They Were Not Traitors

A typical calumny directed at Confederate soldiers is that they don’t merit commemoration because they were traitors. It is a lie for two reasons.

First, the Confederate states had no intent to overthrow the government of the United States. They seceded merely to form a government of their own. The first seven states that seceded during the winter of 1860-61 did not “make war” on the United States; they accepted it when the Washington government decided to coerce them back into the Union. The four upper-south states that remained Union-loyal until the coercion in the spring of 1861 had previously warned Washington that they regarded the coercion of any state to be unconstitutional and would fight to prevent it. Those four states provided half of the 11-state Confederacy’s white population, the chief source of her soldiers. In truth, the legal status of secession was unsettled in 1861. The Constitution neither outlawed nor authorized it. It was a remedy that geographically isolated political minorities repeatedly considered from 1789 to 1861.

The Northeastern states threatened secession at least five times during America’s first fifty-six years. The first time was during George Washington’s presidency when Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton warned that the Northeastern states would secede unless the Federal Government agreed to assume an obligation to pay-off their Revolutionary War debts. In 1803 New Englanders threatened to secede over the Louisiana Purchase. They worried that the new territories would become new states thereby reducing New England’s influence.

In 1807 New England again threatened secession after America announced a trade embargo, hoping to avoid the War of 1812 by use of economic sanctions. New Englanders objected because their region was then America’s maritime center. After the embargo failed, Congress declared war on Great Britain during President James Madison’s first administration. Yet New Englanders were uncooperative in our nation’s defense. They traded with the enemy and refused to put their militia into Federal service as ordered by President Madison. When the British finally extended their blockade to New England during the last seven months of the thirty-month war, the region held a convention in Hartford to discuss secession or other steps to protect their interests from Federal powers. In January 1815 the Convention sent emissaries to President Madison to demand five additional constitutional amendments. Upon arriving in Washington, they learned that the war had ended and went home in embarrassment. They did not need the amendments because the Treaty of Ghent ended the war thereby ending the British blockade.

Even as late as 1844 leaders in the Northeastern states warned they would secede over the proposed annexation of Texas. In 1843 twelve congressmen, including former President John Quincy Adams, signed a letter to the people claiming that Texas annexation would not only result in the secession of “free states” but would “fully justify it.” A year later former New York Governor and future secretary of state under Presidents Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, William H. Seward, wrote that the “free-labor states cannot yield” to Texas annexation. They would consider it grounds “for secession, nullification and disunion.” The Massachusetts legislature underscored the opinion by declaring the 1845 Texas annexation to be unconstitutional.

In sum, secession was a remedy that geographically isolated political minorities repeatedly considered. As a result, it tended to find favor within those regions that were out-of-power in Washington. It was a game of musical chairs. Whenever a regional minority felt that they could never regain the majority they worried that their constitutional rights might be trampled by a tyrannical simple majority in the central government. By 1861 the South was caught without a chair in the game when the music stopped. Under different circumstances it could have been the North. Although they threatened secession often enough, Northerners were never destined to become a permanent minority as were Southerners.

The second reason that Confederate soldiers were not traitors is that their loyalty was first to their state and secondarily to the central government. Prior to the war the average Confederate soldier was a yeoman farmer who rarely travelled outside his state. His taxes were chiefly paid to his state. He only paid federal taxes indirectly when he purchased imported dutiable items that implicitly included a tariff as a component of the purchase price.

Northerners felt much the same way. As Shelby Foote explained, prior to the Civil War the United States was often thought of as a collection of independent states and spoken grammatically as “the United States are.” After the Civil War it was increasingly spoken of as “the United States is,” which we commonly say today without even thinking about it. The war made us an “is.”

Finally, after a couple of decades postbellum Southerners welcomed reconciliation. They eagerly volunteered to fight in the 1898 Spanish-American War. One of them was former Confederate General Joseph Wheeler. President William McKinley appointed the sixty-one year old erstwhile cavalryman as Major General commanding a cavalry division that included Theodore Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders” regiment. Despite the censure historians heap upon white Southerners of the 1890s, those volunteers can be credited for fighting under a flag that belonged to their enemy only thirty-odd years earlier. Southerners also readily enlisted in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam and later wars. Even today the South accounts for 44% of America’s army volunteers while containing only 36% of her population.

