THE SOUTHERN
SIDE OF THE CIVIL WAR:
FACTS YOUR
HISTORY TEACHER MAY NOT HAVE MENTIONED
ABOUT THE
WAR BETWEEN THE STATES
Sixth
Edition
Michael T.
Griffith
2011
@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
·
Did the South
Control the Federal Government Until 1860?
·
The
Reconstruction Era
·
The True Nature
of the War
·
What If the
South Had Been Allowed to Go in Peace?
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
Nevertheless, despite their support for
protectionist policies, even many Republicans favored allowing the South to go
in peace during the first few months following the secession of the
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, Lincoln supported a proposed constitutional amendment, known as the
Corwin Amendment, that would have made the federal government’s protection of
slavery explicit and permanent.
The Constitution already protected slavery, and in that day it was
widely understood that the only way the federal government could act against
slavery would be by a constitutional amendment, which had to be approved by
three-fourths of the states. The Corwin
Amendment would have made it impossible to abolish slavery even by another
constitutional amendment. Furthermore,
in the years leading up to the Civil War,
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)
John Adams, a key figure in the American
Revolution who later became our second president, echoed these thoughts. He taught that the ultimate powers of
government belonged to the citizens of the colonies, that the powers with which
parliament and even the king ruled were in reality delegated powers that
belonged to the citizens of each colony, and that those citizens had the right
to resume those powers whenever they felt they were being misused badly
enough. In fact,
These principles are nothing more or less
than the right of secession--one could also call this right the right of
separation or the right of independence, as the Patriots usually did. Adams expressed these principles in his
famous exchange with a Tory pen-named Massachusettensis
(
Historian Page Smith discussed Adams’
famous 1775 exchanges with the Tory Massachusettensis
in his biography of
. . . are but the ministers of the
people; that their authority is delegated to them by the people, for their
good, and they have a right to resume it,
and place it in other hands, or keep it themselves, whenever it is made use of
to oppress them. (John Adams,
Volume 1: 1735-1784, Norwalk, CT: The Easton Press, 1962, Collector’s Edition,
190-191, emphasis added)
Smith then pointed out that
To this charge
Smith observed that Adams went on to
assert that even Parliament had no authority over the colonies except to
regulate their trade, and that even this authority was based solely on the
consent of the colonies. Said
Parliament has no authority over them
[the colonies], excepting to regulate their trade, and this not by any
principle of common law, but merely by the consent of the colonies, founded on
the obvious necessity . . . of the case. (John
Adams, p. 191)
What most textbooks omit or skillfully
obscure about the argument over taxation without representation is that the
Patriots did not--I repeat, did not--think the answer was representation
in Parliament. No, instead, they argued
that that the colonies should be allowed to tax and govern themselves. Why?
Because, as the Patriots pointed out--in fact, as Adams pointed out in
his exchanges with Massachusettensis--even if the
colonies were granted proportional representation in Parliament, they would
still not have enough votes to prevent taxes from being imposed on them against
their will. So the answer, said the
Patriots, was for Parliament to allow the colonies to tax and govern
themselves, as had been the case for many years until Parliament began imposing
taxes on them.
The patriots of this Province desire
nothing new; they wish only to keep their old privileges. For 150 years they had been allowed to tax
themselves and govern their internal concerns as they thought best. Parliament governed their trade as they
thought fit. This plan they wish may
continue forever. (John Adams, p.
193)
The Patriots began to consider separating
from
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 C. Vann Woodward:
For all that, the Northern Negro was made
painfully and constantly aware that he lived in a society dedicated to the
doctrine of white supremacy and Negro inferiority. The major political parties, whatever their
position on slavery, vied with each other in their devotion to this doctrine,
and extremely few politicians of importance dared question them. Their constituencies firmly believed that the
Negroes were incapable of being assimilated politically, socially, or
physically into white society. They made
sure in numerous ways that the Negro understood his “place” and that he was
severely confined to it. One of these
ways was segregation, and with the backing of legal and extra-legal codes the
system permeated all aspects of Negro life in the
Leon F. Litwak,
in his authoritative account, North of
Slavery, describes the system in full development. “In virtually every phase of existence,” he
writes, “Negroes found themselves systematically separated from whites. They were either excluded from railway cars,
omnibuses, stagecoaches, and steamboats or assigned to special “Jim Crow”
sections; they sat, when permitted, in secluded and remote corners of theaters
and lecture halls; they could not enter most hotels, restaurants, and resorts,
except as servants; they prayed in “Negro pews” in the white churches, and if
partaking of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, they waited until the whites
had been served the bread and wine.
