THE SOUTHERN
SIDE OF THE CIVIL WAR:
FACTS YOUR
HISTORY TEACHER MAY NOT HAVE MENTIONED
ABOUT THE
WAR BETWEEN THE STATES
Fourth
Edition
Michael T.
Griffith
2007
@All Rights
Reserved
Soon after I began to study the Civil War,
I realized that much of what I had been taught about it in school was either
wrong or incomplete. It has been said that history is written by the victors.
This is especially true when it comes to the Civil War. The Southern viewpoint
is rarely presented fairly in our public schools and textbooks today. I believe it is important that we as
Americans know the whole truth about the Civil War. The purpose of this article
is to present the Southern side of the story.
The following basic facts are undisputed:
The seven states of the
The version of the Civil War that’s taught in nearly all textbooks goes something like this: “The only reason the South wanted to leave the
We will consider twelve issues relating to
the Civil War: Why Did the South Secede?
Did the South Have the Right to Secede?
What Caused the War? Who Started
the War? The Emancipation Proclamation.
Republicans, the North, and Racism. Was
the War Fought Over Slavery? What
Happened at
Why Did the South Secede?
Before we examine why the South seceded,
perhaps we should first consider why a majority of Northern leaders opposed
secession to the point of using force against the South. In other words, why did Lincoln and most other
Republican leaders refuse to allow the South to go in peace? Did they oppose secession because of
slavery? No, they did not. In fact, most people aren’t aware that, even as president,
Most Republicans who opposed secession
said they opposed it because they believed it was unconstitutional. In their view, no state had the right to
leave the
There is considerable evidence that many
Republican leaders opposed secession and eventually supported waging war on the
South in large part because of economic considerations. Numerous Republicans, including
Without the strong support from the Wall
Street class and the merchants and men of commerce, especially in
Most of the merchants were not for
provoking war, and many admitted that the government had no right to coerce a
state to remain in the
By the end of March, the whole Northern
world had changed, with the businessmen and newspapers leading the way. Whenever the historian reads Northern
newspapers and articles that favor secession, or just tolerate it as a
constitutional right, it is important to look at the date on the article. For by late March the business circles saw
clearly that slavery was a nonissue for them—the tariff was the issue. . . .
In early March, even before
On 18 March 1861, the Philadelphia
Press demanded war: “Blockade Southern Ports,” said the
Press. If not, “a series of custom houses will be required on the vast inland
border from the Atlantic to
The economic editor of the New York
Times changed his tune in late March.
For months he had written that secession would not injure Northern
commerce and prosperity. . . . But on
22-23 March 1861, he reversed himself with a vengeance: “At once shut down every
Southern port, destroy its commerce and
bring utter ruin on the Confederate States”. . . .
Perhaps the most intriguing development
occurred in late March when the two tariffs stood side by side. Over a hundred leading commercial importers
in
At the very end of March, at the very
time
Rather than lower the high federal tariff
and embrace free trade, most Republican leaders decided they could not allow
the South to go in peace. It seems
apparent that economic concerns played a major role, if not the decisive role, in
their decision to violently oppose secession.
Now that we’ve considered why Republican leaders opposed secession, let’s discuss why the South
seceded.
Nearly all textbooks give the impression that the South withdrew from
the
But secession,
As mentioned previously, even as
president,
Most Southern leaders who advocated
secession in order to protect slavery did so because they feared that
Republican leaders would try to abolish slavery by unconstitutional means and
that Southern slaveholders would not receive any compensation for their
slaves. Southern spokesmen felt this
would be unfair, since Northern slaveholders had been able to receive various
forms of compensation for their slaves when most Northern states had abolished
slavery several decades earlier. They
knew that emancipation without compensation would do great damage to the
Southern economy.
Critics note that many Southern statesmen
voiced the view that slavery was a “positive good.” Yet, even the “positive good” advocates acknowledged that slavery had its evils and
abuses. In fact, most Southerners rejected
the arguments of the extreme defenders of slavery (John Garraty, The
American Nation, Volume 1: A History of the United States to 1877, Third
Edition, New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1975, p. 363). There were plenty of Southerners who were
willing to see slavery abolished in a fair, gradual manner, as had been done in
most Northern states. After all, 69-75 percent
of Southern families did not own slaves.
However, few Southerners believed the Republicans were interested in a
fair, gradual emancipation program. The
more extreme Republicans, who were known as “Radical Republicans,” certainly weren’t
interested in such a program.
Few people today understand why the South
distrusted the Republican Party. Not
only was the Republican Party a new party, it was also the first purely
regional (or sectional) party in the country’s history. Republican leaders frequently
gave inflammatory anti-Southern speeches, some of which included egregious falsehoods
and even threats (Susan-Mary Grant, North
Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era,
Southerners were alarmed when dozens of
Republican congressmen endorsed an advertisement for Hinton Helper’s book The Impending Crisis of the South, which spoke
approvingly of a potential slave revolt that would kill untold numbers of
Southern citizens in a “barbarous massacre.” The
Republican Party even distributed an abridged edition of the book as a campaign
document, and Republican editors added captions like “The Stupid Masses of the
South” and “Revolution . . .
Violently If We Must.”
Southerners also noticed that the
Republicans broke the long-established tradition of having a sectionally
balanced presidential ticket. For
decades, the major political parties had almost always nominated tickets that
consisted of one candidate from the North and one from the South. If nothing else, the major parties had always
nominated tickets that appealed to more than just one part of the country. Each of the three other parties in the 1860
election nominated sectionally diverse tickets, but not the Republican
Party. Another reason that Southerners
were worried about the Republicans was that the party’s leaders made it clear
they would push for several policies that
the South believed were harmful and unconstitutional, such as a high
protectionist tariff that favored Northern commerce, federal spending on “internal improvements,”
and a significant expansion of the size
and power of the federal government.
Many Southerners feared that Republican leaders were determined to
subjugate and exploit the South by any means.
With these facts in mind, perhaps it’s not
hard to understand why the election of
One factor that led many Southern citizens
to support secession was the fear that some abolitionists were determined to
carry out armed attempts to incite slave insurrections in the Southern
states. This fear became widespread when
a violent Northern abolitionist named John Brown led an armed raid on the
arsenal at Harper’s Ferry,
A solid majority of Northern citizens
condemned Brown’s
actions, but a vocal minority did not. When Brown was put on trial after his
capture, some predominantly Republican towns in the North held public meetings
to glorify him and to defend his conduct.
When Brown was executed, numerous abolitionist churches across the North
rang their bells and held memorial ceremonies in Brown’s honor. Most
Americans, in all parts of the country, disapproved of what Brown had
done. However, Southerners
understandably were alarmed by the support that was expressed for Brown by a
vocal and influential minority in the North.
They were also disturbed by the fact that virtually nothing was done to
Brown’s
Northern backers. As a result of Brown’s raid, many Southerners began to fear that Northern abolitionists were going
to carry out more armed attempts to incite slave insurrections in the
South. Brown’s attack caused a good
number of Southern citizens who had
previously opposed secession to change their minds.
As stated above, slavery was not the only
factor that led to secession. If one
reads the Declarations of Causes of Secession and the Ordinances of Secession
that were issued by the first seven states of the Confederacy, one finds that
there were several reasons these states wanted to be independent, and that some
of the reasons had nothing to do with slavery.
For example, the Georgia and Texas Declarations of Causes of Secession
included economic complaints, in addition to concerns relating to slavery. The
They [the Northern states] have
impoverished the slave-holding States by unequal and partial legislation,
thereby enriching themselves by draining our substance.
The
The material prosperity of the North was
greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the South not at all. In
the first years of the Republic the navigating, commercial, and manufacturing
interests of the North began to seek profit and aggrandizement at the expense
of the agricultural interests. Even the owners of fishing smacks sought and
obtained bounties for pursuing their own business (which yet continue), and
$500,000 [about $8.5 million in today’s dollars] is
now paid them annually out of the Treasury. The navigating interests begged for
protection against foreign shipbuilders and against competition in the coasting
trade. Congress granted both requests, and by prohibitory acts gave an absolute
monopoly of this business to each of their interests, which they enjoy without
diminution to this day. Not content with these great and unjust advantages,
they have sought to throw the legitimate burden of their business as much as
possible upon the public; they have succeeded in throwing the cost of
light-houses, buoys, and the maintenance of their seamen upon the Treasury, and
the Government now pays above $2,000,000 annually [about $34 million today] for
the support of these objects. These interests, in connection with the
commercial and manufacturing classes, have also succeeded, by means of
subventions to mail steamers and the reduction in postage, in relieving their
business from the payment of about $7,000,000 annually [about $119 million
today], throwing it upon the public Treasury under the name of postal
deficiency. The manufacturing interests entered into the same struggle early,
and have clamored steadily for Government bounties and special favors.
Eleven years earlier, Senator John Calhoun
of
Had this destruction [of the balance
between the Northern and Southern states] been the operation of time without
the interference of government, the South would have had no reason to complain;
but such was not the fact. It was caused by the legislation of this government,
which was appointed as the common agent of all and charged with the protection
of the interests and security of all.
The legislation by which it has been
effected may be classed under three heads: The first is that series of acts by
which the South has been excluded from the common territory belonging to all
the States as members of the federal Union--which have had the effect of
extending vastly the portion allotted to the Northern section, and restricting
within narrow limits the portion left the South. The next consists in adopting
a system of revenue and disbursements by which an undue proportion of the burden
of taxation has been imposed upon the South, and an undue proportion of its
proceeds appropriated to the North. And the last is a system of political
measures by which the original character of the government has been radically
changed. . . .
I have not included the territory
recently acquired by the treaty with
The next is the system of revenue and
disbursements which has been adopted by the government. It is well known that
the government has derived its revenue mainly from duties on imports. I shall
not undertake to show that such duties must necessarily fall mainly on the
exporting States, and that the South, as the great exporting portion of the
Union, has in reality paid vastly more than her due proportion of the revenue;
because I deem it unnecessary, as the subject has on so many occasions been
fully discussed. Nor shall I, for the same reason, undertake to show that a far
greater portion of the revenue has been disbursed in the North, than its due
share; and that the joint effect of these causes has been to transfer a vast
amount from South to North, which, under an equal system of revenue and
disbursements, would not have been lost to her. If to this be added that many
of the duties were imposed, not for revenue but for protection--that is,
intended to put money, not in the Treasury, but directly into the pocket of the
manufacturers--some conception may be formed of the immense amount which in the
long course of sixty years has been transferred from South to North. (Calhoun,
speech to the U.S. Senate on the Henry Clay compromise measures, March 4, 1850)
The South’s long-standing opposition to the federal tariff was a factor that led to
secession. The South’s concern over the tariff
was nothing new.
The South had valid complaints about the
tariff.
The high tariff in the North compelled
the Southern states to pay tribute to the North, either in taxes to fatten
Republican coffers or in the inflated prices that had to be paid for Northern
goods. Besides being unfair, this
violated the uniformity command of the Constitution by having the South pay an
undue proportion of the national revenue, which was expended more in the North
than in the South. . . . (When In the
Course of Human Events, p. 26)
Economist Frank Taussig, one of the foremost
authorities on the tariff, acknowledged that the tariff fell “with particular weight” on the South:
The Southern members, who were almost to
a man supporters of
Steven Weisman, in his study of the role
that taxation has played in American history, notes that Northern economic
exploitation of the South, particularly in the form of the tariff, was a major
concern to Southerners:
The tariff would effectively raise prices
on clothing, farm equipment and many other everyday necessities. Farmers in the South . . . squeezed by these
high prices and struggling to sell their own farm products abroad, protested
the high tariff. . . .
These were some of the factors that
thrust
The new [Confederate] president,
Jefferson Davis, had been a hero of the Mexican War, a former Secretary of War
to President Franklin Pierce, and a respected champion of the South as senator
from
There was a great deal of evidence to
support
From the perspective of the South, the
North’s
economy rested on a kind of state
capitalism of trade barriers, government-sponsored railroads, coddling of
trusts, suppression of labor and public investment in canals, roads and other
infrastructures. Southern slave owners
sought . . . to secure free trade, overseas markets and cheaper imports. Southern resentment of the tariff system
propelled the Democratic Party to define itself as the main challenger to the
primacy of the industrialist and capitalist overlords of the system. (The Great Tax Wars: Lincoln to
Wilson--The Fierce Battles Over Money and Power that Transformed the Nation,
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002, pp. 21-22, 52)
Weisman notes that even when
As
Weisman also points out that the
Confederate Constitution’s prohibition against protective
tariffs and government favoritism toward particular businesses was based on the
South’s
desire to avoid the Union practice of
favoring certain industries. Under the
Confederate Constitution, says Weisman,
State legislatures were given the right
to overrule . . . [officials of the national Confederate government] on certain
issues, and taxes and tariffs “designed to promote or foster
any branch of industry” were barred, as were public expenditures to benefit a particular section of the populace. These clauses were a residue of the South’s desire to avoid the
Union practice of showering largesse on
certain industries. (The Great Tax Wars, p. 65)
Jeffrey R. Hummel, a professor of
economics and history, notes the negative impact of the tariff on the Southern
states and concedes that Southern complaints about the tariff were justified:
Despite a steady decline in import
duties, tariffs fell disproportionately on Southerners, reducing their income
from cotton production by at least 10 percent just before the Civil War. . . .
At least with respect to the tariff’s adverse impact,
Southerners were not only absolutely
correct but displayed a sophisticated understanding of economics. . . . The tariff was inefficient; it not only
redistributed wealth from farmers and planters to manufacturers and laborers
but overall made the country poorer. (Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free
Men: A History of the American Civil War, Chicago: Open Court, 1996, pp.
39-40, 73)
Economists Mark Thornton and Robert
Ekelund explain why the tariff was such an important issue to the South:
The South was basically an agrarian
economy. This input-producing region’s major crops were
tobacco, rice, and cotton, with much of
the latter intended for export or for the textile mills of the North. Southerners had to earn their revenue to buy
finished goods from the North and from abroad through the export of raw
materials. Since tariffs on finished
goods, such as textiles and luxuries, and on capital goods, such as machinery,
raised the prices paid by Southerners, they believed correctly that the “terms of trade” were set against them by high protectionist
tariffs.
