that he was only fighting to preserve the Union, in private between his election and inauguration he destroyed any chance there was of preserving the Union by telling his friends to resist the Crittenden Compromise.
I call bullshit! Seems that WAPO must feel it has to combat the rising states rights movement….
Hm, if the South didn’t secede for these reasons – and I believe they did with the exception of the slavery issue – then why did they? What other causes are there, excepting the thousands we now face that the South did not?
But, even so, revealing the money trail, including now, that leads directly to the Bank of England and the Rothschild Khazarian Jew International banking cartel of thieves, liars, and quite evil miscreants gives the answer, or so facts indicate. After all, look at what has happened to America since the evil tribe got control of our money through the Federal Reserve Act, a foreign owned system controlled by the God awful Rothschilds of Khazarian Mongol descent.
Well I see you see. No blinders for you. spread the words of the truth. Most people cant handle it but dont let that keep you from speaking it.
Agreed Hippy…this one did not make it to my email list
By the way Norton
ryder….I’m on my second Triumph and used to ride an 1984 FLHS shovel till some low life MOFO took it in ’95′. Ride Safe…hb
My Great Grand Father on my fathers side was born and raised in MO. Need i say more about my feelings, other than the fact that I now reside in a southern State.
For more enlightenment, read a serious of books by Thomas DiLorenzo about the real Abe Lincoln and his War of aggression against the civilian population of the south.
Good book. I’m about half done with it. Being originally from Illinois, I was brought up with the Lincoln legends. Abe was at best a socialist and at worst a communist. The book has the proof.
Ed, I too was born and raised in the cesspool of Illinois. No one ever mentions the fact that U.S. Grant and his wife owned slaves right in IL.
I’m glad i moved to Florida because now we find that IL has raised it’s income tax 66%. Bastards!
Then why did the Confederate Constitution prohibit the transpotation of slaves between Confederate states?
Based on published letters of Southerners from that time, the thinking was that abolishing slavery all at once would decimate the Southern ecomomy. So, the plan seemed to be to not grow the institution of slavery but to let it die out over time. True, it would have taken years but was the killing of so many thousdands on both sides including former slaves forced by the north to fight worth waging war against the south?
In my opinion, our country would be much better off had the south won and still had our U.S. Senators represent the states and not elected by the public and special interest groups whose goals are not in the best interest of the country.
Now that the U.S. is an over taxed, bankrupt country barely short of being a Police State, I’d say that the Damnn Yankees have pretty much destroyed the very foundations on which the county was based.
If you joined a country club where you were paying more than others (as did the Southern states) and told that if you tried to leave you would be killed,I wonder what your reaction would be.
Being published in washington post says it all. Trash writing for trash. The writer here is probably a banker profiting from the unions latest wars.
HippyB,
Don’t forget – The winners write the history.
Ride Hard
NortonRyder
What a complete Crock of Bullshit!