Was the Civil War about Slavery?

Acton Institute, Prager University ^ | 8/11/2015 | Joe Carter

[iowamark]

What caused the Civil War? That seems like the sort of simple, straightforward question that any elementary school child should be able to answer. Yet many Americans—including, mostly, my fellow Southerners—claim that that the cause was economic or state’s rights or just about anything other than slavery.

But slavery was indisputably the primary cause, explains Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

The abolition of slavery was the single greatest act of liberty-promotion in the history of America. Because of that fact, it’s natural for people who love freedom, love tradition, and love the South to want to believe that the continued enslavement of our neighbors could not have possibly been the motivation for succession. But we should love truth even more than liberty and heritage, which is why we should not only acknowledge the truth about the cause of the war but be thankful that the Confederacy lost and that freedom won.

[BroJoeK]

x: "But really, how much revenue was anyone going to be able to collect from one fort in a hostile part of the country?"

We have debated this at great length, clearing up, I think, much confusion.
Our pro-Confederates claim that virtually all Federal revenues came from the export of Southern cotton & tobacco, and that's why Fort Sumter was so important.

Of course, it's nonsense.
Federal tariffs were never collected on exports but only imports, and in early 1861 95% of those came through non-Confederate ports.
Indeed, of the 5% of Federal revenues from Deep South ports, 80% of that number was one port: New Orleans.
Federal import revenues from Charleston, South Carolina, home of Fort Sumter, amounted to one-half of one percent of the total:

Of course, US export earnings necessary to pay for its imports did come largely from slave-grown cash crops -- roughly 58% in total.
However during the course of Civil War and afterwards those exports turned out to be non-essential to both the Union economy and that of our European trading partners.

[BroJoeK]

Ditto to DiogenesLamp on state abolition laws: "The legal basis of it dates back to British Common Law predating our independence.
There were dozens of cases where state courts in slave states declared slaves free in identical cases as Dred Scott.
here is the case of Rachel v. Walker "

We should take note that here, and in some others of your excellent posts, the response from DiogenesLamp is a thunderous, deafening silence.

How do they score in tennis? Point, set, match?

[BroJoeK]

ditto: "What is that, the famous Heads I Win, Tails You Lose clause in the Constitution?"

DiogenesLamp: "That is exactly what it seems to be when you analyze the larger consequence of it.
It does indeed appear to create and maintain a disadvantage in the law towards people who wish to abolish slavery in their state.
When you have a clause that specifically says there can be no state laws interfering with the labour owed by the laws of another state, that pretty much torpedoes any means of freeing a slave who was born subject to another state's laws."

We might note first that no American today spells the word "labour", rather "labor", and perhaps that hints at something regarding DiogenesLamp's birth-language.
He has, after all, sometimes suggested a difficulty understanding English.

But second and more important: all of DiogenesLamp's arguments are based on a false premise -- that the following Constitution words (Article 4, section 2) were intended by our Founders to refer to something other than Fugitive Slaves:

"No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, But shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due."

In no writing, in the Constitution, Federalist Papers or elsewhere does any Founder suggest these words apply to anybody other than Fugitive Slaves.
The words certainly do not suggest that slave-holders may bring their slaves into Free States without being subject to the abolition laws of those states.
Nor did any Founder suggest that Federal government had no authority to restrict slavery in international trade or in US western territories.

So everything DiogenesLamp says here is pure fantasy within his own mind, having no relation to historical reality.

DiogenesLamp: "I am under the impression that it is irrelevant to the larger point."

But the larger point has always been, from the beginning of this thread, that our FRiend DiogenesLamp is strictly delusional, consumed by fantasies not based in historical facts.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "Article IV says states have to respect other states slave laws.
I take that to mean that in a contest between freedom laws of a free state, and slave laws of a slave state, the slave laws must always prevail.
Yeah, that's ugly, but that's what it says, and if Northern states didn't agree to it, they wouldn't have had to abide by it."

No, no, no!
Article 4, Section 2 says only that states must return Fugitive Slaves, not that slave-holders are exempt from Free State abolition laws within those states.
So people like Roger Tanney and our own DiogenesLamp are clearly delusional in this regard.

Indeed, DiogenesLamp himself has no difficulty identifying Tanney's false reasoning regarding African-American citizenship, but since his delusions agree with Tanney on slave-state laws, they are both blind to the historical reality that the Founders' Constitution only intended to protect holders of Fugitive Slaves.

DiogenesLamp: "The lower courts were apparently unaware that laws freeing slaves, and laws holding them in bondage were inherently unequal in the requirements of the Constitution, with the slave laws having the superior legal position.
Again, don't blame me for pointing this out, but that was the law of that era."

But not only lower courts, but all courts before Dred-Scot correctly understood that the US Constitution allows states to make their own laws regarding slavery, and that, except in the case of Fugitive Slaves, no state could impose slavery on another.

So DiogenesLamp is not here pointing out "the law of that era", but strictly his own delusions of what he wished they would have been, had he been there to guide them.

[miss marmelstein]

I’m late to this debate. You’re a Nat Turner abolitionist? Didn’t turn out well for old Nat as I remember...

[miss marmelstein]

Here we go again. How many years after the war and we still have beat the brains out of the South. What is the motivation on this, I wonder? To me it is simply sick, sick and sick.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "The disaster was that provision in article IV which the Northern states voluntarily agreed to, and then used every trick of which they could think to get out of that devil's bargain.
They either should have not agreed with it, or not Unionized with Slave states."

