Why They Fought For The South
by Carole E. Scott
(Text and graphics copyrighted by C. E. Scott, 1997)
The
South's motive for going to war in 1861 has traditionally been described as
economically-based immorality, while the North's has been portrayed as
non-economically-based morality, and this, the most bloody war of the 19th
century, has been justified on the basis of it having been necessary in order
to eliminate slavery even by some who believe it would have come
to an end without war. This scenario makes for a good morality play, but it is
bad history. (Slavery was eliminated in other countries and in Washington, D.C.
without violence by compensating slave owners.)
Only
in the United States and in Santo Domingo (Haiti), where slavery was eliminated as a result of a slave
revolt, was blood shed in order to eliminate slavery.
(Fear in the South of a revolt like the one in Haiti was intense, particularly
in South Carolina, which had a slave majority, and in counties in other
Southern states where slaves were a majority or accounted for a substantial
percent of the population.) Leading the long effort to rid the world of slavery
was Great Britain, which eliminated slavery throughout its empire through a
program of gradual emancipation and compensation of slave owners. The last
ditch defenders of slavery, says Bernard Lewis in Race and Slavery in
the Middle East, were religious conservatives in Mecca and Medina. Legal
slavery did not disappear from the world until 1974, when Mauritania made it
illegal. In pretty much all but name, slavery continues to exist in some
countries.
There
is no question but that it was the capture by the new, anti-slavery party
(Republican) in 1860 that caused the Southern states to secede from the Union
in 1861. After the subsequent war that forced the return of the South to the
Union, both the South and history was reconstructed. According to the dominant,
New England historians, the preservation of slavery was what the South fought
for; while Northerners fought in order to eliminate slavery.
However,
long-standing complaints by Southerners about the centralization of power in
Washington and a tax policy that benefitted the North at the expense of the
South and the fact that the great majority of white Southerners owned no slaves
and some Southern critics of slavery like Robert E. Lee chose to fight for the
Confederacy, suggests that something other than slavery motivated Southerners.
That Northerners, too, were motivated by more than their distaste for slavery
is shown by the fact that in his First Inaugural Address Abraham Lincoln
declared that, "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere
with the institution of slavery where it exists. I believe I have no lawful
right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."
Many
Northern workers feared competing with either slave labor or free black labor.
"Reduce the supply of black labor," said President Lincoln, "by
colonizing the black laborer out of the country, and by precisely so much you
increase the demand for, and wages of, white labor."
After war broke out, Ethelbert Barksdale, who represented Mississippi
in the Confederate Congress, justified his support for enlisting
slaves in the Confederate
Army on the basis of his belief that "the end which is paramount to all
other considerations, and to which all else is secondary, is the achievement of
our independence and our assured escape from Yankee domination."
"It
is said," said Confederate General Patrick Cleburne, "slavery is all
we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were
true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is
merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized
form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties."
Camille
Jules Armand Marie, the Prince de Polignac, a Frenchman who became a Confederate Major General,
explained his views on the causes of the War this way: "It is only
necessary to recall into mind the two main currents of political opinion which
ran in the United States prior to the war. In the North, more especially in New
England, the leading men of the day aimed at a greater concentration of
political power & advocaed the supremacy of the
Federal government over the states. The Southern statesman unanimously
denounced that tendency as unconstitutional. They contended that, in practice,
it must end in placing a dictatorial power in the hands of an oligarchy &
would leave all interests, general & local, at the mercy of a shifting
majority. In conformity with traditions established by the founders of the
great republic, they adhered to the doctrine of States-Rights as the only means
of preserving an equitable balance of power throughout the Union. With these
two conflicting political tendencies, viewed in the abstact,
the social question of domestic slavery had nothing whatever to do. The two
opposed doctrines & consequently the main issue would have remained the
same if slavery had already ceased to exist in the Southern States, only in
this case the Northern wire-pullers would have had to screen their selfish aims
& motives behind another less convenient pretext."
Lord
Acton, a British statesman well known for his declaration that power corrupts,
and absolute power corrupts absolutely, in a November 4, 1866 letter to Robert
E. Lee wrote, "I saw in States Rights the only availing check upon the
absolutism of the soverign will, and secession filled
me with hope, not as the destructioin but as the
redemption of Democracy....I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our
liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which
was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at
Waterloo."