Thus, from the earliest days of the nation, the tariff issue was
paramount to Southerners. (Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics
of the Civil War, Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2004, p.
16)
Civil War scholar Webb Garrison, a former
associate dean of
Long before Charlestonians began taking
over forts, the U.S. Customs Service and the tariff system had angered the
South. Tariffs on imported goods served
to protect the industrialized North and boosted the cost of manufactured goods
in the agricultural South.
Such sectional differences had surfaced
while the
When the seceded states merged to form
the Confederate States of
Historians William and Bruce Catton
summarized the economic case that Southern leaders put forth in favor of
secession:
On the economic front, long-standing Southern
grievances against Northern financial and commercial exploitation, Northern
high-tariff policies, Northern monopoly of the coastwise trade, and similar
items, were contrasted to the bright future that awaited an independent South,
secure and prosperous on a foundation of cotton, free trade, and an
inexhaustible European market with no Northern middlemen to siphon off the
profits. (Two Roads to Sumter: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and the
March to Civil War, Edison, New Jersey: Castle Books, 2004, reprint of
original edition, p. 251)
A major point of contention between the
North and the South was the issue of the size and power of the federal
government as defined by the Constitution.
As mentioned earlier, Republican leaders supported a loose reading of
the Constitution and wanted to expand the size and scope of the federal
government, even if that meant giving the government powers that were not
authorized by the Constitution. Among
other things, they advocated government subsidies for certain big businesses,
federal control of the banking system, a high protectionist tariff, and massive
public works projects (called “internal improvements”). Most Southern statesmen opposed these
policies and instead favored a strict reading of the Constitution. They believed the federal government should
perform only those functions that were expressly delegated to it by the
Constitution. From the earliest days of
the republic, Southern and Northern leaders frequently battled over this
issue. A recent study that abundantly
documents this fact is John Ferling’s book Adams
vs.
Four of the eleven Southern states did not
join in the first wave of secession and did not secede over slavery. Those four states—Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia—only seceded months later
when Lincoln made it clear he was going
to launch an invasion. In fact, those
states initially voted against secession by fairly sizable
majorities. However, they believed the
Virtually no history textbooks mention the
fact that each Confederate state retained the right to abolish slavery within
its borders, and that the Confederate Constitution permitted the admission of
All states reserved the right to abolish
slavery in their domains, and new states could be admitted without slavery if
two-thirds of the existing states agreed—the idea being that the tier of
Before we move on to the issue of the
right of secession, it should be noted that Southern fears about Republican
policies were soon proven valid. When
the Republicans gained control of the federal government, they started
Tariffs were the centerpiece of
Republican policy. They . . .
implemented the Morrill Tariff Bill in 1862, which raised the level of the tax
on imports from roughly 20 percent to 50 percent, where it remained for the rest
of the century. . . .
Banking, particularly in the South, was
harmed as a result of the war. The
imperfect system of free banking and state-chartered banking was replaced with
a system of national banks. As Robert
Sharkey noted, “the
seeds of decay had been planted. The National Banking System, with its yet
unsuspected exploitative potentialities, had been established.” As a result,
big business had better access to the money market, and small business was
virtually shut out. Sharkey lamented, “Is it any wonder that the true advocates of free non-corporate
enterprise such as Henry Carey screamed so unrestrainedly at what they called
the ‘money
monopolists’ of
The defeat of the Confederacy was an
ideological downfall for the cause of anti-Federalist, Jeffersonian, and
Jacksonian traditions of small, limited government. . . . (Tariffs,
Blockades, and Inflation, pp. 87, 89, 98-99)
Ekelund comments on the Republicans’ big-government policies in an article he wrote for
the Ludwig Von Mises Institute’s website:
The Republican
Party that emerged in the 1850s was an amalgamation of historical influences,
third parties, and interest groups. One group that entered the Republican Party
was the Free Soil Party, whose primary platform was free land and subsidies for
farmers. In contrast, most Democrats favored selling off the public lands to
finance government expenditures, keep tariff rates low, and prevent deficit
spending. . . .
The ambitious economic agenda of the
Republican Party had its roots in the economic platforms of Federalist icon
Alexander Hamilton and Whig leader Henry Clay. They advocated protective
tariffs for industry, a national bank, and plenty of public works and patronage.
The flurry of new laws, regulations, and bureaucracies created by Lincoln and
the Republican Party during the early 1860s foreshadowed Franklin Roosevelt's
"New Deal" for the volume, scope and questionable constitutionality
of its legislative output.
In fact, the term "New Deal"
was actually coined in March of 1865 by a newspaper editor in
Protectionism was a high priority of the early
Republican Party. They quickly enacted the Morrill Tariff, which raised tariff
rates to extremely high levels, and their extreme protectionism continued
throughout the era of Republican dominance.
There is really little debate that these
Republicans were the primary proponents of protectionism, particularly in the
areas of steel and textiles. . . .
In the area of deficit spending and the
national debt, the early Republicans . . . produced large deficits and national
debt. Pre-Civil War Democrats had worked effectively to eliminate the national
debt and to close the national banks. (“The Awful Truth About Republicans,” Ludwig Von Mises Institute, March 25, 2004, http://www.mises.org/story/1476)
Ekelund goes on to discuss some of the
harmful results of the Republicans’ banking and monetary policies:
In their early
years they [the Republicans] nationalized money and banking, a policy that
helped big-city banks at the expense of the common citizen, particularly in the
South and West. As Robert Sharkey noted:
“As the National Banking System took shape after
the war, it was apparent that human ingenuity would have had difficulty
contriving a more perfect engine for class and sectional exploitation:
Creditors finally obtaining the upper hand as opposed to debtors, and the
developed East holding the whip over the undeveloped West and South. This
tipping of the class and sectional balance of power was, in my opinion, the
momentous change over the twenty-three-year period, 1850-1873.” ["Commercial
Banking," in Economic Change in the
Civil War Era: Proceedings of a Conference on American Economic Institutional
Change, 1850-1873, and the Impact of the Civil War, Greenville, Delaware: Eleutherian
Mills-Hagley Foundation, 1965, p. 27, original emphasis.]
Looking at the
consequences of this legislation, leading monetary economists concluded:
“The provision of the Acts of 1863 and 1865 that
established the national banking system were designed to remedy two perceived
defects of the antebellum state banking system. . . . Unfortunately, the
remedies did not work as intended by the architects of the national banking
system. Instead, the system was characterized by monetary and cyclical
instability, four banking panics, frequent stock market crashes, and other
financial disturbances." [Michael D. Bordo, Peter Rappoport, and Anna J.
Schwartz, "Money versus Credit Rationing: Evidence for the National
Banking Era, 1880-1914," in Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century
American Economic Growth, edited by Claudia Goldin and Hugh Rockoff,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 189-223.] (Ekelund, “The
Awful Truth
About Republicans”)
Did the South Have the Right to Secede?
I believe the evidence is clear that the
South had the right to secede. None
other than Ulysses S. Grant, the commanding general of the Union army for much
of the Civil War and later a president of the United States, admitted he
believed that if any of the original thirteen states had wanted to secede in
the early days of the Union, it was unlikely the other states would have
challenged that state’s “right” to do so. Grant also conceded that he believed the
founding fathers would have sanctioned the right of secession rather than see a
war “between brothers.” Said Grant,
If there had been a desire on the part of
any single State to withdraw from the compact at any time while the number of
States was limited to the original thirteen, I do not suppose there would have
been any to contest the right, no matter how much the determination might have
been regretted. . . .
If they [the founding fathers] had
foreseen it, the probabilities are they would have sanctioned the right of a
State or States to withdraw rather than that there should be war between
brothers. (The Personal Memoirs Of Ulysses S. Grant, Old Saybrook,
Connecticut: Konecky & Konecky, 1992, reprint of original edition, pp.
130-131)
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of
When the Constitution was adopted by the
votes of States at Philadelphia, and accepted by the votes of States in popular
conventions, it is safe to say there was no man in this country, from
Washington and Hamilton on the one side to George Clinton and George Mason on
the other, who regarded our system of Government, when first adopted, as
anything but an experiment entered upon by the States, and from which each and
every State had the right to peaceably withdraw, a right which was very likely
to be exercised. (Henry Cabot Lodge, Daniel Webster, Boston,
Massachusetts: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1899, p. 176)
Union general Thomas Ewing acknowledged
that the founding fathers did not address the issue of secession in the
Constitution--he believed the war settled the question:
The North . . .
recognizes the fact that the proximate cause of the war was the constitutional
question of the right of secession -- a question which, until it was settled by
the war, had neither a right side nor a wrong side to it. Our forefathers in framing the Constitution
purposely left the question unsettled; to have settled it distinctly in the
Constitution would have been to prevent the formation of the
British historian Goldwin Smith argued that
the history of the
Few who have
looked into the history can doubt that the Union originally was, and was generally
taken by the parties to it to be, a compact; dissoluble, perhaps most of them
would have said, at pleasure, dissoluble certainly on breach of the articles of
There is nothing in the Constitution that
prohibits a state from peacefully and democratically separating from the
The powers
not delegated to the
The Constitution does not give the federal
government the power to force a state to remain in the
This view is strengthened by the fact that
several of the states specified in their constitution or in their ratification
ordinance that they should retain all rights and powers that were not expressly
granted to the federal government by the U.S. Constitution. For example,
We, the
delegates of the people of the state of
That the
powers of government may be reassumed by the people whensoever it shall become
necessary to their happiness. That the rights of the states respectively to
nominate and appoint all state officers, and every other power, jurisdiction,
and right, which is not by the said Constitution clearly delegated to the
Congress of the United States, or to the departments of government thereof,
remain to the people of the several states, or their respective state
governments, to whom they may have granted the same; and that those clauses in
the Constitution which declare that Congress shall not have or exercise certain
powers, do not imply that Congress is entitled to any powers not given by the
said Constitution; but such clauses are to be construed as exceptions to
certain specified powers, or as inserted merely for greater caution. . . . The
. . . all
powers not expressly delegated by the aforesaid Constitution are reserved to
the several states, to be by them exercised. (
The people of this commonwealth have the sole
and exclusive right of governing themselves as a free, sovereign, and
independent State, and do, and forever hereafter shall, exercise and enjoy
every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not, or may not hereafter be, by
them expressly delegated to the United States of America in Congress assembled.
(Constitution of the
We, the
delegates of the people of the state of
That the
powers of government may be reassumed by the people whensoever it shall become
necessary to their happiness; that every power, jurisdiction, and right, which
is not by the said Constitution clearly delegated to the Congress of the United
States, or the departments of the government thereof, remains to the people of
the several states, or to their respective state governments, to whom they may
have granted the same; and that those clauses in the said Constitution, which
declare that Congress shall not have or exercise certain powers, do not imply
that Congress is entitled to any powers not given by the said Constitution; but
such clauses are to be construed either as exceptions to certain specified
powers, or as inserted merely for greater caution. (
In
Convention of the people of the state of
This
Convention doth also declare, that no section or paragraph of the said
Constitution warrants a construction that the states do not retain every power
not expressly relinquished by them, and vested in the general government of the
We the
Delegates of the people of Virginia . . . declare and make known that the
powers granted under the Constitution, being derived from the people of the
United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to
their injury or oppression, and that every power not granted thereby remains
with them and at their will: that therefore no right of any denomination, can
be cancelled, abridged, restrained or modified, by the Congress, by the Senate
or House of Representatives acting in any capacity, by the President or any
department or officer of the United States, except in those instances in which
power is given by the Constitution for those purposes. . . .
That each
state in the union shall respectively retain every power, jurisdiction and
right, which is not by this constitution delegated to the Congress of the
United States, or to the departments of the Foederal Government. (
If the founding fathers had intended
ratification to be irrevocable, surely they would have said so at least once in
the Constitution. If they had intended
the federal government to have the power to use force to compel a state to
remain in the
Critics of the Confederacy maintain that
certain clauses in the Constitution prohibit secession, even though not one of
those clauses mentions the subject. They
point out, for example, that the Constitution prohibits states from entering
into treaties with foreign powers. They
place particular emphasis on the Supremacy Clause, which reads as follows:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the
United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made,
or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the
supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby,
any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the contrary
notwithstanding. (Article 6, Paragraph 2)
However, it goes without saying that this
clause and the clauses regarding state relations with foreign governments only
apply to states that are in the
Imagine the following scenario: Suppose
you joined an association. The association’s constitution said that when you became a member,
you agreed to be bound by the association’s constitution and by all association rules that did not
violate that constitution. But, the
constitution did not say you could never leave the association. Nor did it say your membership was
irrevocable or permanent. Nor did it say
you needed the permission of other members before you could leave. It didn’t even say the association itself was permanent. After belonging to the association for a
time, you decided you no longer wanted to be a member. You were willing to pay your share of the
association’s debt and
wanted to maintain good relations with it.
How would you feel if the association attempted to force you to remain a
member against your will, with the argument, "Sorry, you can't leave the
association because then you'll no longer be bound by our constitution and
rules"? Most people would view that argument as specious and unfair,
if not dictatorial.
If the
Lincoln and previous nationalists, such as
Joseph Story, John Marshall, and Daniel Webster, argued that the Constitution
was ratified by “We the people” acting as “one people,” i.e., by the people acting as a whole, and that therefore no state or
group of states could leave the Union.
But the Constitution was not ratified in this manner. In the original understanding of the
sovereignty of the people, the people were sovereign only as citizens of their
respective states, not as a whole. This
original understanding of the people’s
sovereignty can be seen in the fact that the Constitution was ratified by the
people in their capacity as citizens of their respective states. It was not ratified by the people acting as “one people.” The
ratification decision of one state’s citizens was not binding on the citizens of other states. The citizens of each state were free to
accept or reject the Constitution, regardless of the decision of the citizens
in other states. Founding father James
Madison, often called “the father of the Constitution,” repeatedly explained that the people were sovereign, not as one
mass, but as citizens of the various states:
. . . this assent and ratification is to
be given by the people, not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as
composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively
belong. (Federalist Paper Number 39)
In arguing for
Give me leave
to say something of the nature of the government. . . .