In short, Confederates soldier were not a traitors in the context of the unsettled constitutional principles of their era. They were asked to do what men have done since prehistoric times: defend their homes. They did so as heroically as any army of American soldiers.

Share on Facebook Tweet it Share on Google+ Share on LinkedIn Pin it Share on Reddit Share on StumbleUpon Email this Print Philip Leigh Secession Southern History Treason United States Constitution War for Southern Independence About Philip Leigh

Philip Leigh contributed twenty-four articles to The New York Times Disunion blog, which commemorated the Civil War Sesquicentennial. He is the author of U.S. Grant's Failed Presidency, Southern Reconstruction (2017), Lee’s Lost Dispatch and Other Civil War Controversies (2015), and Trading With the Enemy (2014). Phil has lectured a various Civil War forums, including the 23rd Annual Sarasota Conference of the Civil War Education Association and various Civil War Roundtables. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Florida Institute of Technology and an MBA from Northwestern University.

Yes, South Carolina’s Declaration of Causes does go on about Slavery. The Address of Robert Barnwell Rhett aka “the father of secession” who was an important South Carolina political leader was attached to and sent out with South Carolina’s Declaration of Causes. It went on at length about the economic grievances South Carolina and the Southern states had.

Why did Lincoln want South Carolina (and several other Southern states) back so badly? Because it was a cash cow! Its exports were extremely valuable. The North made a lot of money servicing those exports (banking, insurance, shipping, acting as wholesalers, etc) and the federal government made a lot of money on tariffs imposed on the goods those exports were exchanged for. Indeed, that is how the federal government got most of its money back then given that there was no federal income tax.

Here is what the leading newspaper in South Carolina said:

“The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government from a confederated republic, to a national sectional despotism.” Charleston Mercury 2 days before the November 1860 election

Here is what several other prominent South Carolina political leaders said:

“The north has adopted a system of revenue and disbursements, in which an undue proportion of the burden of taxation has been imposed on the South, and an undue proportion of its proceeds appropriated to the north ... The South as the great exporting portion of the Union has, in reality, paid vastly more than her due proportion of the revenue,” John C Calhoun Speech on the Slavery Question,” March 4, 1850

George McDuffie of South Carolina stated in the House of Representatives, “If the union of these states shall ever be severed, and their liberties subverted, historians who record these disasters will have to ascribe them to measures of this description. I do sincerely believe that neither this government, nor any free government, can exist for a quarter of a century under such a system of legislation.” While the Northern manufacturer enjoyed free trade with the South, the Southern planter was not allowed to enjoy free trade with those countries to which he could market his goods at the most benefit to himself. Furthermore, while the six cotton States — South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas — had less than one-eighth of the representation in Congress, they furnished two-thirds of the exports of the country, much of which was exchanged for imported necessities. Thus, McDuffie noted that because the import tariff effectively hindered Southern commerce, the relation which the Cotton States bore to the protected manufacturing States of the North was now the same as that which the colonies had once borne to Great Britain; under the current system, they had merely changed masters.

“The legislation of this Union has impoverished them [the Southern States] by taxation and by a diversion of the proceeds of our labor and trade to enriching Northern Cities and States. These results are not only sufficient reasons why we would prosper better out of the union but are of themselves sufficient causes of our secession. Upon the mere score of commercial prosperity, we should insist upon disunion. Let Charleston be relieved from her present constrained vassalage in trade to the North, and be made a free port and my life on it, she will at once expand into a great and controlling city.” - Robert Barnwell Rhett

In a letter to the Carolina Times in 1857, Representative Laurence Keitt wrote, “I believe that the safety of the South is only in herself.” James H. Hammond likewise stated in 1858, “I have no hesitation in saying that the Plantation States should discard any government that makes a protective tariff its policy.”