Moreover, they were often educated in segregated schools, nursed in
segregated hospitals, and buried in segregated cemeteries.”
In very few instances were Negroes and
other opponents of segregation able to make any progress against the
system. Railroads in
Generally speaking, the farther west the
Negro went in the
Racial discrimination in political and
civil rights was the rule in the
By the eve of the Civil War the North had
sharply defined its position on white supremacy, Negro subordination, and
racial segregation. The political party
that took control of the federal government at that time was in accord with
this position, and Abraham Lincoln as its foremost spokesman was on record with
repeated endorsements. . . .
It is clear that when its victory was
complete and the time came, the North was not in the best possible position to
instruct the South, either by precedent and example, or by force of conviction,
on the implementation of what eventually became one of the professed war aims
of the Union cause—racial equality. (Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Commemorative Edition,
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 Southern 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
Historian Jeff Riggenbach has published an insightful overview of American
history that includes a refreshingly candid, sensible analysis of the causes of
the Civil War. Among other things, Riggenbach says,
As
Gore Vidal presents it in
Vidal might well have found inspiration for such a view of the war in the
writings of Charles Beard and William Appleman
Williams. For, as Beard wrote in 1927 in Volume II of The Rise of American Civilization,
"Since the abolition of
slavery never appeared in the platform of any great political party, since the
only appeal ever made to the electorate on that issue was scornfully repulsed,
since the spokesman of the Republicans emphatically declared that his party
never intended to interfere with slavery in the states in any shape or form, it
seems reasonable to assume that the institution of slavery was not the
fundamental issue during the epoch preceding the bombardment of Fort
Sumter."
Williams agreed. In his Contours of
American History (1961), he wrote that “neither Lincoln nor the majority of
northerners entered the war in an abolitionist frame of mind or entertaining
abolitionist objectives.” Williams is even more explicit in his 1976 book
[Jeffrey R.] Hummel’s view of the Civil War is remarkably like Vidal’s.
“Historians and buffs debate the fundamental causes of the American Civil War
almost as hotly today as the combatants did then,” he writes. “We can simplify
our understanding of the Civil War’s causes, however, if we follow the advice
of one eminent historian, Eric Foner, and ask two
separate questions. Why did the southern states want to leave the
In fact, as Hummel points out, one of the most prominent leaders of the
abolitionist movement, William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the weekly
abolitionist paper The Liberator and one of the organizers of the leading
abolitionist organization, the American Anti-Slavery Society, was an
enthusiastic proponent of secession – for the North. Garrison and his followers
“felt that this best hastened the destruction of slavery by allowing the
In effect, Lincoln refused to allow, first the lower South, then the entire
Confederacy, to go in peace because he was committed to a conception of the
United States as a perpetual nation, with whose central government the
component states had no right to end their association – he was committed, not
to a voluntary Union, but to a compulsory one. (“An Introduction to
Revisionism,” LewRockwell, http://lewrockwell.com/riggenbach/riggenbach3-4.html)
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). Historian
Mark Smith provides additional perspective on the number of slaveholders in
relation to the South’s white population of about 8 million:
Half of the South’s 385,000 slaveholders
(out of . . . a total white population of about 8 million in 1860) owned one to
five slaves, about 38 percent belonged to the middling ranks, and 12 percent
owned 20 or more bondpeople. . . . Census data
suggest that only 13,000 masters owned more than fifty slaves in 1860, and 75
percent of white families owned no slaves whatsoever. . . . (Mark H. Smith, Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the
Antebellum American South, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 15)
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 in the North that 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 American involvement in the
overseas slave trade was far 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
The Reconstruction Era
Time only allows me to provide a limited
sketch of the “Reconstruction” program that the Republicans imposed on the South
after the war. I don’t deny that some
good things were accomplished during Reconstruction. Nor do I deny that Reconstruction, as bad as
it was, could have been worse. However,
most textbooks only talk about the good aspects of Reconstruction, while they
ignore or minimize the negative aspects.