Who are the
parties to it? The people--not the people as composing one great body,
but the people as composing thirteen sovereignties.
Were it, as the
gentleman asserts, a consolidated government, the assent of a majority of the
people would be sufficient for its establishment: and as a majority have
adopted it already, the remaining States would be bound by the act of the
majority, even if they unanimously reprobated it. (Speech to the Convention of
In his old age,
It is fortunate when disputed theories,
can be decided by undisputed facts. And here the undisputed fact is, that the
Constitution was made by the people, but as embodied into the several States,
who were parties to it; and therefore made by the States in their highest
authoritative capacity. (Letter from James Madison to Daniel Webster, March 15,
1833)
In his highly acclaimed book on the
formation of the federal Union, E Pluribus Unum: The Formation of the
In an ultimate sense, the Constitution
confirmed the proposition that original power resided in the people—not, however, in the
people as a whole, but in them in their
capacity as people of the several states.
In 1787 the people were so divided because, having created or acquiesced
in the creation of state governments, they were bound by prior contracts. They could create more local or more general
governments, but only by agreeing, in their capacity as people of the several
states, to relocate power previously lodged with the state governments. All powers not thus relocated, and not
reserved by the people in explicit state constitutional limitations, remained
in the state governments. In short,
national or local governments, being the creatures of the states, could
exercise only those powers explicitly or implicitly given them by the states;
each state government could exercise all powers unless it was forbidden from
doing so by the people of the state. But
in the Constitution the states went a step further, and expressly denied to
themselves the exercise of certain powers, such as those of interfering with
the obligations of private contracts, passing ex post facto laws, and refusing
to honor the laws of other states. This
is the essence of the American federal system. . . .
There was . . . one cardinal difference
between
In other words, “the people” were not, in
any part of the multilevel government, allowed to act as the whole people.
Instead, for purposes of expressing their will they were separated from
themselves both in space and in time.
This was accomplished by separating the people, both in space and in
time, from those they elected. . . .
The division of every voter into many
artificial parts of himself was one of three aspects of the genius of the
American constitutional system. (E Pluribus Unum: The Formation of the
American Republic 1776-1790, Second Edition, Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty
Press, 1979, pp. 312, 314, 315)
This original understanding of the people’s sovereignty can also be seen in the system that the
founding fathers established for the election of the president, namely, the
Electoral College. “We the people” elect the president as citizens of our respective states, but
not as one people. We vote in our
respective states, and the candidate who wins in our state receives our state’s Electoral College votes. Thus,
a president can be elected without a majority of the nationwide popular vote as
long as he has won in enough states to give him a majority in the Electoral
College. The last thing the framers
wanted was pure majority rule. They
understood that a purely majority-rule system often results in a tyranny of the
majority.
Since the citizens of each state were the
ultimate sovereign in deciding whether or not their state would join the Union,
the citizens of each state should have been the ultimate sovereign in deciding
whether or not their state would remain in the
As part of his denial of the right of
secession,
Our States have neither more nor less
power than that reserved to them in the Union by the Constitution, no one of
them ever having been a State out of the
There is so much error and sophistry
packed into these statements that it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s difficult to imagine
what founding documents
It’s also hard to imagine how
In framing his argument that the states
were never sovereign “out of the Union,”
The powers delegated by the proposed
Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to
remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. (Federalist Paper
Number 45)
In the same treatise,
The State
government will have the advantage of the Federal government, whether we
compare them in respect to the immediate dependence of the one on the other; to
the weight of personal influence which each side will possess; to the powers
respectively vested in them. . . . (Federalist Paper Number 45)
Speaking of
When
The first question [how a state could
secede without approval from the other states] is answered at once by recurring
to the absolute necessity of the case; to the great principle of
self-preservation; to the transcendent law of nature and of nature's God, which
declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all
political institutions aim, and to which all such institutions must be
sacrificed. (Federalist Paper Number 43)
This is important because the Articles of
Confederation expressly stated that the union they were creating was “perpetual” and that
that union could only be altered by the approval of all the states. Now, if the natural right of
self-preservation allowed a state to peacefully leave the "perpetual"
union of the Articles of Confederation without the consent of the other states,
then logic demands that this natural right would also permit a state to
peacefully leave the federal
It’s true that
Applying a like view of the subject to
the case of the U. S. it results, that the compact being among individuals as
embodied into States, no State can at pleasure release itself therefrom, and
set up for itself. The compact can only be dissolved by the consent of the
other parties, or by usurpations or abuses of power justly having that
effect." (Letter from James Madison to Nicholas P. Trist, February 15,
1830, emphasis added)
Notice that
The constitution of the
When the Constitution was being debated in
the states,
On the other hand, should an
unwarrantable measure of the federal government be unpopular in particular
States, which would seldom fail to be the case, or even a warrantable measure
be so, which may sometimes be the case, the means of opposition to it are powerful
and at hand. The disquietude of the people; their repugnance and, perhaps, refusal
to co-operate with the officers of the Union; the frowns of the executive
magistracy of the State; the embarrassments created by legislative devices,
which would often be added on such occasions, would oppose, in any State,
difficulties not to be despised; would form, in a large State, very serious
impediments; and where the sentiments of several adjoining States happened to
be in unison, would present obstructions which the federal government would
hardly be willing to encounter.
But ambitious encroachments of the
federal government, on the authority of the State governments, would not excite
the opposition of a single State, or of a few States only. They would be signals
of general alarm. Every government would espouse the common cause. A
correspondence would be opened. Plans of resistance would be concerted.
One spirit would animate and conduct the whole. The same combinations, in
short, would result from an apprehension of the federal, as was produced by the
dread of a foreign, yoke [i.e., the colonists’ fear of British oppression]; and unless the
projected innovations should be
voluntarily renounced, the same appeal to a trial of force would be made in
the one case as was made in the other.
But what degree of madness could ever drive the federal government to
such an extremity? In the contest with
In April 1830,
The great early American constitutional
scholar William Rawle said a state had the right to secede. Rawle was a contemporary of founding fathers
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and was appointed by George Washington as
the first U.S. Attorney for
It depends on the state itself to retain
or abolish the principle of representation, because it depends on itself
whether it will continue a member of the
This right must be considered as an
ingredient in the original composition of the general government, which, though
not expressed, was mutually understood. . . . (A View of the Constitution of
the United States, 2nd Edition, 1829, Vol. 4, p. 571)
Another early American legal giant, George
Tucker, also said a state had the right to secede. Like Rawle, Tucker was a contemporary of
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and corresponded with the former. Tucker came to be known as the “American Blackstone.” Tucker
was a professor of law at the
The federal government, then, appears to
be the organ through which the united republics communicate with foreign
nations and with each other. Their
submission to its operation is voluntary: its councils, its engagements, its
authority are theirs, modified, and united.
Its sovereignty is an emanation from theirs, not a flame by which they
have been consumed, nor a vortex in which they are swallowed up. Each is still a perfect state, still
sovereign, still independent, and still capable, should the situation require,
to resume the exercise of its functions as such in the most unlimited extent.
(Tucker, editor, Blackstone’s Commentaries: With Notes of Reference to the Constitution and Laws
of the Federal Government of the United States, Volume 1, Philadelphia: William Birch and Abraham
Small, 1803, Appendix: Note D, Section 3:IV)
The
George Washington’s Secretary of State, Timothy Pickering of
The Federalists
are dissatisfied, because they see the public morals debased by the corrupt and
corrupting system of our rulers. Men are tempted to become apostates, not to
Federalism merely, but to virtue and to religion and to good government. . .
. the principles of our revolution
point to the remedy--a separation.
That this can be accomplished, and without spilling one drop of blood, I
have little doubt. . . . The people of
the East cannot reconcile their habits, views, and interests with those of the
South and West. The latter are beginning to rule with a rod of iron. . . .
A Northern
confederacy would unite congenial characters, and present a fairer prospect of
public happiness; while the Southern States, having a similarity of habits,
might be left "to manage their own affairs in their own way." If a
separation were to take place, our mutual wants would render a friendly and
commercial intercourse inevitable. . . .
(Letter from Timothy Pickering to George Cabot, January 29, 1804,
emphasis added)
Thomas Jefferson, the author of the
Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States, said
in a letter to William Crawford in 1816 that if a state wanted to leave the
Union, he would not hesitate to say “Let us separate,” even if he didn’t agree with the reasons the state wanted to leave (Letter
from Thomas Jefferson to William Crawford, June 20, 1816). Critics point out that in one case
Concurring in
the doctrines that the separate States have a right to interpose in cases of
palpable infraction of the constitution by the government of the United States,
and that the alien and sedition acts presented a case of such infraction, Mr.
Jefferson considered them as absolutely null and void, and thought the State
legislatures competent, not only to declare, but to make them so, to resist
their execution within their respective borders by physical force, and to
secede from the Union, rather than to submit to them, if attempted to be
carried into execution by force. (Southern Historical Society Papers,
Volume 1, 1876, p. 10)
The founding
fathers specifically rejected the idea that the federal government could use
force against a state to compel obedience.
The only two situations in which the framers permitted the general
government to use force against a state, or even in a state, were (1) if
the state were invaded or (2) if the state's legislature or governor requested
federal assistance to deal with domestic violence. Constitutional scholar
and former law professor John Remington Graham discusses this point:
It is an historical
fact that, on two occasions during their deliberations, the framers in the
Philadelphia Convention voted to deny Congress the power of calling forth
military forces of the Union to compel obedience of a state, and on two further
occasions they voted to deny Congress the power of sending the Federal army or
navy into the territory of any state, except as allowed under Article IV,
Section 4 of the United States Constitution--to repel a foreign invasion or at
the request of its legislature or governor to deal with domestic violence. (A
Constitutional History of Secession, Gretna,
Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company, 2002, p. 287)
In commenting on
Article IV, Section 4, George Tucker noted that it was a protection against the
federal government using the pretext of providing “protection”
as an excuse for
unjustified intervention:
It may not he
amiss further to observe, that every pretext for intermeddling with the
domestic concerns of any state, under color of protecting it against domestic
violence is taken away, by that part of the provision which renders an
application from the legislative, or executive authority of the state
endangered, necessary to be made to the federal government, before it's
interference can be at all proper. (Tucker, editor, Blackstone’s Commentaries: With Notes
of Reference to the Constitution and Laws of the Federal Government of the
United States, Volume 1, Appendix: Note D, Section 17:6)
As mentioned earlier, President James Buchanan,
in his last annual message to Congress, warned that the federal government had
no constitutional right to use force to keep a state in the Union nor to compel
a seceded state to rejoin the
The question fairly stated is: Has the
Constitution delegated to Congress the power to coerce a state into submission
which is attempting to withdraw or has actually withdrawn from the confederacy?
[Note: It was common to refer to the
It appears from the proceedings of that
body that on the 31st of May, 1787, the clause “authorizing an exertion of the force of the whole against a delinquent state” came up for consideration. Mr. Madison opposed it in a brief but
powerful speech, from which I shall extract but a single sentence. He observed:
“The
use of force against a state would look
more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment, and would
probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous
compacts by which it might be bound.”
Upon his motion the clause was
unanimously postponed and was never, I believe, again presented. Soon afterward,
on the 8th of June, 1787, when incidentally adverting to the subject, he said: “Any government for the
United States formed on the supposed
practicability of using force against the unconstitutional proceedings of the
states would prove as visionary and fallacious as the government of Congress,” evidently meaning the then existing Congress of the
old Confederation.
Without descending to particulars, it may
be safely asserted that the power to make war against a state is at variance
with the whole spirit and intent of the Constitution. . . .
The fact is that our
President Buchanan was
correct. On May 31, 1787, during the
debates on the Constitution, the founding fathers considered a clause
"authorizing an exertion of the force of the whole against a delinquent
state.” The clause was not approved. Madison himself spoke against it. Here is the relevant extract from the Journal
of the Federal Convention:
The last clause of the
sixth Resolution, authorizing an exertion of the force of the whole against a
delinquent State, came next into consideration.
Mr.
A few days later, on June 8,
In order to believe that the framers
intended the federal government to have the right to compel a state to remain
in the Union, one would have to ignore the fact that the framers rejected the
idea of allowing the federal government to use force against a state. One would also have to believe that the
founders gave the federal government a right that they didn’t believe the British government possessed. George Washington and many other Patriots
believed the British were “unjust invaders” for attempting
to force the colonies to remain under British control against their will, and
they resented being called “rebels” and “traitors” for wanting
independence (see, for example,
The general [British general Thomas
Gage], further emulating his ministerial masters, by a proclamation bearing
date on the 12th day of June, after venting the grossest falsehoods and
calumnies against the good people of these colonies, proceeds to “declare them all, either
by name or description, to be rebels and traitors, to supersede the course of the common law, and instead
thereof to publish and order the use and exercise of the law martial."
("A Declaration by the Representatives of the United Colonies of
North-America, Now Met in Congress at Philadelphia, Setting Forth the Causes
and Necessity of Their Taking Up Arms," July 6, 1775)
Continental Army
surgeon James Thacher didn't like the label of "rebels" either--he
complained of being “stigmatized” as “rebels” by the enemy:
The great
majority of the people are happily united in the resolution to oppose, to the
uttermost, the wicked attempts of the English cabinet. This class of people have assumed the
appellation of Whigs; but by our enemies are stigmatized by the name of Rebels.
(Journal of James Thacher, 1775)
Our Patriot forefathers
also had a lot to say about the colonies’ natural right to self-government and
independence. Samuel Adams talked about
natural rights and the fact that every natural right not expressly surrendered
remains with the people:
All men have a right to remain in a state
of nature as long as they please; and in case of intolerable oppression, civil
or religious, to leave the society they belong to, and enter into another.
