Replies

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."

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.

Nobody then much cared if average tariffs were 10% or 15%, but everybody cared a lot if slaves were arbitrarily set free by Washington, DC, and let loose on their former masters!

So it was "all about slavery" for average Southern voters, even if the top 1% of 1% also had greedy eyes on "money flows from Europe" and those so-called "Northeastern power brokers".

In his 1961 book The Legacy of the Civil War, Pulitzer Prize winning poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren wrote that “the greatest danger to slavery was the Southern heart.” This certainly reflects Robert E. Lee’s statement, “The best men in the South have long desired to do away with the institution of
slavery, and were quite willing to see it abolished.” (Thomas Nelson Page, Robert E. Lee: Man and Soldier, pg. 38)

In the same book Warren also said this about America’s fabricated “treasury of virtue:”

“The official story that the war was about the South’s desire to protect and expand slavery and the North’s determination to abolish it is not merely an error in academic history. The evidence against it has not been ignored so much as it has been suppressed. It had to be suppressed because it contradicts the legitimizing myth of the centralized nationalist regime that emerged after the war. Having been repeated so often it has come to be believed because of repetition.”

Robert Penn Warren

Well, I was in the process of preparing a response to FLT-Bird, when I find that BroJoeK pretty much said everything I was going to say. I would like to expand on a couple of items, though:

1. Since none of the participants are around to talk to, we are pretty much forced to rely on what they said in their various writings. There are a lot of personal letters, editorials, etc. around, so the question is, what documents do we rely on as being the most authoritative as to what the decision makers actually thought. For me, this is the Articles of Secession that the various southern state legislatures published. These were written by those who voted to secede, and were meant to be their official position. If anyone has a reason to assume these were not their words or their position, I would like to know why.

2. Not all of these documents actually list the reason for secession but, of those who do, all list slavery as the reason for secession. Note that I am using the single word “slavery” as shorthand for; a) maintaining slavery in the existing slave states, b) expanding slavery into the territories, and c) enforcing the fugitive slave act (I don’t want to hear the specious argument that “It can’t be about slavery as they already had slavery BS)

3. None of the Articles of Secession mentioned that high taxes or tariffs were a reason for secession. Only slavery was mentioned. If these other items were major concerns, don’t you think they would have mentioned them in their official articles?

4. The mere fact that Lincoln, and the Union government, claimed that they were not going to war for slavery does not mean that the war wasn’t about slavery. The South seceded due to slavery and the North, if it wanted to maintain the Union, had no choice but to fight. The fact that the Union claimed that they were not fighting for slavery in no way obviates the fact that the war was about slavery.

5. There were other issues that concerned the South other than slavery. The whole tariff issue goes back to 1828, if not earlier. But, and this is an important but, we were able to work through it. What changed in 1860? To my knowledge, there was no bill in Congress to increase tariffs or anything, so why did they wait till 1860 to secede? I contend that no one decides to do something as momentous as seceding without a triggering event. What was the triggering event in 1860? It was the election of Lincoln and the concern that he and the Republican party would impact slavery (remember my shorthand).

6. Even though there are other items that irked the southerners, the prime element was slavery. I liken it to a divorce. If you ask the wife why they are divorcing, she will undoubtedly give you a long list, but the fact that her soon to be ex-husband slept with her sister was the triggering event. Without that, they might have stayed married forever. I contend that slavery was the sleeping with her sister event in secession.

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.

"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)

That is a long and strange article. For somebody who downplays slavery in this paragraph, the author spends a lot of ink writing about slavery (and a little about the tariff) earlier in the article. But it looks like he's writing to oppose the "ultra abolitionists" who, seeing slavery as the cause of the war, supported the abolition of slavery as a war measure. Saying that the war wasn't about slavery but about ambitious politicians and their intrigues allows the writer to reject emancipation.

Notice, though, a few sentences after the quote, when he says: "If the nullification of 1832 had become an active rebellion, the tariff would not have been the cause of the war, but only a pretext for it." So the author isn't saying that it was all about economics, rather it was all about ambitious intriguers, and that the tariff was just another issue they could use to manipulate the masses. Sometimes it's true that personal ambitions start wars. World War II may be example. I don't think he's entirely wrong about the role of political ambition and intrigue, but to see the actual issue that divided the country as a mere pretext is to miss a lot.