The unjust, illegal aspects of Reconstruction merit discussion.
Reconstruction began in 1865 and
officially ended in 1877. The Radicals
took substantial control of Reconstruction in 1867. Reconstruction was bad enough from the
outset, but it became much worse under Radical influence. The Radicals illegally placed the South under
military rule. They divided the South
into five military districts, each governed by a Union army general. They nullified the recent Southern elections
and refused to allow Southern congressmen to take their seats in Congress, even
though these men had been elected in elections that were just as valid as any
election that had been held in the North.
Not content with their political subjugation of the South, the Radicals
and other Republicans allowed the Southern states to be looted and exploited
for years by Northern business interests and by corrupt Reconstruction
governments. The Radicals did these things over the strenuous objections of
The Radicals also shamelessly contradicted
During the worst period of Reconstruction,
Southerners who voiced objections to Republican policy could be jailed, and
even executed, without indictment or trial.
Southern newspapers that criticized Reconstruction ran the real risk of
being shut down, and some newspapers were closed down for this reason. Federal troops were stationed all over the
South, and in some cases their conduct was disgraceful and abusive. Many Republican operatives and other
Northerners who came to the South poisoned race relations by inciting former
slaves to hate and persecute Southern whites.
The Republicans made it illegal for males who had served in the
Confederate army or in the Confederate government to vote or hold public
office. Ex-Confederates could only vote
if they were willing to lie by taking the “ironclad oath.” The oath disqualified any man who had served
in the Confederacy or who had even “aided” the Confederacy. Of course, this excluded a large majority of
Southern men. To their credit, some
Southern black leaders opposed denying former Confederates the right to vote,
but their efforts were unsuccessful. New
Southern legislatures and governors were chosen in elections in which most
former Confederates were barred from voting.
These corrupt Reconstruction state governments imposed oppressive taxes
on their citizens and also stole or wasted a staggering amount of taxpayer
money. Historian Albert B. Moore noted
the vindictive, unjust nature of Reconstruction:
The war set the stage for a complete
reconstruction of the South. Furious
hatred, politics, economic considerations, and a curious conviction that God
had joined a righteous North to use it as an instrument for the purging of the
wicked South gave a keen edge to the old reconstruction urge. The victories of bullets and bayonets were
followed by the equally victorious attack of tongues and press. Ministers mounted their pulpits on Easter
Sunday, the day following President Lincoln’s tragic death, and assured their
sad auditors that God’s will had been done, that the President had been removed
because his heart was too merciful to punish the South as God required. An eminent
Many unfriendly writers invaded the
South, found what they wanted, and wrote books, articles, and editorials that
strengthened the conviction that the South must be torn to pieces and made
anew. Books, journals, and newspapers
stimulated the impulse to be vigilant and stern, to repress and purge. . . .
The repudiation of its debts impoverished
the South and destroyed its financial relationships. While the South lost its debts, it had to pay
its full share of the northern debts which amounted to about four-fifths of the
total northern war expenses. The money
for this debt was spent in the North for its upbuilding. It paid also its share of the $20,000,000
returned by the Federal treasury to the northern states for direct taxes
collected from them during the war, and of extravagant pensions to Union
soldiers. Professor James L. Sellers
estimates that the Sound paid in these ways an indemnity of at least a billion
dollars to the North. . . .
It would be safe to say that the people
of the North never understood how the South suffered during the Radical
regime. The Radicals who controlled most
of the organs of public opinion were in no attitude of mind to listen to
southern complaints, and most people were too busy with the pursuit of alluring
business opportunities that unfolded before them to think much of what was
going on down South. . . .