When men enter
into society, it is by voluntary consent; and they have a right to demand and
insist upon the performance of such conditions and previous limitations as form
an equitable original compact.
Every natural
right not expressly given up, or, from the nature of a social compact,
necessarily ceded, remains."
All positive
and civil laws should conform, as far as possible, to the law of natural reason
and equity." ("The Rights of the Colonists," November 1772)
In fact,
If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake,
should in terms renounce or give up any essential natural right, the eternal
law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation."
(“The Rights
of the Colonists”)
Thomas
Paine:
Every thing
that is right or natural pleads for separation. . . . A government of our own is our natural
right. (Common Sense,
Richard Henry
Lee:
Resolved, That these United
Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they
are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political
connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be,
totally dissolved. (Resolution of
Richard Henry Lee, Journals of the Continental Congress, June 7, 1776)
The Sons of
Liberty of Connecticut adopted a resolution that said the people had the right
to reassume the authority they had delegated:
Resolved. 1st.
That every form of government rightfully founded, originates from the
consent of the people.
2d. That the
boundaries set by the people in all constitutions are the only limits within
which any officer can lawfully exercise authority.
3d. That
whenever those bounds are exceeded, the people have a right to reassume the
exercise of that authority which by nature they had before they delegated it to
individuals. (Connecticut Resolutions on the Stamp Act, December 10, 1765,
emphasis added)
There was a time when even Massachusetts
Federalists said that nullification and secession were not treason but were
actions that a state had the right to take if it believed it needed to do
so. Historian James Banner points out
the following:
The Federalist theory of interposition, so widely held after 1808, was
rooted in the premise that the nation was a collection of “several independent confederated republics,” a “league” of equal and
sovereign states which had surrendered
only a portion of their authority to the central government under the
Constitution. In constitutional
arguments sharply reminiscent of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, which
they had only a few years earlier rejected, Federalists declared that the Constitution
was variously a “treaty,” “contract,” or “association.” Each state
was a free republic “united by a solemn compact under
a federal government of limited powers.” These sovereign republics, and not the
people, had been represented at
Federalists concluded from these
propositions that since the states had negotiated the Constitution, the states
alone could determine when a national law violated the compact, when its
obligations under the Constitution ceased, and when to denounce it. From this it irresistibly followed that if a
state nullified a law, interposed its authority between the people and the
national administration, or in the extremity seceded, it would not commit
treason. The state would merely assume
to itself its full sovereign powers as a republic, a remedy “prescribed by the law of
nations." (To the Hartford
Convention: The Federalists and the Origin of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789-1815, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1970, p. 118)
In discussing the
arguments in the rising calls for secession made by Massachusetts Federalists
as their opposition to the War of 1812 mounted, Banner paraphrases and quotes
those arguments:
Because, it was
said, the Constitution was “a treaty of alliance and confederation”
and the government an association of states, then it followed “that
whenever its provisions are violated, or its original principles departed from by a majority of the
states or of their people, it is no longer an effective instrument, but that
any state is at liberty by the spirit of that contract to withdraw itself from
the union." (To the Hartford Convention, p. 301)
The principle of peaceful separation was
as American as apple pie. But
My residence is in the North, but I have
never seen the day, and I never shall, when I will refuse justice as readily to
the South as to the North. . . .
Sir, if there is, as I contend, the right
of secession, then, whenever a State exercises that right, this Government has
no laws in that State to execute, nor has it any property in any such state
that can be protected by the power of this Government. In attempting, however, to substitute the
smooth phrases “executing
the laws” and “protecting public
property” for
coercion, for civil war, we have an important concession: that is, that this Government dare not go before
the people with a plain avowal of its real purposes and of their
consequences. No, sir; the policy is to
inveigle the people of the North into civil war, by masking the designs in
smooth and ambiguous terms. (Congressional Globe, Second Session,
Thirty-Sixth Congress, p. 1347, in Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the
Confederate Government, pp. 216-217)
In addition, the South had no desire to overthrow
the federal government. The South
seceded in a peaceful, democratic manner, with the support of the overwhelming
majority of Southern citizens. The
Southern states used the same process to secede that the original thirteen
states used to ratify the U.S. Constitution, i.e., by voting in special
conventions comprised of delegates who were elected by the people. The one exception was
Furthermore, most Southerners believed
secession would be peaceful. In fact, it’s revealing that the
early correspondence of the first Confederate
Secretary of War, Leroy Walker, "clearly indicates he did not expect
war" (Rembert Patrick, Jefferson Davis and His Cabinet, Louisiana
State University Press, 1944, p. 106).
As late as March 21, 1861, Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens
believed it was more likely that war would be avoided:
The prospect of war is, at least, not so
threatening as it has been. The idea of coercion, shadowed forth in President
Lincoln's inaugural, seems not to be followed up thus far so vigorously as was
expected.
On the basis of the natural right of
self-government alone, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the
South had the right to leave the
The driving, core principle behind the
American Revolution was that the colonies had the natural right to be
independent if they so desired. The
founding fathers said over and over again that the colonies had a natural,
God-given right to release themselves from British authority. They resented the fact that the British
refused to recognize this right and that the British forced them to fight for
their independence. Senator Jefferson
Davis of
Now, sir, we are confusing language very
much. Men speak of revolution; and when
they say revolution they mean blood. Our
fathers meant nothing of the sort. When
they spoke of revolution they meant an unalienable right. When they declared as an unalienable right
the power of the people to abrogate and modify their form of government
whenever it did not answer the ends for which it was established, they did not
mean that they were to sustain that by brute force. They meant that it was a right; and force
could only be invoked when that right was wrongfully denied.
If the Declaration of Independence be
true (and who here gainsays it?), every community may dissolve its connection
with any other community previously made, and have no other obligation than
that which results from the breach of an alliance between States. Is it to be supposed; could any man . . .
come to the conclusion that the men who fought the battles of the Revolution .
. . in order that they might possess those unalienable rights which they had
declared—terminated
their great efforts by transmitting posterity to a condition in which they could only gain those rights by
force? If so, the blood of the
Revolution was shed in vain. . . . (Speech in the U.S. Senate, January 10,
1861, in The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume 1, pp.
531-532)
John O’Sullivan, the editor of the influential United States Magazine and the
man who coined the famous phrase “Manifest Destiny” because he believed God wanted
Northern abolitionist Lysander Spooner,
though a harsh critic of slavery, disputed the Republican claim that secession
was treason, and he argued that the North’s use of force to keep the South in the
The question of
treason is distinct from that of slavery; and is the same that it would have
been, if
The principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That
men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that
they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and
criminals.
No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false
than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom. Yet it
triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established. If it really be
established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the
war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that
he does not want, is a slave. And there is no difference, in principle--but
only in degree--between political and chattel slavery. . . .
The North has thus virtually said to the world: It was all very well to prate
of consent, so long as the objects to be accomplished were to liberate
ourselves from our connection with England, and also to coax a scattered and
jealous people into a great national union; but now that those purposes have
been accomplished, and the power of the North has become consolidated, it is
sufficient for us --- as for all governments--simply to say: Our power is our
right.
In proportion to her wealth and population, the North has probably expended
more money and blood to maintain her power over an unwilling people, than any
other government ever did. And in her estimation, it is apparently the chief
glory of her success, and an adequate compensation for all her own losses, and
an ample justification for all her devastation and carnage of the South, that
all pretence of any necessity for consent to the perpetuity or power of government,
is (as she thinks) forever expunged from the minds of the people. In short, the
North exults beyond measure in the proof she has given, that a government,
professedly resting on consent, will expend more life and treasure in crushing
dissent, than any government, openly founded on force, has ever done.
And she claims that she has done all this
in behalf of liberty! In behalf of free government! In behalf of the principle
that government should rest on consent! (No Treason, Boston, 1867, Number 1,
Introductory and Chapter I)
What Caused the War?
The Civil War was fought because
The Confederacy did not want war. One of the first things Jefferson Davis did
after assuming office as president of the Confederacy was to send a peace
delegation to
“Why,” one may
ask, “did Confederates sometimes refer
to themselves as ‘rebels’?” Actually, many Confederates resented that
term (see, for example, Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the
Confederate Government, Volume 1, pp. 282-284). Those Confederates who described themselves
as “rebels”
did so in sarcastic defiance and only in the sense that they were “rebelling” against being invaded and subjugated.
It should be pointed out that many
Northern citizens opposed the war and believed the South should be allowed to
leave in peace. Dozens of Northern
newspapers expressed the view that the Southern states had the right to
peacefully leave the
Who Started the War?
The standard textbook answer to this
question is that the South obviously started the war because it “fired the first shot” by attacking
In his inaugural speech, given weeks
before the attack on
Jefferson Davis argued that the attack on
The attempt to represent us as the aggressors
in the conflict which ensued is as unfounded as the complaint made by the wolf
against the lamb in the familiar fable.
He who makes the assault is not necessarily he that strikes the first
blow or fires the first gun. To have
awaited further strengthening of their position by land and naval forces, with
hostile purpose now declared, for the sake of having them “fire the first gun” would
have been as unwise as it would be to
hesitate to strike down the arm of the assailant, who levels a deadly weapon at
one’s breast,
until he has actually fired. After the assault was made by the hostile
descent of the fleet, the reduction of
If Lincoln had desired peace, he knew all
he had to do was evacuate Fort Sumter, as his own Secretary of State had been
promising would be done for weeks. When
the Confederacy was told the fort was
going to be evacuated, Confederate forces stopped building up the defenses
around the harbor and celebrated. Across
the harbor, Major Anderson was grateful the fort would be evacuated and that
therefore North and South would separate peacefully:
Confidently, he [Seward] told Supreme
Court Justice John Campbell that
But, sadly,
As the pressure for aggression mounted,
Some Northern leaders who wanted peace
urged that
Before the Confederacy was established,
You say that the fort was garrisoned for
our protection, and is held for the same purposes for which it has ever been
held since its construction. Are you not
aware, that to hold, in the territory of a foreign power, a fortress against her
will, avowedly for the purpose of protecting her citizens, is perhaps the
highest insult which one government can offer to another? But
Republicans protested loudly over the fact
that several Southern states seized numerous federal installations before
Admittedly, the pre-secession seizures,
though few in number, were unwise and legally problematic. However, let’s keep in mind that these seizures posed no threat to the federal government,
that they were bloodless, and that the Confederacy offered to pay compensation
for all federal installations in the South.
The seizures certainly didn’t provide any credible justification for a federal
invasion, and they were hardly what one
could call “aggression”
in any meaningful sense of the
word. Additionally, it needs to be
emphasized that the Republicans would have been just as determined to invade
the South even if no federal installations had been seized. After all, some Republicans began voicing
dire threats against the seceded states before any federal installations were
seized. The seizures merely provided
Republicans with another excuse to refuse to allow the South to go in peace.
The Emancipation Proclamation
Everyone can agree that slavery needed to
be abolished. However, the Emancipation
Proclamation, signed on January 1, 1863, left over 400,000 slaves in
bondage. Let’s take a moment to
consider the purpose, nature, and
legality of the Emancipation Proclamation.
The proclamation was a war measure, as the
document itself states. The Radical
Republicans hoped the proclamation would produce a slave revolt in the South,
even if this resulted in the deaths of thousands of women and children on
plantations and farms. (Perhaps it’s an indication of how most slaves were treated that no
such revolt ever occurred, even though many plantations and farms were being
run by women and children at the time, since most of the men were engaged in
the war effort.)
When it was issued, the proclamation did
not free a single slave in any of the four Union slave states nor in any of the
regions of the South that were then under federal control. The proclamation excluded the slaves in those
areas. The proclamation only applied to
slaves in the Confederate states, where
The Emancipation Proclamation asserted
freedom for slaves in those areas that were not under control of the federal
government and left slavery untouched in areas where federal control was
effective. It seemed a halting measure
of dubious effect and shaky legality, and the Confederates denounced it as a
call for a slave revolt. (In Blum and Catton, Edmund Morgan, Arthur
Schlesinger, Kenneth Stampp, and C. Vann Woodward, editors, The National
Experience: A History of the United States, Second Edition, New York:
Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1968, p. 360)
African-American scholar Lerone Bennett
presents evidence that Lincoln only issued the proclamation under intense
pressure from the Radical Republicans, who were threatening to cut off funds to
the army if emancipation wasn’t made a war objective, and that Lincoln only began to seriously consider the Radicals’ demands after Union
forces suffered several defeats
(Bennett, Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 2000, pp.
23-24, 415-420, 498-504; see also Klingaman, Abraham Lincoln and the Road to
Emancipation, pp. 139, 148-149, 200-202).
Bennett also shows that
The proclamation provided no compensation
for slaveholders, even though Lincoln himself had said this should be done, and
even though most slaveholders treated their slaves humanely (as even many
abolitionists had once been willing to admit).
Few Northern abolitionists had ever supported compensated
emancipation. The Radical Republicans
certainly weren’t about to support such a plan. They didn’t seem to care that several Northern states had reaped fantastic profits from the
slave trade. Nor did they seem to care
that when most Northern states had abolished slavery they had done so gradually
and in a manner that enabled Northern slaveholders to recover the cost of their
slaves.
If the Southern states were still actually
in the Union, as
Of course, the Southern states had in fact
left the
It should be pointed out that American
leaders reacted angrily when the British tried to incite a slave revolt in the
American colonies during the Revolutionary War.
This was a serious threat, since slaves were held in each of the thirteen
colonies at the time. The British offered
freedom to American slaves who would fight in the British army, and they
encouraged slaves to sabotage the colonial war effort. Not surprisingly, tens of thousands of slaves
flocked to British army encampments.
Fortunately, however, not enough slaves fought for the British to turn
the tide against the Patriots. At the
end of the war, at least 15,000 former slaves accompanied British troops as
they evacuated
If the Emancipation Proclamation had
covered all slaves, if it had included compensation for slaveholders, and if it
had contained guarantees against a slave revolt, it would have been on solid
moral ground. It still would have been
unconstitutional, but it would have been consistent, fair, and moral. However, the proclamation contained none of
these things. It was intended as a war
measure. It left Northern slaves in
bondage. Its real purpose was to advance
the effort to subjugate the South, even if that meant causing the deaths of
thousands of Southern women and children in a slave revolt. The Radicals and other Republicans were using
Southern slaves as pawns in their effort to conquer the South.
