My point is that I disagree with this claim. I agree that the original 7 seceding states weren't being candid as to why they were seceding. In the tradition of the "train of abuses" contained within the Declaration of Independence where they (let's be honest) heaped everything including the kitchen sink in there to throw at the king....and it was actually Parliament that enacted a lot of the laws they hated but it sounded a whole lot better to say it was the King. So they came from a tradition of being a bit disingenuous in making such claims.
They made what was a sound legal argument but it was not the real reason. That's why when the North offered to remedy the constitutional violations they complained of, they swiftly dismissed it. Both sides were really after the money - as in the vast majority of all wars. The South figured - rightly - that they would be much better off independent and making their own tariff and government expenditure policies. The North figured the same....and that consequently if that Southern money stopped flowing northward, they themselves would be considerably worse off. There are reams of newspaper editorials in the North, the South and Abroad which all agreed about that.
Under what law could John Brown's backers have been prosecuted? Hello? They were part of a criminal conspiracy. As the old common law principle goes, "in for a penny, in for a pound". They were just as guilty of terrorism and murder as Brown and his band of terrorists who fired the shots.
I agree with you that in every country that was industrializing, the costs of industrialization were borne by the agricultural sector. What was different in the US is that the economies of the regions were highly specialized. So in addition to political and cultural differences that had existed since colonial times, you now saw these bitter political differences added in and it was simply too much for the system to bear. The country broke apart as a result. Every government of a larger country at least does indeed rule over areas that have different interests but you just did not see it so regionally localized elsewhere as it was in the US.
Unfortunately, this was not dealt with by the US Congress. Obviously the Southern states should have received some kind of compensation to ameliorate the financial burden of paying for the North's industrialization but instead the larger population of the Northern states (and the nature of industrialization meant they would draw in more immigrants because they needed more labor) meant they had a majority in Congress. The temptation to vote themselves other people's money was just too great and they went too far with it.
Gobbling up all the corporate subsidies and the vast majority of federal infrastructure funds paid for by tariffs on Southern Export/Imports was an added slap in the face for Southerners. Secession was a response to the election of Lincoln yes, but it was much more a response to him as a protectionist and the certain concomitant passage of the Morrill Tariff that convinced the Southern states that it was time to leave.
As for abolition, Lincoln was no abolitionist. He took great pains to say so again and again. He even offered strengthened fugitive slave laws and the Corwin Amendment to show he was perfectly willing to live with slavery.
I agree with you that states rights vs federal power was a live issue then and is indeed still a live issue now. What kept the line on secession the time before....that would be the Nullification Crisis in 1832 was that the federal government agreed to repeal the Tariff of Abominations which is what South Carolina had objected to so strenuously. The lower Walker Tariff held until 1860 when the Morrill Tariff passed the House and was certain to pass the Senate. On top of all the other tensions, that was the last straw. Slavery they could have dealt with. The Northern states were perfectly willing to bend on that issue. The Southern states for their part were determined never again to suffer under a rerun of the Tariff of Abominations which had really grinded down their economies for the benefit of the Northern states.
I don't believe it was so much any threat to the long term survival of slavery that motivated the Southern states to get out when they did. They could see the effect industrialization had had on slavery elsewhere in various European colonial empires and in the Northern states. They knew....or at least many of them knew....slavery's days were numbered. What they needed was to reap the tremendous profits to be had from their very lucrative cash crops for a while so that they would then have the seed capital to industrialize and be competitive. They were only going to get that via independence.
As for the slaving raids....these did happen on rare occasion. More common was for professional slave catchers to round up free blacks in the North and claim they were escaped slaves even when they were not, grease the appropriate palms and then ship them South for a nice tidy profit. You say Lincoln was not in office when the war started. I would say he was. The real shooting was when Lincoln sent a fleet of warships laden with troops into South Carolina's territorial waters.
The Star of the West had been driven off with a warning shot across the bow.
You say Lincoln sent unarmed supply ships to South Carolina's sovereign territory of Charleston Harbor.