The South staggered out of the
Reconstruction, which ended officially in 1877, embittered, impoverished,
encumbered with debt, and discredited by Radical propaganda. . . . The tax load had been devastating. The lands of thousands upon thousands had
been sold for taxes. Huge state and
local debts, much of which was fraudulent, had been piled up. So many bonds, legal and illegal, had been
sold that public credit was destroyed. (In Gerald Grob
and George Billias, editors, Interpretations of
American History, Volume 2, New York: The Free Press, 1967, pp. 33-35,
37-38, original emphasis)
Hummel notes the heavy tax burden that was
imposed on the South after the war:
. . . the war-ravaged South suffered
under some of the heaviest state and local taxation in proportion to wealth in
Economist Thomas DiLorenzo
discusses some of the ways in which Republicans and Northern business interests
exploited the South during Reconstruction:
What did the Republican Party do with its
monopolistic political power? First, it
plundered Southern taxpayers by greatly expanding state and local governmental
budgets. Little of this governmental
expansion benefited the general public; the main beneficiaries were the
thousands of “carpetbaggers” (and a few “scalawags”) who populated the newly
bloated governmental bureaucracies and who benefited from government contracts.
. . .
The biggest item on the agenda of the
Republicans was government subsidies to the corporations that bankrolled the
Republican Party. The Confederate
Constitution outlawed such corporate welfare, but with the defeat of the
Confederate armies there was no longer any opposition to it.
From 1866 to 1872 the eleven southern
states amassed nearly $132 million in state debt for railroad subsidies alone. In countless instances bonds were issued but
were backed by no property of any value.
In many states bonds were sold before work began on railroads, and
“dishonest promoters sold these bonds for what they could get and never built
the roads.” [Quoting E. M. Coulter, The South during Reconstruction, LSU
Press, p. 150]. . . .
The federal government established a
“Land Commission” that was ostensibly set up to buy property and turn it into
homesteads for ex-slaves. Instead, most
of the land was handed out to those with good connections to the Republican
Party. . . . Many recipients of land
grants were paid “front men” for mining and timber companies.
Many of the Republican Party operatives
who dominated Southern legislatures during Reconstruction literally sold their
votes for cash on a daily basis: The going rate was just under $300 per vote. .
. . The expansion of government provided
myriad opportunities for bribery, and Republican Party opportunists took great
advantage of them. . . .
The historian E. Merton Coulter
catalogued myriad ways in which Republican Party operatives figured out how to
loot Southern taxpayers:
* By 1870 the cost of printing alone to
the government of
* The
* Before the war a session of the
* Taxes on property were increased by intolerable amounts so that
the governmental agents could then confiscate the property for “unpaid taxes”.
. . . By 1872 property taxes in the
South were, on average, about four times what they were in 1860. In
The tax collectors stole much of this
money. More than half a million dollars
in taxes collected in 1872 were never turned in to the
Although the South was economically
destitute, a punitive five cents per pound federal tax was placed on cotton,
making it difficult, if not impossible, for many cotton growers to stay in
business. A military order stated that
anyone who had sold cotton to the Confederate government must give up his
cotton to the
In order to keep this corrupt system
running, the Republican-controlled governments subsidized pro-Republican
newspapers to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars annually and, in some
cases, granted them legal monopolies in the newspaper business in particular
towns. In effect, the Republicans were
extending
Steven Weisman discusses some of the ways
that the Republicans punished and exploited the South during Reconstruction:
The election in the fall of 1866 cemented
the control of Congress by radical Republicans, emboldening them not only in
their punitive approach to the South but also in their drive for high tariffs
and muscular government on behalf of business.
Among the harshest of the Reconstruction Era steps directed at the South
was the invalidation of the entire Confederate debt. Congress also ruled out any possibility of
slaveholders being compensated for the loss of their slaves. Beyond the total destruction of vast swathes
of Confederate farmlands and cities, these steps wiped out billions of dollars
of assets held by the South’s aristocracy.
By contrast, in the North, everything possible was done to redeem the
As noted, Northern business interests took
full advantage of the South’s subjugation during Reconstruction. African-American scholars Franklin and Moss
note that “Northern financiers and industrialists took advantage of the opportunity
to impose their economic control on the South, and much of it endured for
generations” (From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans,
p. 264). Kenneth Davis concedes that
Southern railroad companies were "burdened for decades by unfair rates and
restrictive tariffs set by Northerners, who controlled the vast majority of
railways and the legislatures that set rates" (Don't Know Much About
the Civil War, pp. 425-426).