Many Southern heritage defenders argue
that the Emancipation Proclamation “did not free a single slave.” In one
respect, this is true. At the time it
was issued, the proclamation didn’t free any slaves, since it only applied to
Confederate territory. However, as the war continued, thousands of
slaves did in fact achieve freedom because of the proclamation. Prior to the issuance of the proclamation,
numerous Union commanders refused to help or harbor runaway slaves. This refusal largely vanished after the
proclamation took effect.
Republicans, the North, and Racism
(NOTE: In this section it will be
necessary to quote some offensive words and statements from the Civil War
era. I apologize to those readers who
are offended by them.)
The same Republican-controlled Congress
that eventually made forceful emancipation a secondary goal of the war and that
imposed oppressive Reconstruction rule on the South after the war, also
sanctioned the federal government’s terrible mistreatment of the American Indians.
Historian C. Vann Woodward put it this way:
The same Congress that devised Radical Reconstruction
. . . approved strict segregation and inequality for the Indian of the West.
(In Blum and Catton et al, editors, The National Experience, p. 416)
With the Republicans firmly in control of
the federal government, the Union army began a series of brutal campaigns
against the American Indians a few months after the Confederate commanding
general, Robert E. Lee, surrendered at
Indian war broke out in
Hardly had peace been restored to the
Southwest in the fall of 1865 when Indian war broke out in the Northwest. The bloody Sioux War of 1865-67 was brought
on by many forces, but it was triggered by the demands of minors who had
invaded the Sioux country. . . .
The Chivington and Fetterman massacres,
together with scores of minor battles and endless shooting scrapes, prompted
the federal government to review its Indian policy in 1867. . . .
The new policy meant that the Indians
were to abandon their way of life, submit to segregation in small
out-of-the-way reservations on land spurned by the white man, and accept
government tutelage in learning “to walk the white man’s road.” The Black
Hills section of the
But many Indians refused to renounce
their way of life and enter meekly into the reservations. When they took the warpath in the summer of
1868, General Sherman unleashed his troopers and launched a decade of
remorseless war against them. “I will urge General
Sheridan to push his measures for the
utter destruction and subjugation of all who are outside [the reservations] in
a hostile attitude,”
By the end of 1874 all seemed calm. Then in 1875, when government authorities
permitted tens of thousands of gold-prospectors to crowd into the
I agree with Thomas DiLorenzo’s point that the Republicans’ treatment of the Indians raises questions about
their professed concern for social justice:
Before being elected president, and while
still commander of the U.S. Army,
Ulysses S. Grant gave General Sherman the assignment, in July of 1865,
of conducting a campaign of ethnic genocide against the Plains Indians to make
way for the government-subsidized railroads.
“We
are not going to let a few thieving,
ragged Indians check and stop the progress of the railroads,”
The eradication of the Plains Indians was
yet another subsidy to the railroad industry, albeit an indirect one. Rather than paying for rights of way across
Indian lands, as James J. Hill’s nonsubsidized Great Northern
Railroad did, the government-subsidized Union Pacific and Central Pacific
Railroads got the government to either kill or place on reservations every last
Indian by 1890.
Sherman and Sheridan purposely planned
their raids during the winter months when they knew entire families would be
together. They killed all the animals as
well as the people, ensuring that any survivors would not survive for very long.
. . .
The fact that the war against the Plains
Indians began just three months after Lee’s surrender
calls into question yet again the notion that racial injustices in the South
were the primary motivation for Northerners’ willingness to wage such a long and destructive war.
No political party purporting to be sensitive to racial injustice could
possibly have even contemplated doing to the Indians what the
Both the Southern Confederates and the
Indians stood in the way of the Whig/Republican dream of a North American
economic empire, complete with a subsidized transcontinental railroad, a
nationalized banking system, and protectionist tariffs. Consequently, both groups were conquered and
subjugated by the most violent means. (The Real Lincoln: A New Look at
Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, Paperback Edition, New
York: Three Rivers Press, 2003, pp. 220-223)
Another example of Republican hypocrisy
was the Republican Party’s platform for the 1868 presidential election. Ulysses S.
Grant ran for president on this platform, and won handily. The platform stated that the Southern states
should be forced to allow blacks to vote but that the Northern states should be
allowed to decide this issue for themselves.
The Republicans took this position even though every Northern state that
had voted on amendments for black voting rights in the preceding three years
had soundly defeated those
amendments. Republican leaders knew that
racism was so widespread in the North that they would lose the election if they
advocated forcing the Northern states to allow blacks to vote. Many Republicans themselves weren’t enthusiastic about voting rights for Northern blacks
anyway.
If the Republicans’ primary concern had been to ensure that blacks were allowed to vote, they
would have insisted on black voting rights in all regions of the country. If they had done so, at least their position
would have been consistent and morally defensible. But they didn’t do
this. Furthermore, subsequent events
suggest that the Republicans enforced black voting rights in the South
primarily to expand their political power into that region. Once they achieved that power they
shamelessly plundered Southern taxpayers of all races. When the Republicans felt they no longer
needed to maintain their power in the South, most of them seemed to lose
interest in voting rights for African Americans.
Many Republican leaders, including some of
the Radicals, held racist views.
Thaddeus Stevens, the leader of the Radicals in the House, not only
opposed racial integration but believed blacks were less intelligent than
whites. In the words of friendly
biographer Fawn Brodie, Stevens “insisted that he had never held to the doctrine of Negro equality” (Fawn Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South, New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1959, p. 193; Hummel, Emancipating Slaves,
Enslaving Free Men, p. 300).
Incidentally, Stevens also believed the Constitution was “a worthless bit of old parchment” (Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens, p. 292).
Another powerful Radical in the House, George Julian, lectured his
fellow Republicans about their racism, saying, “The real trouble is that we hate the negro.
It is not his ignorance that offends us, but his color. . . .” (Kenneth Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction,
1865-1877, Vintage Books Edition, New York: Vintage Books, 1965, p.
102). Benjamin Wade, a leading Radical
in the Senate, was overheard “railing about too many 'nigger'
cooks in the capital” and complaining that he had eaten so many meals “cooked by Niggers” that he could “smell and taste the Nigger all
over” (Klingaman, Abraham Lincoln and
the Road to Emancipation, p. 53). In
the 1860 election campaign, numerous Republican leaders championed their party
as the true “White
Man’s Party” that would keep the western
territories safe for white labor (McPherson, Ordeal By Fire: The Civil War
and Reconstruction, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982, p. 123).
The North has nothing to do with the
Negroes. I have no more concern for them
than I have for the Hottentots. . . . They are not of our race. (In Klingaman, Abraham
Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation, p. 295)
Lincoln himself held racist views. As a politician in
I will say, then, that I am not nor ever
have been in favor of bringing about in any way, the social and political
equality of the white and black races; that I am not nor ever have been in
favor of making voters of the free negroes, or jurors, or qualifying them to
hold office, or having them to marry white people. I will say in addition, that
there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which, I
suppose, will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social
and political equality, and inasmuch as they cannot so live, that while they do
remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, that I as
much as any other man am in favor of the superior position being assigned to
the white man. (Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1832-1858, New
York: The Library of America, 1989, edited by Don Fehrenbacher, p. 751)
To be fair, it should be noted that
To understand something of the nature of that
problem we must look at the position of the American Negro in the 1860s. . .
. Throughout the nation there were
488,000 free Negroes. . . . Most free
Negroes—258,000—lived
in the South. . . .
“Free people
of color” were welcome in few places. In the North
they were almost universally segregated, excluded from public life, and their
children barred from white public schools.
In those areas where separate Negro schools were provided they were
inadequately financed and instruction was poor. . . .
The situation of the black American when
the war ended was ambiguous. . . .
Northerners as a whole, willing to concede freedom, were hostile to
equality. Many of them dreaded an incursion
of black folk after the war—especially among lower paid
workers who feared Negro competition and some not so poorly paid who resented
possible Negro entry into their crafts.
The use of Negroes as strikebreakers during the war and their employment
in areas where whites were out of work resulted in agitation and riots and intensified
anti-Negro feeling.
Such sentiment, however, was by no means
confined to workingmen. Between 1865 and
1867 voters in
Historian James McPherson:
The
African-American scholars John Franklin
and Alfred Moss:
There can be no doubt that many blacks
were sorely mistreated in the North and West. Observers like Fanny Kemble and
Frederick L. Olmsted mentioned incidents in their writings. Kemble said of Northern
blacks, “They
are not slaves indeed, but they are
pariahs, debarred from every fellowship save with their own despised race. . .
. All hands are extended to thrust them out, all fingers point at their dusky
skin, all tongues . . . have learned to turn the very name of their race into
an insult and a reproach.”
Olmsted seems to have believed the
Historian Michael F. Holt:
Many Northern whites also wanted to keep
slaves out of the West in order to keep blacks out. The North was a pervasively racist society
where free blacks suffered social,
economic, and political discrimination; some midwestern states, indeed, legally
banned the entry of blacks within their borders. Bigots, they sought to bar African-American
slaves from the West. [David] Wilmot
himself proudly and repeatedly called his measure [to bar slavery from new
western territories] the “White Man’s Proviso.” (The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery
Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War, New York: Hill and Wang, 2004, p. 27)
Historian David R. Roediger:
Historians have noticed the rise in
racism in the urban North before the Civil War—a racism expressed in attacks on
vestigial Black civil rights, in physical attacks on Blacks by white crowds, in
the growth of racist invective, in color bars in employment and in the huge
popularity of minstrel shows. . . .
We have seen the extent to which
triumphant republicanism proved compatible with the casting of Blacks as “anticitizens” to be excluded
from civic affairs. For example, anyone the color of Crispus
Attacks, the martyr of
. . . the most common role for Black
Philadelphians in antebellum Christmas maskings was as victims of blackfaced
mobs [i.e., mobs of white people who had blackened their faces or wearing black
masks]. . . . In 1834, blacked-up Philadelphians
attacked Blacks in a major race riot not connected to Christmas maskings. In 1840, Blacks celebrating the Christmas
season as part of the street processions were set upon by attackers in
blackface. . . . But even when not
celebrating on the streets, Blacks could not avoid attacks from those dressed
as Jim Crow or Aunt Sally. Christmas
racial clashes, initiated by blackface mobs, took place regularly between 1837
and 1848, with the last erupting into full-scale riot. Some of the violence involved white and Black
gangs, but on other occasions, blacked-up mobs attacked African-Americans who
were in church. . . .
The movement of “contraband” exslaves into
Historian Joanne Pope Melish:
The emancipation of slaves in New
England, beginning around 1780, was a gradual process, whether by post nati
statute, as in Rhode Island and Connecticut, or by effect, as in Massachusetts
and New Hampshire, where ambiguous judicial decisions and constitutional
interpretations discouraged slaveholding without clearly outlawing it. . .
. The emancipation process took place
during the post-Revolutionary period of social and economic uncertainty that
interrogated the stability of social identity and the meaning of citizenship
for whites as well as people of color [blacks]. . . .
Even more problematic was the promise
implicit in antislavery rhetoric that abolition, by ending “the problem”—the sin of
slavery and the troublesome presence of
slaves—would
result in the eventual absence of people of color themselves. In other
words, whites anticipated that free people of color would, by some undefined
moment (always imminent), have disappeared.
New England whites employed an array of
strategies to effect the removal promised by antislavery rhetoric and to efface
[erase] people of color and their history in
[Ralph Waldo] Emerson’s perceptive if
simplistic observation about abolitionists of the 1850s applies as well to eighteenth-century antislavery
activists: “The
abolitionist wishes to abolish slavery,
but because he wishes to abolish the black man.” Many whites had imagined that gradual
emancipation would ultimately restore
The hardening ideology of “race”—innate, permanent
difference, located within the body as
part of each person’s essential nature—effectively contained and managed people of color, as had the old institution of slavery. . .
.
As sectional controversy intensified, the
mystique of a historically free, white
But the issue of the extension of slavery
racialized the question of the nature of the model society, and “what New England is now”
comprised not only judgments about the
superiority of small-town commerce and free labor over large-scale,
slave-dependent agriculture in the present but also assumptions about the
development of New England in the past as a region that was historically “white” as well as “free.” In this
context, efforts to remove free people of color from
The moral authority asserted by the idea
of a free, white New England also served to rationalize the ambitions of many
New Englanders and, ultimately, northerners—both
intellectuals and entrepreneurs—to dominate the South commercially and culturally. . . .
As Emerson said in support of the confiscation of southerners’ property at the end of
the war, “You at once open the whole South to the
enterprise and genius of new men of all
nations, and extend New England from
When radical abolitionists—advocating immediate,
uncompensated emancipation—began to gain
adherents in the mid-1830s, they vilified the colonizationist argument, but
their own position rested on quite similar assumptions about the superiority of
Yankee blood and culture. The
observation of Theodore Parker, leading Boston preacher and committed
abolitionist, that “the Anglo-Saxon people . . . is the best specimen of mankind which has ever attained great power in the world”—although made later, in 1857—is quite typical of the thinking prevalent among
New England abolitionists.
The few abolitionists who acknowledged
The growing enmity on the part of whites
was clearly reflected in their public language; the use of the word “nigger” in particular
seemed to operate as a kind of coagulate of the resentments that had been growing in white communities in tandem
with the size and visibility of the population of free people of color. People of color themselves understood clearly
how the term served to enact the embodiment of innate, permanent
inferiority. Hosea Easton described the
process in his 1837 Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and Civil and
Political Condition of the Colored People of the
“Negro
or nigger, is . . . employed to impose
contempt upon them as an inferior race, and also to express their deformity of
person. Nigger lips, nigger shins,
nigger heels, are phrases universally common among the juvenile class of society,
and full well understood by them. . . .
