The Civil War was about unconstitutional tariffs imposed by a centralized Federal power. It was about States Rights vs Centralized Federal power, exactly the issue between the Federalists of the Northeastern colonies (Hamilton, et al) and the States Rights advocates of the Southern states like Virginia (Jefferson, et al). Indeed, the fear of a centralized encroachment of power similar to King George, and such tariffs, was exactly the reason for the bicameral legislature.
It was the distrust of centralized federal government that prompted Jefferson to write:
"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
Jefferson also wrote:
"A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference. "
The Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, was never meant for the protection of our homes, but for the protection of our freedoms from such a centralized Federal power encroaching upon them.
Without a doubt, the Second Amendment provided the cure intended by our Founding Fathers for what was happening at the time, the merchantile colonization of the Southern states exploiting their cotton resources at below market prices for Northeastern textile mills.
In those mills, "sweat shops", immigrant workers were literally worked to death, even children. Each wave of immigrants provided a new crop of dispendable human resources. While slavery is a reprehensible institution inconsistent with our Constitution, the "sweat shops" of the Northeast were much more cruel.
One well-documented study,"Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery", Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, 1974, Makes this case. Their chief conclusions were also neatly summarized in a list of 10 "principal corrections of the traditional characterization of the slave economy" (pp. 4-6).
1. Slavery was not a system irrationally kept in existence by owners who failed to perceive or were indifferent to their best economic interests. The purchase of a slave was generally a highly profitable investment which yielded rates of return that compared favorably with the most outstanding investment opportunities in manufacturing.
2. The slave system was not economically moribund on the eve of the Civil War. There is no evidence that economic forces alone would have soon brought slavery to an end without the necessity of a war or other form of political intervention. Quite the contrary; as the Civil War approached, slavery as an economic system was never stronger and the trend was toward even further entrenchment.
3. Slaveowners were not becoming pessimistic about the future of their system during the decade that preceded the Civil War. The rise of the secessionist movement coincided with a wave of optimism. On the eve of the Civil War, slaveholders anticipated an era of unprecedented prosperity.
4. Slave agriculture was not inefficient compared with free agriculture. Economies of large-scale operation, effective management, and intensive utilization of labor and capital made southern slave agriculture 35 percent more efficient than the northern system of family farming.
5. The typical slave field hand was not lazy, inept, and unproductive. On average he was harder-working and more efficient than his white counterpart.
6. The course of slavery in the cities does not prove that slavery was incompatible with an industrial system or that slaves were unable to cope with an industrial regimen. Slaves employed in industry compared favorably with free workers in diligence and efficiency. Far from declining, the demand for slaves was actually increasing more rapidly in urban areas than in the countryside.
7. The belief that slave-breeding, sexual exploitation, and promiscuity destroyed the black family is a myth. The family was the basic unit of social organization under slavery. It was to the economic interest of planters to encourage the stability of slave families and most of them did so. Most slave sales were either of whole families or of individuals who were at an age when it would have been normal for them to have left the family.
8. The material (not psychological) conditions of the lives of slaves compared favorably with those of free industrial workers. This is not to say that they were good by modern standards. It merely emphasizes the hard lot of all workers, free or slave, during the first half of the nineteenth century.
9. Slaves were exploited in the sense that part of the income which they produced was expropriated by their owners. However, the rate of expropriation was much lower than has generally been presumed. Over the course of his lifetime, the typical slave field hand received about 90 percent of the income he produced.
10. Far from stagnating, the economy of the antebellum South grew quite rapidly. Between 1840 and 1860, per capita income increased more rapidly in the south than in the rest of the nation. By 1860 the south attained a level of per capita income which was high by the standards of the time. Indeed, a country as advanced as Italy did not achieve the same level of per capita income until the eve of World War II.
Lincoln rejected abolitionism until well into the Civil War when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This was done when the Union was losing the war, was having trouble recruiting trrops and attracting funds. 300,000 freed slaves joined Union forces, and Bostoniam abolitionist money flowed in. This move infused a new "moral" impetus to a lost cause.
Freeing the slaves was never a reason for the war. After all, the South seceded, the North did not attack to free the slaves. Why did the South secede? Tariffs and States Rights. They employed a Constitutional right when those in power over-reached the Constitution and encroached upon the rights of others.
Since that time Marxism has evolved in the movement for centralized power. Watch this current situation.
“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, —a most sacred right—a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government, may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with , or neat about them, who may oppose their movement. Such minority, was precisely the case, of the Tories of our own revolution.” —Abraham Lincoln, from the Congressional Record, Jan. 12, 1847.
I’ve read through the first of the late Shelby Foote’s trilogy and I feel like I’ve only just begun the study.
