Why The War Was Not About Slavery

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org ^ | March 9, 2016 | Clyde Wilson

[NKP_Vet]

Conventional wisdom of the moment tells us that the great war of 1861—1865 was “about” slavery or was “caused by” slavery. I submit that this is not a historical judgment but a political slogan. What a war is about has many answers according to the varied perspectives of different participants and of those who come after. To limit so vast an event as that war to one cause is to show contempt for the complexities of history as a quest for the understanding of human action.

Two generations ago, most perceptive historians, much more learned than the current crop, said that the war was “about” economics and was “caused by” economic rivalry. The war has not changed one bit since then. The perspective has changed. It can change again as long as people have the freedom to think about the past. History is not a mathematical calculation or scientific experiment but a vast drama of which there is always more to be learned.

I was much struck by Barbara Marthal’s insistence in her Stone Mountain talk on the importance of stories in understanding history. I entirely concur. History is the experience of human beings. History is a story and a story is somebody’s story. It tells us about who people are. History is not a political ideological slogan like “about slavery.” Ideological slogans are accusations and instruments of conflict and domination. Stories are instruments of understanding and peace.

Let’s consider the war and slavery. Again and again I encounter people who say that the South Carolina secession ordinance mentions the defense of slavery and that one fact proves beyond argument that the war was caused by slavery. The first States to secede did mention a threat to slavery as a motive for secession. They also mentioned decades of economic exploitation.

[DoodleDawg]

Ah but it wasn't. Treaties carry the force of constitutional law. No, not merely the force of law - constitutional law.

Making crap up as you go along like I said.

[FLT-bird]

Team Cuda to FLT-bird: "You are right, as far as you go – about halfway through Rhett’s address. If you read the second half of Rhett’s address, you find it talks almost exclusively about slavery, and not taxes or tariffs " FLT-bird: "I agree it was an issue. I agree it was an important issue. I just do not agree that it was THE issue....at least not for most." Judging by the seven "Reasons for Secession" documents before Fort Sumter slavery was THE issue for some and an important issue for all. In every such document slavery is discussed at greater length than any other reason. And even for those who claim slavery was just "pretext", the reason given is quite telling: "Slavery is not the cause of the rebellion .... Slavery is the pretext on which the leaders of the rebellion rely, 'to fire the Southern Heart' and through which the greatest degree of unanimity can be produced.... Mr. Calhoun, after finding that the South could not be brought into sufficient unanimity by a clamor about the tariff, selected slavery as the better subject for agitation." North American Review (Boston October 1862) This (alleged) quote is often posted by Lost Causers like FLT-bird to "prove" their point that it was all about "money, money, money". But the quote actually proves something quite different -- it proves that average Southerners would not reject their own country only for "money, money, money", but rather they needed something much more important to their "way of life", namely slavery.

Nope. Completely wrong as usual. You have nothing to contribute except an endless cycle of "nuh-uh" type posts.

[FLT-bird]

You post editorials; opinion and not fact. And if you posted a "bunch of tax experts" then I must have missed that. And you make up stuff as you go along like the Confederate constitution mandated a maximum of 10% tariff. Hard to take you seriously after all that.

I post editorials, as well as quotes, as well as facts. You just post a bunch of "nuh-uh...now go on a wild goose chase tracking down a million different sources while I sit back and claim any and every source you provide no matter how ironclad is somehow not good enough....ie trolling 101".

Don't worry. I've known better than to take you seriously for quite some time. Notice how you always seek me out to respond to me to try to start and endless cycle of this? Notice how I'm not ever the one who seeks you out?

[FLT-bird]

Notice how pissed BroJoe gets when you point out the truth to him.....ie that his side was the one in favor of big government and high taxes and that those who spew the Revisionist crap he so desperately wants to believe about the period are all a bunch of Leftists in Academia who came up with it about a generation ago.

Dixie is and has always been the heart of Conservative thought in America.

[FLT-bird]

Making crap up as you go along like I said. Tell ya what. I'll put my legal education up against yours any day.

[FLT-bird]

Ya gotta love the whole "spread of slavery" gambit.

Nevermind that the West was totally unsuited for Cotton or Tobacco production. So....they were really motivated by the desire to spread slavery and they seceded so that they could spread slavery...even though when they seceded they made utterly no claim to the territory of the US and left only with their own sovereign territory within their own state borders. Their "solution" to the problem of not being able to spread slavery was....to give up any chance of spreading slavery.

Wait. What????

[DoodleDawg]

"State" in the sense it had it's own governor. Of course it was a vassal of Spain, but you only put out your nitpick because you want to nitpick, and not for any reason of advancing the discussion.

It was a colony of Spain, not a state. Or is that too nit-picky?

Sure, a state had a right to abolish any laws within their state that created slaves, but it had absolutely no right to do anything about slaves created by other state's laws. It also had no right to exclude people with slaves from another state.