Children in infancy receive oral instruction from the nurse. The first lessons given are, . . . go to sleep, if you don’t the old nigger will
carry you off; don’t you cry—Hark; the old
nigger’s
coming—how ugly you are, you are worse than a little nigger. . . . to inspire their half-grown misses and masters to
improvement, they are told that if they do this or that, . . . they will be
poor or ignorant as a nigger, or that they will be black as a nigger; or have
no more credit than a nigger.”
In an explicit reference to the
scurrilous, lampooning broadsides then circulating widely in the streets of
A New England identity remained somewhat
appealing because for over half a century the idea of
But the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
stripped away even the legal convention of “freedom” and overshadowed the few formal advances, laying bare the reality of
northern “racial”
thinking and practices. Martin Delany spoke for a growing number of
distinctly disenchanted northern people of color in 1852 when he stated baldly
that the “free”
states were nothing of the kind. . . .
[
What Harriet Wilson published in 1859 was
a remarkably clear-eyed assessment of the racialized structure of New England
life which had developed in the more than half a century following the first
steps toward emancipation of
The engagement of New England in the
Civil War can be read, as Lewis Simpson suggests, as a nationalist and
culturally imperialist enterprise fueled at least in substantial part by the “racial” essentialism on
the one hand and the mythology of “freedom” on the other
which
Ultimately, of course, the Civil War
ended American slavery finally and completely, but northern people of color
were not thereby released from racial thinking and practices whose origins were
lost in a largely suppressed history of northern slavery and gradual
emancipation. . . .
Long after the war ended, the presence of
people of color in
Historian Merton Dillon:
The ending of slavery in the North had
not been accompanied by change in the racial attitudes that for so long had
supported it. If anything, prejudice
increased as the numbers of free Blacks grew and as the insecurities resulting
from rapid economic and social change were felt throughout white society. Prejudice was not expressed in verbal slurs
and social slights alone. Far more
serious was the fact that custom barred most Blacks from economic and
educational opportunity. Although
striking examples can be cited of Blacks who overcame all such obstacles, the
majority were shut out by prejudice from sharing in the profits and advantages
of the growing American economy. . . .
Most Northerners still preferred that
Blacks remain in the South and not attempt to settle in Northern white
communities. In 1845—after more than a decade
of intense abolitionist agitation—an Illinois state legislative committee asserted that “by nature, education, and association, it is believed that the negro is
inferior to the white man, physically, morally, and intellectually: whether
this be true to the fullest extent matters not, when we take into consideration
the fact that such is the opinion of the vast majority of our citizens.” (The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting
Minority, New York: W. W. Norton
& Company, 1974, pp. 20-21, 74)
William Klingaman:
In the first half of the nineteenth
century, state legislatures in
City officials [in Washington. D.C.]
restricted Negro immigrants to the malaria-ridden lowlands known as “
In early March [1862], Congress took up a
bill to abolish slavery in the
Residents of
Passage of the Confiscation Act did not
resolve the debate over emancipation in Congress. The bill itself freed no slaves. . . . At the same time, however, prejudice against
Negroes was rising among white northerners.
Some whites blamed Negroes for causing the war. . . . Other whites, particularly Irish immigrants
living in Northern cities, feared that freed slaves might migrate north and
compete with them as a source of cheap labor.
“There is but
one thing, sir, that we want here,” announced an Ohioan to a visiting journalist, “and
that is to get rid of the niggers.” A lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery
Society reported that denunciations of Negroes “were never more common in my hearing. Many
Republicans unite with Democrats in cursing the ‘niggers,’ and in declaring that the slaves,
if possibly emancipated by the war, must
be removed from the country”. . . .
When several state governments found it
necessary to institute conscription in the summer of 1862, anti-Negro riots
broke out among . . . communities in
Midwestern opponents of the proclamation
[the Emancipation Proclamation] raised the specter of several million free
Negroes fleeing
In the summer of 1863,
Late in the afternoon, a mob set fire to
the Colored Orphan Asylum at
Racial prejudice grew stronger in the
riot’s
aftermath. Fearful of renewed trouble, employers refused
to hire Negroes; New Yorkers who befriended Negroes found themselves threatened
by white laborers. Eventually one-third
of the city’s
black population left to seek better
opportunities elsewhere. (Klingaman, Abraham Lincoln and the Road to
Emancipation, p. 54, 91, 117-118, 132, 164-165, 246-247, 262-264)
When it came to the issue of using blacks
as soldiers in the Union army, most Northern whites either opposed the measure
or favored it primarily because they wanted to save the lives of as many white
soldiers as possible. Klingaman:
“Certainly we hope we may never have to confess to the world that
the
Vice President Hamlin probably reflected
northerners’
opinion . . . when he told a rally in
Several Northern states rejected the
Fifteenth Amendment, which was designed to guarantee voting rights for African
Americans and for other minorities. The
amendment was submitted to the states for ratification in February 1869. The Northern states of
To judge from some books on the Civil War,
one would never guess that slavery started in the North and that it existed
there for decades. In fact, slavery
survived in two Northern states until the middle of the Civil War. Slavery continued in two other Northern
states until the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery several months after
the war. One rarely reads about the
conditions of Northern slavery. One
excellent study on the subject is James and Lois Horton’s fascinating book In Hope Of
* Northern whites violently overreacted to
rumors of slave conspiracies, and reacted even more harshly to actual slave
revolts. In some cases, numerous slaves
were tortured and then killed, and parts of their bodies were put on display as
a warning to other slaves.
* Northern masters generally opposed
allowing their slaves to learn to read and write, for fear this would make them
harder to control and even dangerous.
Slave revolts intensified Northern opposition to slave literacy.
* Northern governments enacted and enforced
fugitive slave laws, i.e., they forced the return of runaway slaves. One Northern government even signed a
fugitive slave treaty with local Indians in order to prevent slaves from
running away to live among those Indians.
* Northern masters tended to discourage
slave marriages and apparently weren’t overly concerned about keeping slave families intact.
(This is in contrast to Southern masters, who encouraged slave marriages
and who usually strove to keep slave families intact. Even James McPherson admits that 66-80
percent of slave marriages were not broken up. Data from the
* After most Northern states abolished
slavery, ex-slaves actually found themselves shut out from nearly all skilled
labor jobs in the North, whereas in the South free blacks and slaves alike had more
access to such jobs.
* When most Northern states abolished
slavery, racial prejudice against Northern blacks actually became worse,
for a number of reasons, such as perceived labor competition and the fact that
the social contact that had been required by the reality of slavery was no
longer necessary.
* Northern society was dominated by a
wealthy elite. (Interestingly, the
Hortons observe that throughout
* Northern governments passed numerous “black laws” that discriminated against blacks. Some of these laws prohibited interracial
marriage and imposed stiff penalties for violators.
* Runaway slaves were a constant
problem. Northern newspapers routinely
carried notices of masters looking for runaways.
* Some Northern governments passed laws to
encourage the African slave trade. (In
fact, several Northern states made huge fortunes from the slave trade.)
* In most cases, Northern emancipation was
gradual and included generous clauses that allowed Northern masters to recoup
most or all of the cost of their slaves.
* In Northern areas where slavery was more
economically viable, there was stronger opposition to emancipation. This opposition was overcome by the very
gradual nature of the emancipation programs and by the fact that they allowed
slaveholders to largely recover the cost of their slaves, if not make a small
profit.
The Hortons also document some interesting
facts about the British and American approaches to slaves and slavery during
the Revolutionary War. Students of the
Civil War will see some interesting parallels between the Civil War and the
Revolutionary War with regard to these issues.
For example:
* Shortly after the Continental Army was
formed, slaves and free blacks were barred from serving in it. Lord Dunmore, on the other hand, offered
freedom to slaves who would serve the British cause.
* Most blacks in the American army were
used in menial labor positions, not as combat troops.
* Although the commanding general of the
Continental Army issued an order allowing for the enlistment of free blacks in
December 1775, colonial governments and the Continental Congress were slow to
approve this change.
* Some
* The Americans considered it insulting
for the British to use their own slaves against them. Lord Dunmore made note that the use of black
soldiers was sure to anger and distress the American “rebels.” The Hortons
add, “For
many Americans such behavior [the
British use of American slaves as soldiers] confirmed their belief that
* As many as 100,000 slaves ran away from
their masters during the Revolutionary War and flocked to British lines. Thousands of them fought for the British.
* At least 15,000 ex-slaves evacuated with
the British army.
* British abolitionist politicians noted
the inconsistency in the American position of “yelping” for liberty while upholding slavery.
Samuel Johnson said, “How is it that we hear the
loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Another
British critic said, “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of
independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his
frightened slaves.”
Was the War Fought Over Slavery?
The war was fought over Southern
independence, not over slavery.
If there be those who would not save the
My paramount objective is to save the
If I could save the
In July 1861, after the First Battle of
Manassas (Bull Run) had been fought, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution, by
an overwhelming majority, that declared the war was not being fought to disturb
slavery, nor to subjugate the South, but only to “maintain the
The war itself really had nothing directly
to do with slavery. It’s true that disputes over slavery were the most important
factors behind the first wave of secession, but secession and the war were two
separate events. Additionally, four of
the Southern states did not secede over slavery. Secession was a peaceful, democratic process. The seceded states posed no threat to the
federal government, and they had no intention of trying to overthrow the
federal government. The Confederate
states wanted to live in peace with the North and offered to pay their share of
the national debt and to pay compensation for all federal forts in the
South. If
Some will make the argument that had it
not been for slavery there would have been no war and that therefore slavery
caused the war or that the war was fought over slavery. This is not a logical argument. It’s probably true that there would have been no war if there had been no slavery. However, even this is not certain. After all,
We must distinguish between factors and
causes. Slavery was one of several
factors that led to the war, but the cause of the conflict was the Republicans’ refusal to allow the South to leave in peace. The role that slavery played as a factor that
led to the war was similar to the role that oil played as a factor that led to
the first Gulf War in 1991. If there had
been no Kuwaiti oil fields,
If the Southern states had not seceded,
there would have been no war--and slavery would have continued. If the Southern states had surrendered when
The reaction of the Northern abolitionists
to the proposal of fellow abolitionist Moncure Conway is further proof the war
was not fought over slavery. Nearly all
the abolitionists supported the Radicals.
The cries of protest on this side of the
As one reads the speeches and letters of
Confederate leaders during the war, it becomes apparent that they certainly
didn't believe their main reason for fighting was to preserve slavery. For example, beginning in late 1862, James
Phelan, Joseph Bradford, and Reuben Davis wrote to Jefferson Davis to express
concern that some opponents were claiming the war "was for the defense of
the institution of slavery" (Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American, pp.
479-480, 765). They called those who were making this claim
"demagogues." Cooper notes
that when two Northerners visited Jefferson Davis during the war,
Jefferson Davis said repeatedly that the
South was fighting for the same “sacred right of self-government” that the revolutionary fathers had fought for. In his first
message to Congress [the Confederate Congress] after the fall of
To most Southerners, independence was more
important than was the continuation of slavery.
This is not surprising, since less than 10 percent of Southern citizens
actually held title to slaves, and since 69-75 percent of Southern families
were not slaveholders (John Niven, The Coming of the Civil War: 1837-1861,
Arlington Heights, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1990, p. 34; Divine et al,
editors, America Past and Present, p. 389; see also the 1860
Census). Early in the war, James Alcorn,
a powerful planter-politician from
Jefferson Davis summarily rejected
General Lee added his prestige to the
proposal: “We
must decide whether slavery shall be
extinguished by our enemies and the slaves used against us, or use them
ourselves at the risk of the effects which may be produced upon our social
institutions,”
he warned. “My own
opinion is that we should employ them without delay. . . . The best means of securing the efficiency and
fidelity of this auxiliary force would be to accompany the measure with a
well-digested plan of gradual and general emancipation.” In March of
1865, the Confederate Congress narrowly authorized the recruitment of 300,000
slaves, while the Davis Administration promised full emancipation to the
British and French governments in exchange for diplomatic recognition. (Emancipating
Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, pp. 280-281)
A Confederate soldier who was captured
early in the war expressed the South’s reason for fighting in simple yet eloquent terms. He
wore a ragged homemade uniform, and like most other Southerners he didn’t own any slaves. When Union
soldiers asked him why he was fighting for the Confederacy, he replied, “I’m fighting because you’re down here” (McPherson, The Battle Cry
of Freedom, p. 311, emphasis added).
To judge from their own letters, most
Union soldiers didn’t believe the war was being
fought over slavery and didn’t really care about the fate of
the slaves. As McPherson observes, Bell
Wiley studied the attitudes of Union soldiers on emancipation and concluded
that barely one in ten “had any real interest in emancipation per se” (For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil
War, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997, p. 117). Based on his own
analysis of a representative sampling of the letters of federal troops,
McPherson concludes that probably less than one in ten Union soldiers fought
solely for the abolition of slavery; such soldiers, he says, were “rare indeed” (For Cause and Comrades, p. 117). He
adds that for the first half of the war, only thirty percent of the men in blue
viewed the abolition of slavery as a necessary part of the primary goal of
preserving the
The attitudes of a good many soldiers on
the matter were more pragmatic than altruistic.
They understood that every slave laborer who emancipated himself by
coming into Union lines weakened the Confederate war effort. It also strengthened the Union army. “I don’t care a damn for the darkies,” wrote an
The second factor that converted many
soldiers to emancipation was a growing conviction that it really did hurt the
enemy and help their own side. “I have always until
lately been opposed to Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation,” wrote a private in the 18th
Pennsylvania Cavalry, a distiller by trade, in May 1863, “but I have lately been convinced that it was just the thing that was
needed to weaken the strength of the rebels. . . .” (For Cause
and Comrades, pp. 119, 125)
What Happened at
The question that really should be asked
is, Why did thousands of Confederate prisoners die of starvation, disease, and
exposure in Northern prison camps when the Union army could have easily given
them adequate food, housing, and medical care?