“But,” some will ask, “wasn’t slavery
abolished under Reconstruction?” Yes,
slavery was abolished during the Johnson phase of Reconstruction when the
Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on December 18, 1865. We can all agree that slavery was wrong and
that it needed to be abolished. But it
was abolished in a way that was unfair and that caused enormous damage to the
Southern economy. Under the Thirteenth
Amendment, Southern slaveholders received no compensation for their
slaves. The abolition of slavery without
compensation cost the South about two billion dollars in capital, and it
reduced real estate values by at least that amount. In terms of modern monetary value, this
represented a total loss of over sixty billion dollars.
Southern slaveholders should have been
able to recover the cost of their slaves, just as Northern slaveholders had
been able to do decades earlier. Most
Southern slaveholders treated their slaves humanely. Many of these men believed they had a
Christian duty to properly and respectfully care for their slaves. One doesn’t have to condone human bondage to
acknowledge that in most cases Southern slavery was administered humanely. This isn’t the place for an extended
discussion on Southern slavery, but the following facts should be noted:
* When the Works Progress Administration
interviewed thousands of ex-slaves in the 1930s, most of those who commented on
how they were treated said their masters were good men.
* Southern slaves had a life expectancy
that was comparable to urban populations and higher than in some
European nations. In fact, slaves had a
longer life expectancy than did Northern factory workers.
* The diet and housing of slaves were
comparable to, if not usually better than, the diet and housing of Northern
factory workers. According to the 1860
Census, there were 5.2 persons per house among slave households on large
plantations, whereas there were 5.3 persons per house among free
households. In the vast majority of
cases, a slave family lived in a house, not in a dormitory with other families.
* In many cases slaves received a greater
share of the product of their labor than did many Northern factory workers.
* Most slaves marriages were not
broken up. McPherson, a pro-Northern
historian, acknowledges that 66-80 percent of slave marriages remained
intact. An interesting statistic is that
nearly 40 percent of the marriages performed in Southern Episcopal churches
between 1800 and 1860 were slave marriages.
On average, only one out of every twenty-two slaveholders sold a slave
in a year, and about one-third of those cases occurred in the sale of estates
of masters who had died. The records
from the
* Most slave overseers were black.
* The suicide rate among slaves was much lower
than the suicide rate among whites.
* Hundreds of thousands of slaves, if not
millions, were converted to Christianity under slavery.
* Even in the 1850s some slaves were able
to buy their freedom, partly because they were permitted to earn money.
For documentation of the above facts, see
Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman,
Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, Norton
Edition with Afterword, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989, pp. 38-157;
McPherson, Ordeal By Fire, pp. 34-36; Walter Kennedy, Myths of American
Slavery, Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing, 2003, pp. 101-139; John J.
Dwyer, editor, The War Between the States: America’s Uncivil War,
Denton, Texas: Bluebonnett Press, 2005, pp.
67-86; and Eugene D. Genovese, Roll,
Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, Vintage Books Edition, New York:
Vintage Books, 1974, pp. 325-565.
Granted, no matter how humanely slavery
was administered, it was still wrong.
The point is that most Southern slaveholders did not deserve to lose
their slaves without compensation, and that this unfair policy did great damage
to the South’s economy.
Textbooks note the fact that Radical
Reconstruction included civil rights reforms that enabled former slaves to
vote. However, they almost never mention
information that sheds important light on those reforms. If the Republicans had enacted and
implemented these reforms in a legal, ethical manner, and if their motives for
doing so had been noble, they would deserve nothing but praise. But such was not the case. Most Republican leaders supported the
imposition of these reforms because they wanted to control and exploit the
Southern states, not because they really cared about the fate of the
ex-slaves. Republican operatives
manipulated, and sometimes even coerced, ex-slaves to vote Republican so the
Republican Party could take over Southern state governments. Many Republican operatives who came to the
South during Reconstruction did all they could to poison race relations between
ex-slaves and Southern whites. Once the
Republicans took control of Southern state governments, they proceeded to
engage in large-scale corruption and oppression, which harmed blacks and whites
alike. A respected moderate Southern
leader in
Great resources were expended on
registering the adult male ex-slaves to vote, while a law denying the franchise
to anyone involved in the late “rebellion” disenfranchised [took away the right
to vote from] most Southern white men.