LOL! The Court would disagree with you on that. In Corfield v Coryell Justice Washington said that right was not absolute. And if a state can deny a outsider the ability to harvest clams it can deny him the ability to move in with his slaves, especially is such a right is denied the state's citizens.

[DoodleDawg]

Don't worry. I've known better than to take you seriously for quite some time.

LOL! Ditto on that. But it's still fun to question your B.S.

[FLT-bird]

LOL! Ditto on that. But it's still fun to question your B.S.

Just as I have fun debunking your BS.

[BroJoeK]

FLT-bird: "Eminent domain is not limited to private property.
ANY property within their sovereign territory may be seized for public use."

DoodleDawg: "You're just making this crap up as you go along.
Please point me to a single source that defines eminent domain the way that you do."

That piqued my curiosity so went looking...
Turns out, the original definition of eminent domain by Hugo Grotius in 1625 includes this:

"...when this is done, the state is bound to make good the loss to those who lose their property."

So, eminent domain gives a state the right to take a citizen's property, but only with just compensation, and in the British/American tradition, only after legitimate legal processes.

More important, at no time did a single Confederate entity ever declare it was seizing Federal properties on grounds of "eminent domain" -- they didn't bother, they just took what they wanted, by force when necessary.

Historically, governments which seize properties and threaten officials from other governments are committing acts of aggression and risking the direst of consequences.

[Bull Snipe]

Only if 2/3s of the Confederate Senate approve the treaty.

[Bull Snipe]

Davis started the war. He did it with the full knowledge that it would cause a war.

[Bull Snipe]

take a look at the dates you cite.

[FLT-bird]

blah blah blah blah.

You have nothing to contribute. The only question is how many times you obsessively try to rope me in for this thread.

[FLT-bird]

Only if 2/3s of the Confederate Senate approve the treaty.

It was enough to empower the ambassador with plenipotentiary powers. I don't know why y'all are so desperate to argue this. Its been posted with quotes and sources numerous times. This is not exactly a controversial fact.

[DiogenesLamp]

The North invaded the South in order to preserve the Union.

So what did this invasion have to do with slavery?

I’ve answered your question, now please answer mine. My question is: Why did the South secede.

If a man has "Freedom of Speech", what opinions are so bad that he can be denied the right to speak them?

Tell me what are the boundaries on a right and who is the Judge that get to decide what rights have restrictions and what those restrictions are?

I will remind you that slavery was legal in the British Empire until 1833.

Someone pointed out to me awhile back that it was outlawed in England in the 1770s. Slavery was illegal in England.

The British also did not fight the Revolutionary War because of slavery.

Neither did the Union, as you just admitted up above.

Slavery was not an issue in the Revolutionary War on either side.

Same thing in the Civil war for the first 18 months of the war. It later became a big political propaganda campaign trying to make the invaders look like the good guys, but as you admitted, they didn't invade with any intentions of doing anything about slavery. They just wanted to control the South.

3)You asked if I said that those Southern states had a right to freedom even though they had slaves. My answer is, yes of course. However, they already had freedom except for the right to own slaves. Please tell me what freedoms they did not have. Again, back to my original question, why did the South secede?

Well since they already had slavery in the Union, it can't be to keep that, so it must be because they were fed up with Washington DC taking so much of their money and telling them what to do. I quite empathize with that problem.

4)I still believe that calling states like Massachusetts and New Hampshire slave states when the number of slaved in those states in 1776 was minuscule is ridiculous, but you are technically correct.

I am reminded of the question about how much sewage water can be mixed with drinking water to render it undrinkable? I believe the answer is "any amount of sewage water renders drinking water undrinkable. " Thus is it with slavery. So long as it exists at all, the State in which it exists, is a slave state.

5)You are right that they already had slavery as a member of the Union, and this was not a reason for seceding. I misspoke, and should have said “maintaining” slavery.

All they had to do to "maintain" slavery was to remain in the Union. Lincoln was even offering them a constitutional amendment to make it possible to "maintain" slavery forever, so long as any state wanted it.

It sure seems to me that expansion of slavery into the territories was an issue with at least some of the southern states, but I’m sure that you will explain to me how this is a “lie”.

Slavery could not expand into the territories in any meaningful degree. When people referred to "expansion", they were actually referring to the expansion of congressional representation that would ally with slave states. New Mexico could be a "slave state" in theory, even though it could not be an actual slave state in practice. The same was true of other territories.

The whole "expansion of slavery" issue as about congressional power, and not actually about moving slaves into any of the territories. I've read articles that say both sides admitted the territories wouldn't actually support an expanded slave presence, but the fight was about congressional representatives because that is where the real power was.

7)You are correct in saying that the northern states were in violation of the compact in not returning escaped slaves to the South. What you are missing is the moral impact, however. The reason the populace in the Northern states opposed the Fugitive Slave Act was that a majority of the populations of those states considered it immoral. Are you suggesting that morality not be considered in administering the law?

The law should be based on an acknowledged morality, such as Christianity. (With which the concept of slavery is incompatible.) The law, however, often isn't. When the law says something immoral, i'm not going to pretend it doesn't. Here is an example of immoral laws.