Yes, thousands of Union prisoners died of
starvation, disease, and exposure at the Confederate prison camp at
One of the most balanced treatments of the
issue of
The Andersonville prison, until the
soldiers built huts for themselves, was but a stockaded enclosure of sixteen
and a half acres in southwestern
The sickening story of
Even McPherson agrees that Confederate
authorities did not deliberately mistreat Union prisoners:
Few if any historians would now contend
that the Confederacy deliberately mistreated prisoners. Rather, they would concur with contemporary
opinions—held
by some northerners as well as southerners—that a deficiency of resources and the deterioration of the southern economy
were mainly responsible for the sufferings of Union prisoners. The South could not feet its own soldiers and
civilians; how could it feed enemy prisoners? (The Battle Cry of Freedom,
p. 800)
At least some Union generals knew that the
Confederates didn’t even have enough food and medicine for their own soldiers. It’s revealing that General Dan Sickles told
Apart from the objections which exist to
the policy of retaliation, it is at least doubtful whether it would inure to
the benefit of our men, for the reason that the enemy are reported to be
without the means to supply clothing, medicines and other medical supplies even
to their own troops. (Official Records,
Series 2, Volume 7, p. 575)
Union soldier Edward Boate was a prisoner
at
You rulers who make the charge that the
rebels intentionally killed off our men, when I can honestly swear they were
doing everything in their power to sustain us, do not lay this flattering
unction to your souls. You abandoned your brave men in the hour of their cruelest
need. They fought for the
Much could be said about the thousands of
Confederate prisoners who died in Union prison camps and about the horrible
conditions in many of those camps. The
The worst Union prison was in
In January 1865,
Rebel prisoners in
our hands are to be subjected to a treatment finding its parallels only in the
conduct of savage tribes and resulting in the death of multitudes by the slow
but designed process of starvation and by mortal diseases occasioned by
insufficient and unhealthy food and wanton exposure of their persons to the
inclemency of the weather. (Congressional
Globe, 38th Congress, 2nd session, January 24, 1865, p. 381)
Senate Resolution 97 was approved by the
U.S. Senate on January 31, 1865. This
meant that the abuse of Confederate prisoners was endorsed by the U.S.
Senate. The mistreatment of Confederate
prisoners had already been going on well before Senate Resolution 97 was
passed, but the resolution’s passage gave the mistreatment the Senate’s stamp of approval. Fortunately,
the resolution was almost immediately made irrelevant when prisoner exchanges
were finally resumed a short time later.
Still, it’s sickening that the U.S. Senate officially endorsed the cruel
treatment of Confederate prisoners.
The tragedy at Andersonville never would
have happened if the
I suspect the real reason Lincoln and
Grant refused to continue prisoner exchanges was that they wanted to deprive
the Confederate army of manpower, even though they knew the Confederacy was in
no position to properly care for the thousands of Union prisoners in its prison
camps. In fact, in August 1864 Grant
said exchanging prisoners would help the Confederacy more than the
I find it somewhat hard to believe that
men like Lincoln and Grant refused to resume prisoner exchanges because of the
Confederate policy on black Union prisoners.
Still more unmistakable evidence of
Ignoring this testimony and pleas from
major leaders, including some Union officers, a military court sentenced
Sergeant Walker to death. Although
Grant’s concern for humanity was nowhere to be seen when he bombed the civilian population of
It’s true that when the Confederacy offered to include black prisoners in the exchanges, Lincoln
and Grant accepted the offer. But this
didn’t occur
until late January 1865, when it seemed
clear the
After the war, Lincoln’s assistant Secretary of War, Charles Dana, blamed Grant for the breakdown
in prisoner exchanges, saying "the evidence proves that it was not the
Confederates who insisted on keeping our prisoners in distress, want and
disease, but the commander of our armies" (in Lynn Tyler, A Confederate
Catechism, Dahlonega, Georgia: Crown Rights Book Company, 2000, reprint, p.
36, quoting from "Treatment of Prisoners During the War Between the
States," Southern Historical Papers, Vol. 1, pp. 112-327). Dana told the New York Sun that “the fact is
unquestionable that while the
Confederates desired to exchange prisoners, to send our men home, and to get
back their own men, General Grant steadily and strenuously resisted such an
exchange”
(Mildred Rutherford, Truths of
History, Dahlonega, Georgia: Crown Rights Book Company, reprint of original
1920 edition, p. 21).
Why did the Confederacy initially decline
to include black Union prisoners in prisoner exchanges? Confederate leaders considered the Union army’s use of former Southern
slaves as a federally sanctioned slave
revolt. The Confederacy was willing to
exchange black Union prisoners who had been legally free when they enlisted,
but they did not believe they should have to return prisoners who were runaway
or captured slaves. From the Confederate
viewpoint, since those slaves had either run away or had been stolen, they had
no right to be soldiers in the federal forces that were invading the
South. I can certainly sympathize with
those runaway slaves who joined the Union army in the hope of securing freedom
for themselves and for their fellow slaves.
But I can also understand why the Confederates felt the way they did on
the matter.
Critics point out that when Union forces
began using slaves as soldiers, Confederate leaders announced that those
soldiers and their white officers would be prosecuted for slave insurrection
and executed. These critics never
mention that the Confederates’ reaction to the use of slave soldiers against them was essentially identical to the American
Patriots’
reaction to the British use of runaway
slaves as soldiers during the Revolutionary War. American Patriot leaders, including George
Washington, were alarmed and resentful when they learned that the British were
offering freedom to American slaves who would fight in the British army. In fact, the colonial legislature of
At the start of the Civil War, the Union
general in command of the Army of the Potomac, with no objection from
To most Southern citizens, the
No such right is acknowledged as a law of
war by writers who admit any limitation. (In Robert Durden, The Black and
the Gray: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation, Louisiana Paperback
Edition, Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2000, reprint of 1972 edition, p. 27)
Indeed,
One of the reasons that
Whereas George the Third, King of
Great-Britain, in violation of the Principles of the British Constitution; and
of the Laws of Justice and Humanity, hath by an Accumulation of Oppressions
unparalleled in History . . . hath excited the Savages of the country to carry
on a war against us; as also the Negroes to imbrue their Hands in the blood of
their masters, in a manner unpracticed by civilized nations. (“Provincial Conference of
Committees of Committees of the
Another fact that critics rarely mention
is that Confederate forces rarely carried out the execution threat (Garraty, The
American Nation, Volume 1: A History of the United States to 1877, p. 418;
Randall and Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction, pp. 393-395). Indeed, a credible case can be made that the
number of Southern slaves killed by Union
troops was considerably larger than the number of black Union soldiers executed
by Confederate troops. And, just to
provide some historical perspective, it should be kept in mind that the number
of slaves who died on Northern slave ships during the the American involvement
in the overseas slave trade was greater than the total number of slaves who
died in combat during the Civil War.
Did the South Control the Federal
Government Until 1860?
The claim is frequently made that the
South controlled the federal government until the 1860 election, and that
therefore the South showed a lack of tolerance and fairness when it seceded in
response to Lincoln’s victory. However, anyone who is familiar with American
history knows that the South did not control the federal government until
1860. Many Northern politicians and
writers trumpeted this myth for political and propaganda purposes. A major component of this myth was that the
alleged “Slave
Power” in the South was behind the South’s supposed domination of
the federal government. Some Northern leaders even claimed there was
a “Slave
Power conspiracy” to impose slavery on the entire country. When the war
ended, Radical Republicans issued dire warnings about the need to crush this
supposed Slave Power in order to justify their subjugation and looting of the
defeated South.
For one thing, wealthy Southern plantation
owners, i.e., the men who allegedly comprised the supposed Slave Power, did not
dictate Southern politics. Moreover,
they were by no means uniform in their political beliefs. In fact, many affluent planters were Whigs
(Frank Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South, LSU Press Edition, LSU
Press, 1982, pp. 141-142; Arthur Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson, Boston:
Little, Brown and Company, 1945, p. 453; McPherson, The Battle Cry of
Freedom, p. 242). And, as mentioned
earlier, some of the wealthiest slaveholders opposed secession. In
Nor is it to be inferred that a
plantation “aristocracy”
somehow controlled the political
destinies of the region, for the current of democracy had eroded the powers of
the gentry until “whatever influence the planters exercised over the political action of the common people was of a personal and local nature” [quoting Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South, p. 139]. (The
Civil War and Reconstruction, pp. 40-41)
Even in the very conservative Deep South
state of
White manhood suffrage had existed since
1832, and the sovereign voters required wooing and intermingling from their
prospective officeholders. . . .
This was emphatically not a political
world in which rich planters controlled candidates and elections while sipping
sherry and juleps in elegant drawing rooms.
Energetic campaigning antedated
Historian Francis Butler Simkins called
attention to the democratic reforms that the South began to adopt in the early
1800s:
Facts prove that the states of the Old
South, through a series of progressive reforms, conformed to the contemporary
definition of democracy as “an equal division of political
rights, not of property.”
They cast aside the Colonial heritage of suffrage restrictions, property
qualifications for officeholding, and unequal apportionment of legislative
representation.
These restrictions, however, were not
more comprehensive than those prevailing in
If the South truly “controlled” the federal government until 1860, one can only wonder why the
federal tariff was never as low as the South wanted it to be, why Congress gave
the Northern states a legal monopoly in the lucrative shipbuilding business and
why this monopoly was never repealed, why it took ten years for Texas to be
admitted as a state, why Cuba was never annexed, how the Missouri Compromise
became law in 1820, how the Tariff of Abominations passed Congress in 1828, how
the Force Bill passed Congress in 1833, how the tariff act of 1842 passed
Congress, how the John Calhoun resolutions of 1847-1848 were all defeated, how
the Wilmot Proviso passed the House of Representatives twice, how the Compromise
of 1850 was enacted, why Kansas wasn’t admitted
as a slave state, why the Missouri Compromise line wasn’t extended to the west
coast, and how the draconian Morrill Tariff passed the House in 1860.
Some critics claim that Southern congressmen supported the 1828 Tariff
of Abominations, but in point of fact most Southern congressmen voted against
it (see Taussig, The Tariff History of the United States, pp. 61-62).
It’s true that there were periods when the South had more influence on federal policy than did
the North, but there were also periods when this was not the case. At no time did the South control the federal
government in terms of doing whatever it wanted. Cooper notes that “after mid-1854 no chance
remained for a congressional majority on any initiative marked as a southern measure” (Jefferson
Davis, American, p. 284). The South
was usually able to block or modify unwanted bills in the Senate, but not
always, and the South was frequently unable to defeat unwanted bills in the
House. As early as 1819 “the North had built up a decisive majority in the House of Representatives” (Divine et al, editors, America Past and Present, p. 281). Historian John Niven notes that the South
continued to lose ground in the House from 1830 to 1840:
The House of Representatives, whose
membership was based on the census returns for each state, reflected this
growing disparity [between the populations of the North and the South]. Even counting three-fifths of the slave population
(as the federal Constitution provided), free states increased their majority
from twenty-three seats in 1830 to twenty-nine seats in 1840. The disparity expressed in total seats was
149 representatives from the
As for the presidency, Presidents John
Adams, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, William Harrison, Franklin Pierce,
and James Buchanan were all Northern politicians. And who were the Southern presidents? They were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson,
James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, James K. Polk, and
Zachary Taylor. So the South by no means
enjoyed exclusive control of the White House prior to the war. Furthermore, the “Southern” presidents
didn’t automatically take the South’s side on all issues, just as the “Northern” presidents didn’t
automatically take the North’s side on
all issues. For example, President
Taylor sided with Northern politicians on crucial aspects of the Compromise of
1850 and also supported the Wilmot
Proviso, even though he himself was a slaveholder.
When the South did exercise considerable
influence on federal policy, it used that influence toward efforts to reduce
taxes, to limit the growth of the federal government, to curb or eliminate harmful
protectionist trade policies, to impose fiscal responsibility on federal
spending, to abolish the corrupt United States Bank, to preserve our free
banking system, to prohibit the use of tax dollars for wasteful corporate
welfare schemes, to expand the land area of the United States by acquiring new
territory, to preserve the sovereignty of the states, and to enforce a strict
interpretation of the Constitution.
Under Southern leadership,
I’m not saying that Southern politicians did no wrong. For
example, the Southern-inspired 1836-1844 gag rule in the House of Representatives
preventing debate on petitions to abolish slavery in the
All Americans should be grateful that most
Northern politicians did not get their way during crucial times in the decades
leading up to the Civil War. If the
Northern Federalists, followed by the Northern Whigs, had been in control of
the government during certain key periods before the war,
If the Northern Federalists had been in
power in the early 1800s, the
In addition, if the Federalist-dominated
New England states had had their way, the War of 1812 with
New Englanders refused to cooperate with
the war effort. . . . New Englanders
carried on a lucrative, though illegal, commerce with the enemy. When the U.S. Treasury appealed for loans to
finance the war, wealthy northern merchants failed to respond. (Divine et al,
editors, America Past and Present, p. 254)
Historian Kenneth Stampp:
New England Federalists throughout the
war regarded the . . . politicians in
Federalist governors contested federal
calls on the state militias. . . .
Federalists discouraged voluntary enlistments. . . . Federalists resisted tax measures and
boycotted government loans. . . .
Meanwhile, New Englanders defiantly continued to trade with
Historian Forrest McDonald:
New Englanders protested loudly and
refused to cooperate in the prosecution of the war. With congressional authorization, Madison
issued a call for 100,000 militiamen, but those in New England refused to hear
the call, and the governor of Massachusetts intervened to prevent their being
forced into service. . . . Similarly,
bankers in the region refused to subscribe to loans to the
But the Yankees went beyond resistance
into activities that were literally treasonable, even by the Constitution’s restricted definition
of that crime. Through well-established connections in
What was more important in dividing
Americans in their attitudes toward the war was a British blockade, imposed
partially by the end of 1812 and made total by the middle of 1813—except for
When the Northern Federalists gained
control of the federal government in 1796, they tried to use their newly found
power to silence political opponents. In
1798 they passed the infamous Sedition Act, which made it illegal to “falsely” criticize a federal official:
The Federalists did not rely solely on
the army to crush political dissent.