The
South was not the first region to consider secession as a way to escape the
domination of another region. Unhappy with the domination at that time of the
Union by the South, during the War of 1812, the New England states met to
consider nullification and secession. Subsequently, South Carolina attempted to
nullify high tariffs that cost Southerners by raising the cost of manufactured
goods, but benefitted Northern manufacturers by from protecting them from
foreign competition and provided funds for internal improvements that diverted
the West's trade from the South to the North.
"The
material prosperity of the North," said the delegates to Georgia's
secession convention, "was dependent on the Federal Government; that of
the South not at all. In the first years of the Republic the navigating,
commercial, and manufacturing interests of the North began to seek profit and
aggrandizement at the expense of the agricultural interests. Even the owners of
fishing smacks sought and obtained bounties for pursuing their own
business..."
"As
to the cause of the war," claimed antebellum Georgia businessman Mark
Anthony Cooper, "it is chargeable not to the abolition of slavery, which
was only an incident and exciting cause, but to the capital of the country
seeking to control the government through its indebtedness and to foster itself
by exceptions and immunities and by profits on the currencies made and
controlled by it. War alone could furnish a pretext for doing what it
desired."
As
the image of Virginia slave-owner George Washington on the Great Seal of the
Confederacy makes clear, the men who gathered in Montgomery, Alabama in 1861 to
form a Southern Confederacy believed they were creating a new nation in the
image of the confederation of sovereign states their grandfathers had created.
They believed that the United States was established as a league or association
of sovereign states for their mutual benefit. To accomplish this, certain,
limited powers had been delegated to a central government, and they agree with
the view expressed by Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address that whether or
not slavery would be legal in a state was a decision to be made at the state
level. (Fearing failing to be reelected, Lincoln later changed his mind and
freed all the slaves living in Confederate-held territory. After the
Confederacy was defeated, all slaves were freed.)
Clearly,
the dominant view in the South was that it was ridiculous to claim that
the Declaration of Independence denies the legitimacy of slavery because it
proclaims that all "men" are created equal, as one of the complaints
levied in it against Britain's King George III was that he was attempting to
stir up a slave insurrection. They noted, too, that the U.S. Constitution as it
existed in their day condoned slavery; specifying, for example, that for the
purpose of determining how many representatives a state would have in Congress,
only three-fifths of its slaves would be counted, and that escaped slaves would
be returned to their owners by the states to which they fled.
Lincoln
quoted the Declaration of Independence to justify his stance, noting that it
said all men are created equal. Southerners also turned to the Declaration of
Independence to justify their cause, saying that they were exercising the
"Right of the People to alter or to abolish" any government that
failed to secure the inalienable rights it proclaimed they possessed. Although
Lincoln believed that the language of the Declaration of Independence composed
by a slaveowner, Thomas Jefferson, was in conflict
with slavery, he noted in an 1858 letter that it did not require political and
social equality for free blacks.
Robert
E. Lee wrote his wife in 1856 that, "in this enlightened age there are
few, I believe, but what will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a
moral and political evil...;" yet, he turned down the opportunity to lead
the Union Army to take a much lesser post with the Confederate Army.
(Subsequently, he was promoted.) In contrast to Lee, the typical Southerner,
believing that the Bible sanctioned slavery, did not consider it to be immoral.
(In a speech before the Economic and Business Historical Society in 1996, the
noted historian Eugene Genovese observed that in the critical struggle over
biblical exegesis--and, in a deeply religious country, biblical exegesis was,
in fact, politically critical--the slaveholders mopped up the abolitionists on
the question of whether the Bible sanctioned slavery. There was, however, one
great problem with the scriptural defense of slavery, as Lincoln and many other
antislavery men saw. In a sense, it said too much, for the Bible did not
sanction racial slavery; it sanctioned slavery per se--slavery regardless of
race.") Southerners also believed that their slaves fared better than the
North's "wage slaves".