“Next to the demands for safety and equality, the secessionist leaders emphasized familiar economic complaints. South Carolinians in particular were convinced of the general truth of Rhett’s and Hammond’s much publicized figures upon Southern tribute to Northern interests.” (Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln, Ordeal of the Union, Volume 2, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950, p. 332)

South Carolina Congressman Robert Barnwell Rhett had estimated that of the $927,000,000 collected in duties between 1791 and 1845, the South had paid $711,200,000, and the North $216,000,000. South Carolina Senator James Hammond had declared that the South paid about $50,000,000 and the North perhaps $20,000,000 of the $70,000,000 raised annually by duties. In expenditure of the national revenues, Hammond thought the North got about $50,000,000 a year, and the South only $20,000,000. When in the Course of Human Events: Charles Adams

South Carolinians in particular had been screaming about how the federal government/Northern states had been screwing them over economically for decades. Remember the Tariff of Abominations and the Nullification Crisis in the 1830s centered on South Carolina. This was the same argument 30 years later. This is what Leftists do not want you to mention. This is why they try to lie and claim it was “all about slavery”. If you look at the economic causes, suddenly you understand why the other 94% of Southerners who did not own slaves wanted out and were willing to fight to protect their homes.

Because it would have been a violation of his oath to accept secession. The constitution gives the executive branch zero authority to determine the status of a state. Even spineless James Buchanan understood that.

“Apart from the execution of the laws, so far as this may be practicable, the Executive has no authority to decide what shall be the relations between the Federal Government and South Carolina. He has been invested with no such discretion. He possesses no power to change the relations heretofore existing between them, much less to acknowledge the independence of that State. This would be to invest a mere executive officer with the power of recognizing the dissolution of the confederacy among our thirty-three sovereign States. It bears no resemblance to the recognition of a foreign de facto government, involving no such responsibility. Any attempt to do this would, on his part, be a naked act of usurpation. It is therefore my duty to submit to Congress the whole question in all its beatings. The course of events is so rapidly hastening forward that the emergency may soon arise when you may be called upon to decide the momentous question whether you possess the power by force of arms to compel a State to remain in the Union. I should feel myself recreant to my duty were I not to express an opinion on this important subject.”

You’re talking about the post war period.

Its true the Southern states adopted the “Black Codes” that were on the books in Northern States already. Furthermore, its true that there was lawlessness and violence and repression in that period.

Of course its also true that during so-called “Reconstruction” Southern voters were disenfranchised and hopelessly corrupt Republican carpet bagger governments manipulated then relatively unsophisticated Black voters to steal everything they possibly could from White Southerners.
This is typified by the likes of State Representative John Patterson, a white Pennsylvania transplant, who, when questioned about corruption flippantly replied, “Why there are still 5 good years of stealing left in South Carolina”.

An essential element of early “Reconstruction” was the disenfranchisement of all of the adult white males in the South, coupled with the voter registration of every last adult male ex-slave. The ex-slaves assisted in the continued plundering of the South by voting en masse to raise taxes that provided precious little in the form of government services. Untold millions were simply stolen by Republican Party “officials.” (Property taxes in South Carolina, for example, were 30 times higher in 1870 than they were in 1860, and a punitive federal tax was imposed on cotton at a time when what the South needed was tax amnesty).
The Ku Klux Klan was created to terrorize the ex-slaves out of participating in this political plundering racket operated by the Republican Party. The Republicans kept promising to share the property of white southerners with the ex-slaves, which of course they never did and never intended to do. Had the Republicans not used their victory and their monopoly of political power to line the pockets of the thousands of political hacks and hangers on who were the backbone of the party (the “carpetbaggers”) the Ku Klux Klan would never have existed. This in fact was the conclusion of the minority report of an 1870 congressional commission that investigated the Klan. “Had there been no wanton oppression in the South,” the congressmen wrote, “there would have been no Ku Kluxism” (Congressman Fernando Wood, “Alleged Ku Klux Outrages” published by the Congressional Globe Printing Office, 1871, p. 5). The report continued that when southern whites saw that “what little they had saved from the ravages of war was being confiscated by taxation . . . many of them took the law into their own hands and did deeds of violence . . . . history shows that bad government will make bad citizens.”

That’s the part that somehow never gets talked about, what gave rise to groups like the KKK. That’s no defense of them, but this did not come from nowhere. The Occupation and massive theft and oppression of the carpetbagger governments did a lot to cause the problems that went on to bedevil the Southern states until the Civil Rights Movement.

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