Slavery; THE Cause?

[dawna]

Neil:

The above information is taken from the Chicora Foundation (http://www.chicora.org/myth.htm) which is a "Columbia, S.C. non-profit heritage preservation organization founded in 1993, whose work includes archaeological and historical research throughout the southeastern United States, public education, and work in conservation and preservation with museums, libraries, archives, historic organizations, and private citizens."

Dawna

[bill_torrens]

Neil,

So what you are inferring is that slavery was more widespread amongst what we call the yeoman farmers and that they supported secession from the Union over the fact that they were about to lose a very profitable type of workforce?

We are making slow progress. We seem to have moved away from the risible cliché of selfish planters leading a sleepwalking, lobotomised South to its doom. Now we can actually give serious consideration to the idea that the modest yeoman farmer was the backbone of the South and the Confederacy. But, oh dear, why do we have to assume that his motives were selfish and money-grubbing? Actually, I think I know the answer to that. The fact is that, in 1861, millions of perfectly decent Americans turned their backs on the United States and sought an alternative political destiny. The American psyche simply cannot process that information and so, in denial, it looks for the worst possible motives for seeking independence. Because to admit that secession from the Union was not necessarily a corrupt and self-seeking action undermines the notion that God created the United States for the express purpose of leading other nations to democracy. How could decent and uncorrupted people possibly want to leave a nation which is divinely ordained?

In “The Creation Of Confederate Nationalism” Drew Gilpin Faust states that “nationalism requires that a group of strangers imagine themselves intimately related to one another.” This is a really interesting idea which is worth pondering for a moment or two. If we apply this test to the United States which existed between 1776 and 1861, does it pass? I’m inclined to think not. I’m not convinced that it was ever one nation at all, but rather two incompatible societies thrown together by force of circumstance. There was certainly a common purpose when faced with an outside threat (Britain), but even that waned after a few decades. By the time of the conflict with Mexico, war pulled the country apart at least as much as it united it. Did the Americans who lived before 1861 really “imagine themselves intimately related to one another”? Only with knives at each other’s throats. Like Yugoslavia, the first version of the United States was an artificial entity, a union of states who were rivals from day one and never possessed the same vision for the future. Secession was the only ethical way of terminating an untenable and dishonest relationship.

Bill

[dawna]

Bill:

I know that you've addressed your comments to Neil, but I would like to suggest that the average yeoman farmer was not mindlessly led to the trough, but most had been convinced that it was not in their favour to share their land with millions of free slaves. I'm curious to know if you believe that South Carolina would still have seceded if black people had not been brought to America and enslaved?

Dawna

[unionblue]

Bill,

Tut, tut, my friend across the pond. We have not made the kind of progress you seem to infer from your above, latest post.

A society who closes down communication and dissent on the issue of slavery and suppresses the idea that the institution could be altered or done away with, does not give me much hope. I have never inferred that the vast majority of Southern yeoman or citizens were dolts or were brain-damaged in some way. And again, you make the inference that Northern citizens were somehow not immune to influences of the times.

But what puzzles me is why when secession first began, most Northern citizens were of the attitude to 'let the erring sisters go' and only after the firing on Ft. Sumter did they become aroused enough to go to war. Yet the South was far more willing to inflame the crisis by taking Federal property, soldiers, ships, forts, etc., plain acts of war and then were willing to open fire and dam the consequences.

Yet your post of October 15, 2004 - 10:21am gives evidence that slavery was far more widespread, accepted as an institution of economic and social control and one that the majority of the common citizens were unwilling to give up or allow change to, to include not having able to be protected, expanded or denying the change for small farmers to become plantation owners someday.

At least, it seems like that from the information you give, or did I missread it again?

Sincerely,
Unionblue

[hawglips]

Bill: The fact is that, in 1861, millions of perfectly decent Americans turned their backs on the United States and sought an alternative political destiny. The American psyche simply cannot process that information and so, in denial, it looks for the worst possible motives for seeking independence. Because to admit that secession from the Union was not necessarily a corrupt and self-seeking action undermines the notion that God created the United States for the express purpose of leading other nations to democracy. How could decent and uncorrupted people possibly want to leave a nation which is divinely ordained?

That, and the need to justify / make-sense-of the searing contradiction of said United States' founding principles of self-governance and the war against those very principles.

Hal

[bill_torrens]

Dawna,

Many apologies for the delay in replying to you.

Yes, I think it is probable that many Southern states would have seceded from a United States which contained only white people. The conflicting theories as to the division of power and sovereignty between the Federal Government and the States suggest to me the virtual inevitability of a split. This source of conflict doesn’t appeal to the imagination in the way that human slavery does, and it doesn’t have the same pathos and tragedy, but I cannot see any way in which such irreconcilable differences of interpretation could be indefinitely contained within one nation.

Bill

[thea_447]

Dawna,
I too, believe that South Carolina would have seceded anyway. From the very beginning, even while writing the Declaration of Indpendence there were chasms that had already appeared and the differences between North and South only grew more apparent with the passage of time.

I have no idea if it would have been a state from the South or from the north. Or the west. But it was just a matter of time. Be it New England, California or Texas. Sooner or later it would have happened. And will again one day no doubt. There is nothing in recorded history that would indicate that to think it was and is anything but a fact. To think otherwise is to choose to ignore reality.