So rigorous were the restrictions placed on white Southern males that
anyone who even organized contributions of food and clothing for family and
friends in the Confederate army was disenfranchised, as were all those who purchased
bonds from the Confederate government.
Even if one did not participate in the war effort, voter registration
required one to publicly proclaim that one’s sympathies were with the
Federal armies during the war. . . .
The federally funded “Union Leagues” were
run by Republican Party operatives and administered voter registration of the
ex-slaves. This, too, was a dramatic
change in the nation’s political life, for tax dollars taken from taxpayers of
all political parties were being used to register only Republican voters. The ex-slaves were promised many things,
including the property of white Southerners, if they registered and voted
Republican and, at times, were threatened or intimidated if they dared to register
Democrat. All of this was funded with
federal tax dollars. . . . For years,
these men, along with government bureaucrats associated with the “Freedmen’s
Bureau,” promised blacks that if they voted Republican they would be given the
property of the white population (and, of course, they never were).
Missionaries and many other people
assisted the ex-slaves in integrating into society, but the primary concern of
the Party of Lincoln was to get them registered to vote Republican, not to
educate them, feed them, or help them find employment. The result was that by 1868 ten of the
fourteen southern
If Northerners in general and the
Republican Party in particular wanted blacks to be given the vote because of
their concern for social equality, then one has to wonder why voters in Ohio,
Michigan, Minnesota, and Kansas refused to extend the right to vote to blacks
in 1867 and 1868. . . . (The Real Lincoln, pp. 208-210, original
emphasis)
Congressman Lawrence Patton McDonald
discussed some of the illegal measures and negative consequences of the
Radicals’ reconstruction program:
After a brief period of vacillation, Andrew
Johnson, who succeeded
The Radical Republicans succeeded in
getting their reconstruction programs enacted into law; and then, to make their
principal features permanently binding, they proposed the Fourteenth
Amendment. Two-thirds of both chambers
of Congress did not vote for the resolution proposing the Fourteenth Amendment,
as must be done under the Constitution for legal passage of such a
resolution. The Radical Republican majority
resolved that the resolution did pass, and submitted it to the states for
ratification. Three-fourths of the
states did not ratify the proposed amendment, as required by the Constitution;
but the Radical Republican majority in Congress had the Secretary of State
proclaim it ratified anyway—on July 20, 1868.
By then, the Radical Republicans controlled not only Congress but also
the executive branch. They had the
judicial branch thoroughly intimidated, and their cohorts controlled many state
governments in the North. . . .
Two hundred years of slavery created
relationships that would have been slow to change for the better under the best
of circumstances. Negroes were freed
under the worst of circumstances—suddenly, by a storm of violence. And they were started, unprepared, on the
long road toward the responsibilities as well as the blessings of freedom,
amidst a volcano of hatreds which the violence had caused. Conceivably, the road would have been smoother
and the trip faster, if the freed blacks could have lived amidst the whites who
were hailed as their liberators [i.e., Northern whites], with no outsiders
around to agitate mutual hatreds, resentments, and fears. Unfortunately, it was the other way around.
The military power that destroyed white
supremacy in the South established black supremacy. Under the protection of this invading
military force, white outsiders manipulated and used southern Negroes, but did
not educate them, or even permit them to learn much about the burdens and
responsibilities that freedom itself imposes.
When northern military rule was withdrawn in 1877, and white supremacy
was again established in the South, southern blacks and whites were in even
worse condition (socially and economically) to establish a harmonious society
than they would have been in if left alone at the end of the Civil War.
(Lawrence Patton McDonald, We Hold These Truths: A Reverent Review of the
U.S. Constitution, Seal Beach, California: ’76 Press, 1976, pp. 55-56, 92)
Civil rights could and should have been
advanced through legal, ethical means.