The steam sloop-of-war USS Pawnee, 181 officers and enlisted Armament: • 8 × 9 in guns, • 2 × 12-pounder guns USS Powhatan, 289 officers and enlisted Armament: • 1 × 11 in (280 mm) Dahlgren smoothbore gun, 10 × 9 in (230 mm) Dahlgren smoothbore guns • 5 × 12-pounder guns, also transporting steam launches and about 300 sailors (besides the crew, these to be used to augment Army troops)
Armed screw steamer USS Pocahontas, 150 officers and men (approx.) 4 × 32-pounder guns, 1 × 10-pounder gun, 1 × 20-pounder Parrot rifle
The Revenue Cutter USS Harriet Lane, 95 officers and men Armament: 1 x 4in gun, 1 x 9in gun, 2 x 8in guns, 2 x 24 lb brass howitzers
The steamer Baltic transporting about 200 troops, composed of companies C and D of the 2nd U.S. Artillery, and three hired tug boats with added protection against small arms fire to be used to tow troop and supply barges directly to Fort Sumter (or some other point since it is inconceivable that they would be taking small arms fire from a union held fortification)
Totals 4 war ships 4 transports 38 heavy guns 1200 military personnel (at least 500 of whom were to be used as a landing party)
Does this sound like "provisions" to you?
"Lincoln and the First Shot" (in Reassessing the Presidency, edited by John Denson), John Denson painstakingly shows how Lincoln maneuvered the Confederates into firing the first shot at Fort Sumter. As the Providence Daily Post wrote on April 13, 1861, "Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to inaugurate civil war without appearing in the character of an aggressor" by reprovisioning Fort Sumter. On the day before that the Jersey City American Statesman wrote that "This unarmed vessel, it is well understood, is a mere decoy to draw the first fire from the people of the South." Lincoln's personal secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, clearly stated after the war that Lincoln successfully duped the Confederates into firing on Fort Sumter. And as Shelby Foote wrote in The Civil War, "Lincoln had maneuvered [the Confederates] into the position of having either to back down on their threats or else to fire the first shot of the war."
Had they not fired, Lincoln would have only sent more and more expeditions to occupy more and more forts until he was able to control all ports and strategic locations. It was very obvious at the time even to Northerners that Lincoln was the one who really started it.
Here is the letter Lincoln sent to his naval commander, Fox congratulating him on getting a war started.
"May 1st, 1861. Washington Capt. G.V. Fox: My Dear Sir, I sincerely regret that the failure of the late attempt to provision Fort Sumter should be the source of any annoyance to you. The practicability of your plan was not, in fact, brought to a test. By reason of a gale, well known in advance to be possible, and not improbable, the tugs, an essential part of the plan, never reached the ground ; while, by an accident, for which you were in nowise responsible, and possibly I, to some extent, was, you were deprived of a war-vessel, with her men, which you deemed of great importance to the enterprise.
I most cheerfully and truthfully declare that the failure of the undertaking has not lowered you a particle, while the qualities you developed in the effort have greatly heightened you in my estimation. For a daring and dangerous enterprise of a similar character, you would, to-day, be the man of all my acquaintances whom I would select. You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort Sumter, even if it should fail ; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result. Very truly your friend, A. LINCOLN."
He clearly wanted a war and deliberately started one without authorization from Congress.
Also the constitution is silent on a state's right to unilateral secession. Each state did not surrender supreme sovereign power to the federal government. Each sovereign state delegated (what a superior does with a subordinate) certain limited and enumerated powers to the newly created federal government. The states kept most of their sovereign powers for themselves. Under the 9th and 10th amendments, any power not delegated to the federal government was retained by the states. Again, nowhere was the power to prevent secession delegated by the states to the federal government. Furthermore at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, 3 states including the two sectional leaders New York and Virginia expressly reserved the right to unilateral secession. Under the Comity principle, every state understood itself to have that right.
"We, the delegates of the people of Virginia, duly elected in pursuance of a recommendation from the general assembly, and now met in convention, having fully and freely investigated and discussed the proceedings of the Federal Convention, and being prepared as well as the most mature deliberation hath enabled us to decide thereon, Do, in the name and in behalf 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...."
"We, the delegates of the people of New York... do declare and make known that the powers of government may be reassumed by the people whenever 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 department 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 in certain specified powers or as inserted merely for greater caution."
"We, the delegates of the people of Rhode Island and Plantations, duly elected... do declare and make known... that the powers of government may be resumed by the people whenever 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 department 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; that Congress shall guarantee to each State its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Constitution expressly delegated to the United States."
On March 2, 1861 a constitutional amendment was proposed that would have outlawed secession (See H. Newcomb Morse, "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession," Stetson Law Review, vol. 15, 1986, pp. 419—36). This is very telling, for it proves that Congress believed that secession was in fact constitutional under the Tenth Amendment. It would not have proposed an amendment outlawing secession if the Constitution already prohibited it. Nor would the Republican Party, which enjoyed a political monopoly after the war, have insisted that the Southern states rewrite their state constitutions to outlaw secession as a condition of being readmitted to the Union. If secession was really unconstitutional there would have been no need to do so.