During the summer of 1798, the party’s
majority in Congress passed a group of bills known collectively as the Alien
and Sedition Acts. This legislation
authorized the use of federal courts and the powers of the presidency to
silence [political opponents]. . . . The
acts were born of fear and vindictiveness, and in their efforts to punish the
followers of Jefferson, the Federalists created the nation’s first major crisis over civil liberties. . . .
The Sedition Law struck at the heart of
free political exchange. It defined
criticism of the
Historian Edmund Morgan wrote that the
Sedition Act “was
one of the most repressive measures ever directed against political activity in the United States” (in Blum and Catton et
al, editors, The National Experience,
p. 162). Legal scholar John Remington
Graham observes that the Sedition Act “broadly
criminalized libel against public officers of the
As if freedom of the press had not become
part of constitutional heritage in the
Historian John Garraty:
Finally, there was the Sedition Act. Its first section, making it a crime “to impede the operation
of any law” or attempt to instigate a
riot or insurrection, was reasonable enough; but the act also made it illegal
to publish, or even to utter, any “false,
scandalous and malicious” criticism of high government
officials.
Although based on English precedents . .
. this proviso rested, as James Madison said, on “the
exploded doctrine” that government officials “are the masters and not the servants of the people.” To criticize
a king is to try to undermine the respect of his subjects. . . . To criticize an elected official in a
republic is to express dissatisfaction with the way one’s agent is performing his assigned task, certainly no threat to the state
itself. The fundamental difference
between these two modes of thought escaped the Federalists of 1798.
This, of course, is mere theory. Far worse was the Federalists’ practice under the
Sedition Act. As the election of 1800 approached, they made
a systematic attempt to silence the leading . . . [opposition] newspapers of
the country. Twenty-five persons were
prosecuted and ten convicted, all in patently unfair trials. In typical cases, editor Thomas Cooper was
sentenced to six months in jailed and fined $400 [a substantial amount of money
at the time], editor Charles Hall got three months and a $200 fine, editor
James Callender got nine months and a $200 fine. (John Garraty, The American
Nation, Volume 1: A History of the United States to 1877, p. 155)
Founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and
James Madison rightly viewed the Sedition Act as a dangerous step toward a
police state. In response to this threat
to free speech and liberty, Jefferson authored the Kentucky Resolutions, while
In the summer of 1798 a Federalist
Congress passed, and President Adams signed, a series of acts designed to
strengthen the government’s hand and to silence domestic
critics. . . . The most controversial
measure was the Sedition Act. . . . For
a period of two years it was declared unlawful for anyone to “write, print, utter, or publish” anything “false, scandalous and malicious”
against those in federal office. It was further declared seditious to bring
Congress or the president “into contempt or disrepute” or to
“excite
against them . . . the hatred of the good people of the
Dominated by Federalist legislators, all
of the Northern states denounced the
In a 1799 letter to
Historian Frank Owsley pointed out that
Under the Sedition Act men had been
prosecuted for criticizing the President or members of Congress or judges and
had been sent to prison in violation of the Constitutional guarantee of freedom
of speech. Opinion had been suppressed,
meetings broken up, arbitrary arrests made, men held without trial, in fact,
the whole body of personal liberties had been brushed aside by the Federalist
or centralizing party. . . . Jefferson
and Madison, supported by the state-rights apostle of Virginia, John Taylor of
Caroline, and . . . John Randolph, proclaimed that the federal government had
thus shown itself to be an unsafe protector of liberty. So
When Northern Federalists sought to block
the admission of
Six years later the territorial
legislature of
In a letter to William Pinckney,
The
The battle over
The Missouri Compromise, passed in 1820,
limited the extension of slavery to a small section of the territories of the
In 1856 the Supreme Court, led by Chief
Justice Roger Taney, ruled in the Dred Scott decision that Congress did
not have the right to ban slavery in the territories and that therefore the
Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.
However, the Republicans made it clear that if they gained control of
Congress, they would attempt to ban slavery in all the territories, even
though the Supreme Court had just ruled that Congress had no right to ban
slavery in any territory. Most Southern
leaders viewed the Republican position as unfair and lawless. Under Republican territorial policy, founding
fathers like George Washington and James Madison, both of whom were
slaveholders, would have been barred from settling in the territories unless
they came there without their slaves.
The Southern position was that each
territory had the right to abolish or legalize slavery when it applied for
statehood, but that until then slaveholders should have equal access to the
territories. Southern leaders argued
that since the territories were supposed to be the common possession of all
citizens, it was unfair to ban slaveholders from them, especially since
slaveholders had played an important role in winning the Mexican War, which
resulted in the acquisition of the territories granted in the Mexican Cession.
Most Southern leaders viewed equal access
to the territories as a matter of honor and principle, as well as a matter of
law. They knew that relatively few
slaveholders had relocated into those territories where slavery was legal. They also knew that very few slaveholders had
moved into the territories even after the Supreme Court ruled in 1857 that
Congress could not prohibit slavery in any of the territories. However, Southern statesmen felt it was wrong
in principle to treat slaveholders as second-class citizens by denying them
equal access to the territories. They
knew that Northern wage slavery wasn’t banned from the territories. They knew
that Northern factory owners who cruelly abused their workers enjoyed full
access to the territories and were free to bring their inhumane sweatshops with
them. They knew that most slaveholders
treated their slaves better than many Northern factory owners treated their
workers. So most Southern leaders felt
it was unfair and insulting to deny slaveholders equal access to the
territories.
There were two major Southern positions on
what should be done to provide slaveholders full access to the
territories. One position, advocated by
Senator Albert Brown, was that federal legislation should mandate the
protection of slavery in each territory until the territory became a
state. The other position, advanced by
men like Jefferson Davis, James Orr, and Alexander Stephens, was that the
people of each territory should be able to decide whether or not to allow
slaveholders to travel or settle among them with their slaves (Cooper, Jefferson
Davis, American, pp. 327-329). The
Republicans, on the other hand, argued that under no circumstances should any
new territory be allowed to permit slavery, even though the territory could
choose to abolish slavery when it became a state.
It’s often overlooked that the main dispute over slavery between Northern and Southern leaders
involved the extension of slavery into the territories, not the continuation of
slavery where it already existed. Most
Republicans were not opposed to the continuation of slavery in those states where
it was already established. Indeed, as
mentioned earlier, the majority of the men in
If the Republicans had been willing to compromise
to a relatively small degree on the extension of slavery, the Deep South states
may very well have rejoined the Union soon after they seceded (in fact, they
may not have seceded at all if the Republicans had not insisted on banning
slavery in all the territories). Shortly
after
That Crittenden's scheme had wide and
enthusiastic public support there could be no question. John A. Dix, Edward
Everett, and Robert Winthrop no sooner saw it than they wrote approbatory
[approving] letters. Martin Van Buren declared that the amendments [proposed in
Crittenden's plan] would certainly be ratified by three-fourths of the States.
The Senator received hundreds of assurances from all over the North and the
Early in January, Crittenden rose in the
Senate to make the remarkable proposal that his compromise should be submitted
to the people of the entire nation for their solemn judgment, as expressed by a
popular vote. . . . The proposal inspired widespread enthusiasm. . . . Because
of Republican obstruction, interposing delay after delay, it never came to a
vote in the Senate. . . . (The Emergence of Lincoln, pp. 392-393,
401-402)
Historian David Potter says the following
about the defeat of the Crittenden Compromise:
What do we mean, specifically, by saying
that the Republican party rejected compromise? Certain facts are reasonably
familiar in this connection, and may be briefly recalled. In December, 1860, at
the time when a number of secession conventions had been called in the Southern
states but before any ordinances of secession had been adopted, various
political leaders brought forward proposals to give assurances to the
Southerners. The most prominent of these was the plan by Senator John J.
Crittenden of
It’s important to understand that most Republicans wanted to ban slavery from the
territories primarily because they wanted to reserve the territories for white
workers. When they were Whigs or Free
Soilers in 1846-1849, most Republican politicians, including Lincoln, supported
the Wilmot Proviso, which at one point would have banned free blacks
from moving into the territories, in addition to banning slavery there (Divine
et al, editors, America Past and Present, p. 413). Also, as mentioned previously, in the 1860
election campaign many Republican candidates championed their party as the true
“White Man’s
Party” that would reserve the territories
for white labor. Wilmot himself proudly
called his proposal the “White Man’s Proviso” (Holt, The
Fate of Their Country, p. 27).
Now irrespective of the moral aspect of
this question as to whether there is a right or wrong in enslaving a negro, I
am still in favor of our new Territories being in such a condition that white
men may find a home—may find some spot where they can
better their condition—where they can settle upon new soil and better their condition in life.
I am in favor of this not merely
(I must say it here as I have elsewhere) for our own people who are born
amongst us, but as an outlet for free white people everywhere, the world over.
. . . (Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1832-1858, New York: The
Library of America, 1989, edited by Don Fehrenbacher, p. 807)
Textbooks and virtually all history books
summarily dismiss the Supreme Court’s position on the Missouri Compromise in the 1857 Dred Scott ruling. However, the court’s position on this issue
is by no means untenable. Critics of the decision note that the
congress of the Articles of Confederation passed the Northwest Ordinance, which
banned slavery in what was then the Northwest Territory (and permitted it in
the territorial lands south of the
On an aside note, Chief Justice Taney’s reputation has been unfairly brutalized over the Dred
Scott decision. Taney’s position on the Missouri Compromise was and is credible and
defensible, and if he had stopped there he would have been on solid
ground. But, tragically and mistakenly,
Taney also ruled in Dred Scott that the Constitution barred blacks from
federal citizenship, and that the sublime statement in the Declaration of
Independence that “all men are created equal” did not apply to blacks.
Civil rights advocates were justifiably outraged by these arguments.
However, before we judge Taney too
harshly, a few things should be said in his defense. Although he argued that the Constitution did
not permit blacks to be federal citizens, he added that they could receive
state citizenship. He made it clear that
the court’s
ruling did not prevent states
from conferring full citizenship on slaves, and that the court’s decision only involved federal citizenship. As for Taney’s mistaken
belief that blacks were not included in the phrase “all men are created
equal,” even many Northerners shared this view at the time, including Senator Stephen Douglas of
Taney hinted that he realized that the
denial of federal citizenship to slaves was unjust but that he felt bound by
the Constitution to reach the decision that he reached. He pointed out that it was not the place of
judges to rule on the basis of justice or injustice in deciding the legality of
laws, but on the basis of the text of the Constitution and the original intent
of its authors. Said Taney,
It is not the province of the court to
decide upon the justice or injustice, the policy or impolicy, of these laws.
The decision of that question belonged to the political or law-making power; to
those who formed the sovereignty and framed the constitution. The duty of the
court is, to interpret the instrument they have framed, with the best lights we
can obtain on the subject, and to administer it as we find it, according to its
true intent and meaning when it was adopted.
And:
The change in public opinion and feeling
in relation to the African race, which has taken place since the adoption of
the Constitution, cannot change its construction and meaning, and it must be
construed and administered now according to its true meaning and intention when
it was formed and adopted.
It should also be pointed out that Taney
had no love for slavery. In fact, Taney
disliked slavery and had long since freed his own slaves. Very few textbooks mention these facts. To his credit, McPherson mentions them in his
book The Battle Cry of Freedom.
McPherson also notes that Taney was “committed to liberating American enterprise from the shackles of special privilege,” that as President
Jackson’s Secretary of the Treasury he
helped destroy the Second Bank of the
Events in
Actually, the violence in “Bleeding Kansas” was not
appreciably more severe than was common
in newly opened frontier communities, and a lot of it involved land claims and
other disputes having no bearing upon slavery.
But newspapers in the Northeast carried sensational stories almost daily
and portrayed the actions as representing unmitigated proslavery aggression. (States’ Rights and the Union, p. 171)
Historian Thomas Woods:
It was fairly clear that slavery would
not take root in
A recent study concluded that of the 157
violent deaths that occurred during
Any response to the charge that the South
controlled the federal government before the war wouldn’t be complete without an examination of the Brooks-Sumner incident. The incident is often cited as an example of
the South’s
alleged intolerance and barbarism even
in the halls of Congress. On May 22,
1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina walked onto the floor of
the Senate carrying a cane. Brooks was
looking for Senator Charles Sumner of
Shortly after the attack, Northern
congressmen tried to expel Brooks from the House, but they failed to achieve
the two-thirds majority required for expulsion.
Northern politicians were outraged that Southern representatives wouldn’t vote to expel Brooks. Not all
Southern congressmen necessarily condoned Brooks’s assault, but most of them believed that Sumner had behaved in a rudely
provocative manner and that therefore Brooks’s conduct did not warrant expulsion. I can’t condone Brooks’s
behavior. By any reasonable measurement, his use of
force was unacceptable. I suspect I
would have voted to expel him from the House, or at least to censure him (he
was in fact censured). However, I agree
with Lloyd Paul Stryker that the attack “was provoked if any ever was” (Andrew Johnson, p. 51). Senator Douglas of
The way in which events in
Many Southerners believed that Brooks’s act was unwise because
it played into the hands of the
abolitionists, although there were few who felt that it was not justified. His Southern colleagues prevented his
expulsion from Congress by refusing the necessary two-thirds majority, and when
he resigned voluntarily he was re-elected with only six votes cast against
him. Enthusiastic friends presented him
with suitably inscribed canes and wrote exultant editorials. Brooks did not like these vulgar
manifestations of approval. He was a
courtly gentleman far removed from the ruffian depicted in the abolitionist
propaganda. To him the chastisement of
Sumner was an unpleasant duty under a code of honor which required that the
slanderer of a helpless kinsman should not go unpunished. (A History of the
South, p. 200)
Historian Lyon G. Tyler, son of President
John Tyler, pointed out that when one Northern congressman attacked another
Northern congressman in an earlier incident similar to the Brooks-Sumner
affair, neither offender was expelled and both were reelected:
The remarkable point is that