Lincoln also made a remark early in the war that his primary objective was to "save the government". That sent up a gigantic red flag to me...I don't have the reference right in front of me however. When I get off work tonight, I'll go ahead and find it.
reference bump
The word “slavery” appears 4o times in the Declaration of Causes of Secession (GA, MS, SC, TX).
The word tariff is never mentioned. The word tax appears once, in reference to a tax on slave owners. Cotton was never mentioned either.
Look up Joshua Glover (Racine, WI) & tell me it was all about States Rights vs Centralized Federal power.
I will enshrine the following from the message to the Confederate Congress April 29th 1861 from Jefferson Davis:
” As soon as the Northern States that prohibited African slavery within their limits had reached a number sufficient to give their representation a controlling voice in the Congress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States was inaugurated and gradually extended. A continuous series of measures was devised and prosecuted for the purpose of rendering insecure the tenure of property in slaves... Senators and Representatives were sent to the common councils of the nation, whose chief title to this distinction consisted in the display of a spirit of ultra-fanaticicsm and whose business was... to awaken the bitterest hatred against the citizens of sister states, by violent denunciation of their institutions; the transaction of public affairs was impeded by repeated efforts to usurp pairing the security of property in slaves, and reducing those States which held slaves to a condition of inferiority. Finally a great party was organized for the purpose of obtaining the administration of the Government, which the avowed object of using its power for the total exclusion of the slave States from all participation in the benefits of the public comain acquired by all the States in common, whether by conquest or purchase; of surrounding them entirely by States in which slavery should be prohibited; of thus rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless, and thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars. This party, thus organized, succeeded in the month of November last in the election of its candidate for the Presidency of the United States. In the meantime the African slaves had augmented in number from about 600,000 at the date of the adoption of the constitutional compact to upward of 4,000,000. In moral and social condition they had been elevated from brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers, and supplied not only with bodily comforts but with careful religious instruction. Under the supervision of a superior race, their labor had been so directed as not only to allow a gradual and marked amelioration of their own condition, but to convert hundreds of thousands of square miles of the wilderness into cultivated lands covered with a prosperous people; towns and cities had sprung into existence, and had rapidly increased in wealth and population under the social system of the South;... and the productions in the South of cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco, for the full development and continuance of which the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable had swollen to an amount which formed nearly three-fourths of the exports of the whole United States and had become absolutely necessary to the wants of civilized man. With interests of such overwhelming magnitude imperiled, the people of the Southern States were driven by the conduct of the North to the adoption of some course of action to avert the danger with which they were openly menaced.”
GAME. SET. MATCH.
This is for extra credit. It comes from a speech in Savannah on March 21st 1861 by Alexander Stephens, VP of the Confederacy.
” The (Confederate) Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions- African slavery as it exists among us- the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away...Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it- when the “Storm came and the wind blew, it fell.” Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth......It is the first government ever instituted upon principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society. Many Governments have been founded upon the principles of certain classes; but the classes thus enslaved were of the same race, and in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature's laws. The negro by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material- the granite- then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is the best, not only for the superior but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed in conformity with the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances or to question them.”
I like to think of them both as leading liberals of their time.
Enjoyed the read. Thanks
Could another reason for this have been that the Emancipation Proclamation's antecedent, the Confiscation Act(s), proved largely to be ineffective? (That and Lincoln was against the Confiscation Acts from the start)?
Also, could the CSA have truly been winning even though the Union was finding much more success in the western fronts (Ft. Henry and Ft. Donelson, as well as the conquering and Federal occupation of New Orleans) than in the east (e.g.: First Manassas and the Seven Days Battles)?
You are stating something that is nonsense and false. Lots of somethings in fact. Tariffs are clearly NOT unconstitutional. The war came because the slavers refused to accept Lincoln’s election which came as a result of their own colossal stupidity in running three Democrat slates against him.
Southerners controlled every aspect of the government for most of the time since the Founding: Congress, the Court and almost all of the presidents had been southern. J. Adams, J.Q. Adams, Van Buren, Filimore, and Buchanan were the only Northerners and only J.Q. was anti-slavery.
For the South the war was ONLY about slavery and they made no bones about it.
Your other claims are equally false and full of distortions.
Reference PING
Thanks!
Wow, you are so wrong about Lincoln and slavery. Lincoln was almost a fanatic against the spread of slavery. If you don’t know this, then you really have not much knowledge about the Civil War.
By the same token, Jefferson Davis was a fanatic about trying to spread slavery to new territories, mainly Cuba and possibly Mexico, if possible.
These efforts to revise the history of the Great Slaver Rebellion of 1861 are always great for a laugh or two.
Lew Rockwell? LOL