But of course, Northern states never agreed to such a "devil's bargain", nor did any Southern Founder ever claim they had.
Indeed, even 1861 Secessionist documents never claimed that slavery was protected in non-slave states, beyond the constitutionally mandated return of Fugitive Slaves.

So, pal, you've built a whole argument here, defended with innumerable posts, based on nothing except your delusions as to what our Founders intended by their words and deeds.

You need to get over it.

[miss marmelstein]

Unless you listen to Michael Medved who claims that something like 93% of southerners owned slaves. Well, I may be exaggerating a bit but not by much.

[rockrr]

We talked about this on another thread. He claimed 30%.

[miss marmelstein]

If the Union invaded the southern part of the USA why is it shocking for The Confederacy (Lee) to invade the northern part of the USA?

Color me confused.

[miss marmelstein]

Are you sure? He made a huge deal of it at the time. He was positively swooning with glee.

Sorry, I don’t remember you at all.

[BroJoeK]

PeaRidge: "The declaration would likely look like this:
From the archives of the Government of the Confederate States of America.
On this date the Confederate Congress voted in the majority to declare war on the United States of America."

An Act Recognizing the existence of war..."

You are mistaken in your effort to impose a different standard on "declarations of war" than the historic record supports.
The truth is, you know very well the Confederacy issued a declaration of war, you just don't wish to call it that -- in the same way that Confederates wished to call slavery a "domestic institution".
You wish to nit-pick the wording, to assert that the Confederate declaration was not really a declaration, it was just a... well... a "recognition".

But regardless of whether you call it a "declaration" or "acknowledgement" or "recognition", the result is the same: Confederate President Jefferson Davis was granted war-powers and the entire Confederacy was put on a war-making basis.
Plus the Confederate Army was increased from 100,000 to 500,000 troops.
This at a time when the US army was still barely 15,000 troops.

So the historical reality on this subject is:

1. From December 1860 through April 1861 the Confederacy continually provoked war through dozens of seizures by force of major Federal properties -- forts, ships, arsenals, mints, etc. -- threats against and firings on Union officials.

2. In April 1861 the Confederacy started war at Union Fort Sumter through a military assault resulting in some Union deaths and forcing the remainder to surrender.

3. On May 6, 1861 the Confederacy formally declared war on the United States and sent military aid to pro-Confederates in Union Missouri.

4. All this happened before a single Confederate soldier was killed directly in battle with any Union force, and before any Union Army invaded a single Confederate state.

5. By the time that first Confederate soldier (Pvt. Henry Wyatt) was killed in the Battle of Big Bethel, on June 10, 1861, dozens of Union troops had been killed, over a hundred wounded and 500 captured as POWs.

Bottom line: the Confederacy began making war six months before the Union did anything serious in response.

[rockrr]

“Sorry, I don’t remember you at all.”

Thanks ;’)

Try here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3320601/posts?page=17#17

[BroJoeK]

PeaRidge: "As pointed out to you earlier, no citizen was stripped of his rights. Secession in no way harmed any rights of persons living under the original Constitution."

In fact, there were huge regions of several Confederate states which refused to recognize declarations of secession and sent their young men to serve the Union Army.

Those regions included: Western Virginia, Eastern Tennessee, Western North Carolina, Northern Arkansas.
In addition, the Confederacy claimed sovereignty over Missouri and Kentucky, which never voted to secede, and sent the majority of their young men to the Union Army.

In the end, only South Carolina and Georgia, so far as we know, supplied no serious forces to the Union.
So obviously, not everybody in the South agreed that secession was such a great idea.

[BroJoeK]

DoodleDawg: "This is the energizer bunny of FR threads. It just keeps on going...and going...and going..."

In my experience, there are a handful of such threads each year since I've been here.

[rockrr]

I finally received my copy of a book titled “The State of Jones”. It is a recounting of the resistance to confederate rule that went on in in Jones County Mississippi. Fascinating book!

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "But we threw the baby out with the bath water to get something that was going to eventually happen anyways."

That is a Big Lie we hear often.
The truth is, in 1860 slavery had never been more profitable, and the Deep South never more prosperous.
Slavery, far from "fading away" was growing by leaps and bounds in the Deep South, so much so that hundreds of thousands of slaves were sold from Border States and Upper South to the Deep South to grow cotton.
So slavery was indeed fading in such states as Delaware and Maryland, but it was ever-growing in the Deep South.

Point two is that beginning with out Founders, plans were proposed to gradually abolish slavery in the South, including government buy-outs.
But no such plan was ever accepted by slave-holders.

So there's no indication that slavery would ever be voluntarily abolished in those states which valued it most.

DiogenesLamp: "The good thing gained cost far too much.
Far too much.
We are still paying for it."

It could have ended at any time, if the Confederacy had kept the peace, or later sued for peace.
If they had sued early in the war, they could even have kept their slaves.
But by war's end, that was not an option for them.

The blame for all the deaths, and all the negative consequences belongs to those Confederates who started Civil War, and refused to end it short of Unconditional Surrender.

[PeaRidge]

“What do you disagree with here?”

For starters, you didn’t answer the question.

[spintreebob]

Not just Nat. Pacifists who joined state militia to fight for freedom for slaves had no experience with guns or even fist fights. They were soft and could not pull the trigger when they had Johnny Reb in their sights. The result was that in the early stages of the war the North lost an extremely large number of volunteers and had to draft immigrants.