Yes, this would have taken longer, but it would have preserved the
constitutional republic that our founding fathers gave us, and all Americans
would have been better off in the long run.
Instead, in the name of imposing civil rights on the South, the
Republicans subverted the rule of law, permitted Republican operatives to
engage in astonishing corruption, looted the South for years, poisoned race
relations, illegally and unethically amended the Constitution, further
destroyed the balance of power between the states and the federal government,
and empowered the federal government to perform functions that the founding
fathers did not want it to perform. The Radicals claimed that drastic measures
against the South, including the imposition of military rule, were necessary
because of Southern black codes and because of alleged lawlessness in the
region. Historian William Dunning of
As a justification for military rule, it
was declared . . . that “no legal state governments or adequate protection for
life or property” existed in the “rebel states” enumerated. Thus the organizations which Lincoln and
Johnson had with so much care nurtured into vigorous life were formally
pronounced by Congress destitute of legality as state governments and “subject
to the paramount authority of the
The reasoning by which the policy of
Congress was justified in the North was regarded in the South as founded on
falsehood and malice. So far as the
“black codes” were concerned, it was pointed out that they could not be alleged
as evidences of a tendency to restore slavery or introduce peonage, since the
offensive acts had in many of the states been repealed by the legislatures
themselves, and in all had been duly superseded by the civil rights act. (Reconstruction,
Political and Economic 1865-1877, Harper Torchbook
Edition, New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962, pp. 93-94, 110)
Thomas E. Woods says the following about
the black codes:
These codes curtailed black liberty in
various degrees and the Radicals described them as a continuation of
slavery. But the codes were essentially
based on Northern vagrancy laws and other restrictive legislation that was
still on the books when the Reconstruction Acts were drawn up. Historian Ralph Selph
Henry contends that “there was hardly a feature of the apprenticeship and
vagrancy acts of
In the northeast, as well as in
Two modern scholars, H. A. Scott Trask and Carey Roberts, contend that the black codes have
been misunderstood in their intent and exaggerated in their impact:
“Most granted, or recognized, important legal rights for the freedmen,
such as the right to hold property, to marry, to make contracts, to sue, and to
testify in court. Many mandated
penalties for vagrancy, but the intention there was not to bind them to the
land in a state of perpetual serfdom, as was charged by the Northern Radicals,
but to end what had become an intolerable situation—the wandering across the
South of large numbers of freedmen who were without food, money, jobs, or
homes. Such a situation was leading to
crime, fear, and violence.”
The sense of moral righteousness that
dominated fashionable Northern opinion often blinded Northerners to their own
problems. The Chicago Tribune
protested the black codes of
Historian John Blum, though critical of
certain aspects of the black codes, says the provisions against vagrancy were
required by conditions at the time:
The moderates as well as the Radicals
objected . . . to the “black codes” that the former Confederate states
adopted. These codes represented the
initial Southern effort to regulate the economic and social lives of the freed
slaves. Many of the Negroes, without
experience with freedom, drifted aimlessly about the country, expecting charity
and avoiding work, sometimes stealing or carousing. The “black codes” were designed to discourage
vagrancy and to minimize race friction. (In Blum and Catton et al, editors, The
National Experience, p. 377)
Historian John Garraty
concludes that when viewed in historical perspective, even the most restrictive
of the black codes were a marked improvement over slavery:
. . . the so-called Black Codes enacted
by Southern governments to control former slaves alarmed the North. These varied in severity from state to
state. When seen in historical
perspective, even the strictest codes represented a considerable improvement
over slavery. Most permitted blacks to
sue and to testify in court, at least in cases involving members of their own
race. Blacks were allowed to own certain
kinds of property; marriages were made legal; other rights were guaranteed. (The
American Nation, Volume 2: A History of the United States Since 1865,
Eighth Edition, New York: HarperCollins, 1995, p. 434)
I would like to conclude this discussion
on Reconstruction by quoting a substantial portion of President Johnson’s veto
of the first Radical Reconstruction Act.
Before doing so, I should point out that the Radicals tried to remove
Johnson from office because he opposed their Reconstruction program, even
though he had staunchly supported the war and had opposed secession. When