Even the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and Lincoln's treasury secretary Salmon P Chase recognized this fact. “If you bring these [Confederate] leaders to trial it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution secession is not rebellion. Lincoln wanted Davis to escape, and he was right. His capture was a mistake. His trial will be a greater one.” Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, July 1867 (Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3, p. 765)
“If you bring these leaders to trial, it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution, secession is not a rebellion. His [Jefferson Davis] capture was a mistake. His trial will be a greater one. We cannot convict him of treason.” [as quoted by Herman S. Frey, in Jefferson Davis, Frey Enterprises, 1977, pp. 69-72]
Thank you for the paragraphs.
The warships that went into Charleston Harbor don’t sound like provisions. They also don’t sound like the ships that went in first. By design, the first naval group that entered Charleston Harbor included only unarmed transport ships, carrying provisions. After the confederates opened fire on them, they fled. This was not a surprise, since the confederates had fired on the last supply ship. (A warning shot is still a shot.) In specific response to the confederate attack on the supply ships, the gunboats then went in to the harbor (and accomplished very little).
To claim that “Lincoln maneuvered the Confederates into firing the first shot at Fort Sumter” is as absurd as “look what you made me do” usually is in other connections. The confederates had the option of simply allowing the status quo to continue. If they had not fired, there would have been no fight. (At least, not then and there. Given events elsewhere, the chance of avoiding the Civil War entirely, at that point, appears nil.) It is because the confederates were determined to capture the fort, by starving out its garrison, that the confederates were placed in a situation of either giving up on capturing the fort, or shooting at the supply ships. The confederates were the aggressors on this one. For Lincoln to have allowed the garrison to starve, without even trying to send food, would have been badly done.
You can say that the major battles started with the assault on Fort Sumpter, but the shooting started during Buchanan’s term, and the war actually did start when South Carolina enacted her Ordnance of Secession. To remove a slice of a sovereign power’s territory, by force, is war. The fact that, under the Constitution, both the Federal Government and the states are sovereign, requires each to respect the (commonly overlapping) territories and laws of the other. (The Federal Government takes precedence, but only when exercising its enumerated powers. In a manner of speaking, the Constitution creates a two-tier division of powers. The sovereign power is first divided between the Federal Government, the states, and the people, each having privileges which the other two are not allowed to infringe, then it divides the federal power between the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary.)
Lincoln was indeed an abolitionist, in the usual sense of someone who advocated the abolition of slavery. He wanted to do so lawfully, in a manner that would avoid sudden shocks to the societies, and to get the support of local people for any major change. This distinguished him from those who wanted to free the slaves by gunfire, immediately, and without regard for whether there were any buildings left standing. But he always supported the abolition of slavery. He could not have issued the emancipation proclamation had the nation not been at war, he issued it specifically as a military measure, and it only covered the areas where the United States was at war, but it was not an accident that some of his major military measures did take slices out of slavery. He was instrumental in pushing through the amendment to the Constitution that banned slavery.
The states did not grant powers to the Federal Government in the sense of a Power of Attorney, which the granter may revoke whenever he likes. The states specifically yielded power to the Federal Government, specifically making federal law supreme over their own (. . . and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.). Each state agreed that, under the Constitution, some powers would be taken from it, and granted to the new Federal Government, and that some things which the states could still do, would require Federal permission. Under the Anti-Commandeering doctrine, the Federal Government may not require any state to enforce Federal law, but may send its own forces into any state, to enforce Federal law. The states have the power to enforce their laws, and the Federal Government has to power to enforce its laws. (The Anti-Commandeering doctrine is from the judicial world; it is not stated in the Constitution. As far as I know, it is accepted by everyone.)
You did specifically state that “3 states including the two sectional leaders New York and Virginia expressly reserved the right to unilateral secession.” From the quotes you supplied, they didn’t.
All three states specifically distinguish between “the people” and the state governments. The Virginia statement specifically mentions that the powers of the United States Government are derived from the people of the United States (not from the people of Virginia, which the same statement specifically references elsewhere), and that the people of the United States have the right to resume those powers- -essentially to overthrow the Federal Government.