The Northern states were breaking the law. If they couldn't comply with this immoral law, they should have split apart. They misled the Southern states, because when the constitution was approved, the vast majority of the states were still slave states. From the perspective of the Slave holding states, the Northern states had pulled a "bait and switch."

Why did the South secede? Please note that I’m not asking why YOU think they seceded, I’m asking what reason did they give (what did they state in the articles of secession hint: don’t ignore Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, and Texas)

I don't see why I should pay attention to those four states instead of paying attention to the other 7 states. Since when do four states represent a majority in a coalition of 11?

I know why people who want to justify what the North did like to seize on those four states and ignore the other 7. They do so because they want to claim the moral high ground for an after the fact decision to destroy slavery. They have no problem ignoring the fact that nobody was trying to destroy slavery when they invaded, and if they had won quickly, they would have simply restored everything back to what it was before the war, but modern sensibilities prefer o believe the "good guys" beat the "bad guys" because the "bad guys" embraced an evil institution.

This is a cartoon version of what happened, and it is quite inaccurate. Yes, Texas, Mississippi, South Carolina, and maybe Georgia (I don't remember about Georgia) claimed in their secession statements that slavery was the reason they were leaving, but i've seen it argued that even that was just a bunch of propaganda and not the real reason. The real reason appears to be the 230 million in 1860 dollars that the South was making in export value. That money was funneling though New York and Washington DC as a consequence of the rigged system of laws created by the Northern control of congress.

Independence would allow them to steer all that money back through their own cities, and enrich them quite a lot. They were going to make a fortune being independent, and the Newspapers at the time detailed the massive building boom occurring in Charleston when South Carolina seceded.

They were expecting to become the new New York of the South, and Independence was how they could do it.

Unless, of course, the reason you’re avoiding answering the question is because you don’t have an answer to it?

I know what answer you want to hear, but as I said, this is a cartoon understanding of what was going on.

I long ago learned to not pay so much attention to what people claim, but instead learn to watch what they do, and most especially to follow the money.

The money story tells a very different tell than all the pronouncements of all the parties involved. As Charles Dickens said:

Every reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and until it was convenient to make a pretense that sympathy with him was the cause of the War, it hated the Abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale. For the rest, there's not a pins difference between the two parties. They will both rant and lie and fight until they come to a compromise; and the slave may be thrown into that compromise or thrown out, just as it happens."

I believe there were rants and lies all around from both parties, just as Dickens said.

[Mr Rogers]

“WHO FIRED FIRST? Lincoln did.” - DiogenesLamp

As I wrote, none of this “He made me do it” crap! Man up and admit the truth!

The South had a choice. Lincoln did NOT launch a “war fleet”. It was a resupply mission, whose timing, goals & nature were discussed in a letter Lincoln sent to South Carolina.

The South had a choice: Attack a resupply mission. Or let the supplies through. They chose another option: Bombard the fort before the resupply mission could arrive! They bombarded a US owned & held fort. THEIR CHOICE.

They discussed options and decided to attack first. Their choice. The South DECIDED to start the war, and they knew it!

[Team Cuda]

Hey Diogenes Lamp. I thought you were gone. But I see you are back. Since you seem to be an expert on all things Civil War, I will repeat a question I asked a while back.

Why did the South secede? What reasons did they give in their official documents? Please note that I consider their official documents to be the Articles of Secession that each state legislature put out (if you do not consider the Articles of Secession to be their official position, I would like to understand why, and what their official position was). I’m really interested in what you think Mississippi’s reason for secession was was (don’t forget South Carolina, either).

I’m really looking forward to hearing your succinct position as to why the South seceded, as I am sure many other posters are.

To quote Chester Nimitz, “The world wonders”.

[BroJoeK]

DoodleDawg: "What says it says it means a maximum of 10%? Prove I'm wrong."

FLT-bird: "Nope! Read Charles Adams among others. Revenue Tariff = Max 10%"

Anybody can read the Confederate Constitution, here, and see it says nothing about 10% tariffs.

The first act setting Confederate tariffs was passed on March 15, 1861 and listed about two dozen categories as 15% tariffs.

The second more complete tariff law was passed on May 21, 1861 planned to take effect after August 31 and listed several hundred categories with rates from 25% down to 5% or exempt.
However, after August 31 the Union blockade grew stronger resulting in very little revenues actually collected and so an "average rate" is impossible to calculate.

All told, Confederates collected only $3.5 million in tariffs from beginning in 1861 to the end in 1865.

[itsahoot]

My point is: a search for such hidden "real reasons" invariably takes us down a maze of historical rabbit holes & nonsense which seldom add up to anything coherent.

I don't search for them but I rarely believe the Government version of anything. Some of us may remember how easy it was for Sandy Burger to remove items from the National Archives and there is no reason to assume that that was a new practice.

Once we get everything in digital form, History will be very easy to change and that should bother us all but it won't. Me, I am way to old to let anything at all bother me too much.