The
United States went to war, not because slaves were held in the South, but
because a fort in Charleston's harbor that was occupied by its troops was fired
upon by Confederate troops. (Lincoln's determination to continue to hold onto
forts and custom houses in the Confederate States may be explained by the fact
that federal revenues, almost all of which then derived fromtariffs, fell by 26 percent
after the South left the Union. The Union holding onto the fort in Charleston's
harbor, which was viewed by Confederate officials to be a provocation equal to
the British closing of the port of Boston in 1774, provided Lincoln with the
provocation needed to justify going to war when Confederate troops fired on
it.) Lincoln's call to the states for troops to put down rebellion in the Lower
South led to the secession of several of the slaveholding the states of the Upper
South.
One
label Southerners sometimes apply to this war, the War of Northern Aggression,
suggests what likely motivated some Southerners to fight for the Confederacy.
"Every
man should endeavor to understand the meaning of subjugation before it is too
late. We can give but a faint idea when we say that it means the loss of all we
now hold most sacred - slaves and all other personal property, lands,
homesteads, liberty, justice, safety, pride, manhood. It means the history of
this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be
trained by Northern school teachers; will learn from Northern school books
their version of the war; will be impressed by all the influences of history
and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans
as fit objects for derision." -- Confederate General Patrick Cleburne
BACKGROUND NOTES
"Beginning about
1820," notes Pauline Maier in the July/August 1997 issue of American
Heritage, workers, farmers, women's rights advocates, and other groups
persistently used the Declaration of Independence to justify their quest for
equality and their opposition to the 'tyranny' of factory owners or railroads
or great corporations or the male power structure. It remained, however,
especially easy for the opponents of slavery to cite the Declaration on behalf
of their cause....Even in the eighteenth century, however, assertions of men's
equal birth provoked dissent. As slavery became an increasingly divisive issue,
denials that men were naturally equal multiplied. Men were not created equal in
Virginia, Joyn Tyler insisted during the Missouri
debates of 1820: 'No sir, the principle, although lovely and beautiful, cannot
obliterate those distinctions in society which society itself engenders and
gives birth to.'"
Its slave-based economy was what most distinguished the
Antebellum South from the rest of the nation, and this "peculiar"
form of property right was the right that generated the most emotion. It is
clear that the "bottom line" for the Southern political late in the
antebellum period was his position on slavery. Slavery defined the South and
made it far more cohesive than was the North, which had no such litmus-test
issue. Yet, despite their fierce attachment to slavery, Southern whites'
support for equality, democracy, and individual freedom was as heartfelt as
Northerners'. The difference was that, in the North, it was for all men (not
women); while in the South it was for white men only.
Slaves were not uniformly
distributed in the South. The great majority of them were held in areas where
large-scale agriculture was the most economic method of farming. As a result,
few lived where the terrain was rugged and/or not very fertile. Few, too, lived
near the Mexican border because most people considered it too risky to hold
them so near a border that they could gain their freedom by crossing. (This is
one reason why Southerners were anxious for Florida to become a part of the
United States. Northerners opposed the acquisition of territory where slavery
was economic because it would increase the South's political power.
Northerners' desire to reduce the South's political power is why only 3/5ths of
the slaves were included in a state's population for the purpose of allocating
seats in the House of Representatives.)
Although most slaves were
employed in farming, many in those pre-home appliance days were house servants.
(Slave owners often called them "servants," rather than slaves, and
referred to them as members of the "family".) Over half the residents
of Charleston in 1860 were black. For two generations South Carolinians
believed they saw the handwriting on the wall: some day
the North was going to move to abolish slavery. Thus, for years, Carolinians
figuratively shouted "fire" at their fellow Southerners, who, for the
most part, shut their ears and crossed their fingers.
William J. Cooper, Jr.
reports in The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1818 - 1856 says
that a poor white told a traveler that many people he knew wanted slavery
abolished, but "it wouldn't never do to free 'em
and leave 'em here" because "nobody
couldn't live here then." He tells of an Alabamian removing to Texas who
said that "I'd like it if we could get rid of 'em
to yonst. I wouldn't like to hev
'em freed, if they gwine to
hang around." Distaste for blacks led many poor whites to emigrate from
heavily black areas to "whiter" parts of the South and to the
Midwest, where they were prohibited from settling until well into this century.
Over half the nation's
export income in the late antebellum period derived from its exports of
substantially slave-produced cotton. However, slaves were also employed in
producing other crops and in various trades in factories. The cost of training a
slave in a trade was justified by either the work he could perform for his
master or what he could be hired out for.