The other states also distinguish between the people of their states, and the governments of their states. They do not specifically say whether it is the people of a particular state, or the people of the United States, that have the power to break the Federal Government. Each of them does say that the “powers of government” may be reassumed by the people. Unless part of the passage not included here modifies that, each would place both the Federal Government and their state governments at the mercy of “the people” (although their statements were chiefly focused on the Constitution of the United States). Far from asserting a state power, these asserts a state vulnerability- -that the state, like the Federal Government, exists on the sufferance of the people. This may have been deliberate; it was an accepted principle that the people are the font of governmental power, and that would apply at all levels.
Since the Declaration of Independence, it was an accepted principle that when any government goes off the rails, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it” To restate this right is not novel, it was already accepted. Virginia specifically ascribes that right to “the people of the United States”; the other two do not say whether they are ascribing the right to overthrow the Federal Government to the people of the United States as a whole, or to some part of it. None claims that any or all of the state governments may remove any or all of the powers of the Federal Government.
(All three states also express the principle later made explicit by the 10th Amendment, that the Federal Government has only the powers specifically granted it, and can’t act outside them. This was already accepted [even before the 10th was ratified], and seems to have been universally accepted until about the 1930s. It is still supposedly in force, though it seems to have sprung a lot of leaks.)
You also said “Under the Comity principle, every state understood itself to have that right.” I’m not familiar with the Comity principle, please explain.
A proposed amendment banning secession does not indicate that “Congress believed that secession was in fact constitutional”, any more than proposing the 10th amendment meant that Congress believed that it was not previously limited to the enumerated powers. In both cases, the amendment was to make explicit what was already implicit, and was already generally accepted. (Although the belief that secession was unconstitutional was not as universally accepted as the belief that the Federal Government was a government of enumerated powers, it was accepted by many even in the South, and was generally accepted.)
I have seen elsewhere that one reason the United States did not try Mr. Davis, is that you never know what a jury will do, and if the jury decided that secession was constitutional, wouldn’t that be a bit of an embarrassment? I don’t know what was Justice Chase’s logic for deciding that secession was not rebellion. This may turn on the technical definition of the terms. Certainly, secession did propose to abolish the laws of the United States over an entire area, so it would have included an impressive list of crimes.
To speak of the “costs of industrialization” is likely to cause confusion. Industrialization was not, on balance, a cost. People didn’t build factories and machine shops because they wanted to expend money, they built them because they wanted to make money, and they did. Industry was a source of wealth, not a drain on it. What I was referring to was that the whole United States was mostly an agricultural nation. Even the most industrialized states were still mostly farms; I don’t know of an exception. I think the distinction you were mainly reaching for was not between agricultural and industrial states, so much as between export farmers, and everyone else. The cotton and tobacco growers exported their produce; other types of farmers, not so much. While agriculture was everywhere, cotton and tobacco were mostly on the Gulf coast, and the Southern Atlantic coast.
The nature of government finances did make the burden fall more on cotton growers. By design, The United States originally got its revenue mostly from tariffs. As far as I know, this remained the main source of federal revenue until the implementation of the income tax. Tariffs necessarily fall on importers. The cotton growers were the main source of exports, and imports tend to be greater in communities that export. When the US government was funded by tariffs, it was close to impossible for the burden of them not to fall most heavily on exporting communities.
The tariff walls- -tariffs placed for the specific purpose of reducing imports, to promote internal production of the imported goods- -were even more favorable to the manufacturing communities, at the expense of everyone else. Areas that had little manufacture, were harmed by them. Of the confederate states, Virginia was the only one I know of that had significant industry; the others were not purely agricultural, but pretty close. This was deliberately done, for the (at least, intended) purpose of benefitting the nation, but it tended to harm areas with less industry.
But, while the South could fairly complain that they were mostly funding the Federal Government, we know that this would not drive secession, because it didn’t. This had been a long brewing problem area, and did not change with Lincoln’s election (for all that he was a tariff supporter). What changed was who was president. Secession was launched specifically for fear that, with Lincoln in the White House, slavery would be imperiled. It is fair to say that anyone who looked could see that slavery was going to dwindle as an element of the United States, but that only made slavery supporters more frantic. Many in the South who would not fight for slavery specifically, would fight against black equality; they were more afraid of what would happen when slavery ended, that they were enthusiastic about it continuing.
By the way, what leads you to say that John Brown’s backers were part of a criminal conspiracy? John Brown’s strike force committed crimes (and were hanged for them), but that doesn’t mean that the people he collected money from were party to those crimes. Is everyone who donates money to a politician a conspirator to the crimes that politician commits? Given the shooting war in Kansas at the time, even supplying rifles to anti-slavery fanatics was not necessarily in the wrong, or illegal. What did they do that they could be prosecuted for?