[unionblue]

Dawna,

I agree with Thea on this one, South Carolina would have seceded over ANYTHING, to include a stubbed toe! The State was considered 'too small to be a country and too large to be a lunatic asylum.'

As for the rest of our friends here, I disagree totally with the idea that ANY other issue was worth the killing in the hundreds of thousands, to include the tariff, big government (which simply did not exist in 1861) or the very fanciful idea that 'millions' of Americans wished to turn their backs on the United States. The very fact that hundreds of thousands of Southerners fought for the Union shows that this theory is not as solid as some would leave you to believe.

The only issue that could bring forth blood was slavery. Thea talks about the conflicting ideas/chasms in the Declaration of Independence and almost all of those conflicts concerned the institution. Bill speaks of conflicting divisions of power and sovereignty between the Federal government and the States, but this only came about when the Federal government said it could regulate slavery in the territories and the Southern States said it could not.

To think otherwise is to ignore history.

Sincerely,
Unionblue

[dawna]

Neil:

I have taken your suggestion and posted this topic under our current discussion. I think that it's important to remember that both sides of this political instigation volunteered believing that the war would be over in a month - maximum 90 days, whether they thought the cause was slavery, states rights, or tariffs.

Consider, for example, a quote by author Charles Dickens in a London periodical in December 1861, "Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many other evils....The quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel". As Adams notes, the South paid an undue proportion of federal revenues derived from tariffs, and these were expended by the federal government more in the North than the South: in 1840, the South paid 84% of the tariffs, rising to 87% in 1860. They paid 83% of the $13 million federal fishing bounties paid to New England fishermen, and also paid $35 million to Northern shipping interests which had a monopoly on shipping from Southern ports.

The South, in effect, was paying tribute to the North. The address of Texas Congressman Reagan on 15 January 1861 summarizes this discontent: "You are not content with the vast millions of tribute we pay you annually under the operation of our revenue law, our navigation laws, your fishing bounties, and by making your people our manufacturers, our merchants, our shippers. You are not satisfied with the vast tribute we pay you to build up your great cities, your railroads, your canals. You are not satisfied with the millions of tribute we have been paying you on account of the balance of exchange which you hold against us. You are not satisfied that we of the South are almost reduced to the condition of overseers of northern capitalists. You are not satisfied with all this; but you must wage a relentless crusade against our rights and institutions." As the London Times of 7 Nov 1861 stated: "The contest is really for empire on the side of the North and for independence on that of the South....".

If the South did not secede to protect slavery, why was that prominently stated as the principal reason in the secession resolutions of the various Confederate states? Adams claims that slavery was never in danger, pointing out that Lincoln pledged to enforce the fugitive slave law, declared he had no right or intention to interfere with slavery, and supported a new irrevocable constitutional amendment to protect slavery forever. The South's proclamation that slavery was in danger was a political ploy full of political cant to stir up secessionist fever. As the North American Review (Boston October 1862) put it: "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".

An editorial in the Charleston Mercury 2 days before the November 1860 election stated: "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." And on 21 January 1861, five days before Louisiana seceded, the New Orleans Daily Crescent editorialized: "They [the South] know that it is their import trade that draws from the people's pockets sixty or seventy millions of dollars per annum, in the shape of duties, to be expended mainly in the North, and in the protection and encouragement of Northern interests....These are the reasons why these people [the North] do not wish the South to secede from the Union."

When South Carolina seceded in December 1860, followed by the other Confederate states, all the powerful moneyed interests in the North were in favor of appeasing the South over slavery in order to preserve the Union. If the South were to be a sovereign nation with low tariffs, it could undermine Northern business and trade. The South believed that it did not need the North, since it could buy the goods it needed from Europe, but the North needed the South as a market for Northern goods.

The Republican platform of 1860 called for higher tariffs; that was implemented by the new Congress in the Morill tariff of March 1861, signed by President Buchanan before Lincoln took the oath of office. It imposed the highest tariffs in US history, with over a 50% duty on iron products and 25% on clothing; rates averaged 47%. The nascent Confederacy followed with a low tariff, essentially creating a free-trade zone in the South. Prior to this "war of the tariffs", most Northern newspapers had called for peace through conciliation, but many now cried for war.

The Philadelphia Press on 18 March 1861 demanded a blockade of Southern ports, because, if not, "a series of customs houses will be required on the vast inland border from the Atlantic to West Texas. Worse still, with no protective tariff, European goods will under-price Northern goods in Southern markets. Cotton for Northern mills will be charged an export tax. This will cripple the clothing industries and make British mills prosper. Finally, the great inland waterways, the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Ohio Rivers, will be subject to Southern tolls."

Earlier, in December 1860, before any secession, the Chicago Daily Times foretold the disaster that Southern free ports would bring to Northern commerce: "In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all of its immense profits. Our manufactories would be in utter ruins. Let the South adopt the free-trade system, or that of a tariff for revenue, and these results would likely follow."

Similarly, the economic editor of the NY Times, who had maintained for months that secession would not injure Northern commerce or prosperity, changed his mind on 22 March 1861: "At once shut down every Southern port, destroy its commerce and bring utter ruin on the Confederate States." On 18 March, the Boston Transcript noted that while the Southern states had claimed to secede over the slavery issue, now "the mask has been thrown off and it is apparent that the people of the principal seceding states are now for commercial independence. They dream that the centres of traffic can be changed from Northern to Southern ports....by a revenue system verging on free trade...."