Patrols drawn from the
militia that white males were required to join were supposed to make sure that
blacks did not travel without passes or meet in large groups except at
religious services. So that these services would be in "white"
churches, in some areas blacks were discouraged from or forbidden to form their
own congregations. However, in other places, whites helped blacks form their own
congregations. (One black Sunday school was headed by Thomas J. Jackson, who
was to gain fame during the War as Stonewall Jackson.)
Free blacks labored under
a number of restrictions on their activities; were subject to special taxes;
and could not vote or hold public office. (The same was true of white women.)
At various times and places it was illegal to teach slaves to read.
(Southerners often ignored this prohibition. One who did was Georgia
Congressman and Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens.) Whites
suspected of opposing slavery or consorting with blacks could suffer serious
consequences.
A Santo-Domingo-like revolution was planned for Charleston by
Denmark Vesey, a free black. From 1818 to 1822, he organized blacks for an
uprising in which all whites--men, women, and children--would be killed. (Note
that no such uprising like this took place in the Confederacy during the War.)
Taking the advice of a free, slave-owning mulatto, a mulatto house slave
betrayed Vesey, and the uprising never took place. The discovery of Vesey's
plot led to the execution of thirty-five blacks. Another thirty were deported.
(A rumored attempt by black slaves and white indentured servants in 1714 in New
York City led to the execution of more people than took place in Massachusetts
as a result of the much more well known Salem witch
trials. At that time, one-fifth of the residents of New York City were slaves
and black freedmen.)
Black slave owners who
were not part white lacked the social acceptance of their mulatto brothers,
who, on rare occasion, married white men and women and were accepted into white
society. Although some of the slaves owned by blacks were family members,
blacks often owned slaves for the same reason whites did: as income-earning
investments. Only a small minority of blacks were free, and only a very small
minority of them owned slaves.
The fact that the Haitian
slave revolt was preceded by the formation of abolitionist societies in France
that flooded Haiti with anti-slavery tracts was not lost on Southerners.
Undoubtedly, they saw parallels between the French abolitionists and those in
the North who filled Southern mails and Congress with, respectively,
anti-slavery tracts and anti-slavery petitions. Not lost on Southerners,
either, was that troops sent from Revolutionary France to retake its Haitian
colony took sides with the blacks. This was widely attributed to France, like
the other European colonial powers, having concluded that the best way to keep
the United States from annexing their Latin American colonies was to make them
as black as possible.
By 1865, it was obvious to both Confederate officers and
enlisted men that the infusion into the Union Army of a steady stream of
immigrants from Europe and freed slaves insured the North's victory unless this
was countered by the enlistment of slaves. The recommendations of soldiers and
Confederate President Jefferson Davis and other Confederate officials that
slaves be enlisted engendered a fierce debate prior to the authorization of their
enlistment by the Confederate Congress.
The Confederacy
considering enlisting slaves was not as far fetched
as many today probably believe. Early in the War, for example, it was reported
in the Southern press that some mixed race, free men (some of whom may have
owned slaves) had offered to organize a regiment composed of their peers.
Uniformed, black musicians served from the start of the War. Individual slaves
who served as personal servants, laborers, or cooks may on occasion have picked
up guns and fought. Some mixed-race men enlisted in the Confederate Army on an
individual basis.
Heather
Cox Richardson in The
Greatest Nation of the Earth, Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War observes
that, "A new tariff went into effect in March 1861, and the South, which
abhorred the new law, refused to permit the Union government to collect duties
from it or, in fact, to collect any customs duties in Southern ports. Worse
still, the Confederate government talked of setting a low tariff, or none at all,
which would pull foreign trade South. Since the Union
government depended almost entirely on customs duties for revenue, the
situation threatened to cripple Union finances."
Northerners have
always called it the Civil War, but until comparatively recently Southerners
called it the War Between the States or the War for Southern Independence.
Although the nomenclature of the victor is today used by virtually everyone,
the old Southern nomenclature was the more accurate, because a civil war is one
whose initiators have as their objective the overthrow of the existing
government, and this was no more the objective of the South than was the
overthrow of the British government in 1776 by the revolutionaries in America.