Civil War History - Secession and PoliticsWas it Slavery, or was it States Rights? Perhaps it was the election of Lincoln? What were the real reasons for Southern Secession and what were the political issues in this time of war? Find your answers here in the Secession and Politics Disussion.
1)"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" -Charles Dickens
... -a perfect description of the motivation for the war.
2) "...one of the principal reasons why the North is so resolved upon the continued vigorous prosecution of the war, is that her people now know by experience the inestimable value to them of the Southern trade....The mercantile marts of New England and the Middle States will be hopelessly ruined. Nothing can possibly save them except the recovery of that magnificent trade....the people of the North think their only chance of getting back Southern trade--or making our country evermore tributary to their growth and aggrandizement, is to conquer us, hold us as subject provinces, and compel us to resume the former channels of mercantile communication. They freely acknowledge that the war [secession/an independent South] injures them terribly..."
Charles Dickens, a popular English author, and an editor for the New Orleans Bee -- we've been reading the wrong historians! We should be studying foreign commentators and secesh newspapers. Long live Barnwell Rhett!
Ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
"...If the government of a country has no credit, its individuals will not be likely to stand in good odor in the markets of the world. When 'the faith of the United States' is protested in Wall street or Lombard street, the faith of all the citizens of the United States is protested. But however grave a calamity this might be, it is a minor circumstance as compared with the wide-spread and irreparable disasters to result from the violent shock to our domestic commerce and the utter overthrow of mutual confidence consequent upon disunion. Every consideration, pecuniary, moral and legal, points to a firm maintenance of the Constitution and geography of the United States. Is it not time that the citizens of Chicago and other commercial centres in the Northwest were giving an expression of their views on these questions? The interests to be affected one way or another are their interests. We are confident that the press will do its duty in the premises. We believe that Congress will do its duty, but we have no guaranty half so sure as the voice of the people publicly proclaimed. Let it be sounded abroad that the Northwest declares 'the Union must and shall be preserved,' and a thousand echoes will be awakened...repeating and reiterating the glorious words."
Chicago Tribune, 14 December 1860
4)"COLLECT THE REVENUES"
"...if the 'peace policy' of the Secessionists prevail, bankruptcy of the Government and ruin and convulsion of business are certain consequences. The Government would not only be destroyed but the Free States would virtually be reduced to the condition of plundered and conquered provinces of his Majesty, Jeff Davis..."
5)"SELF PROTECTION"
"The national existence of the Government depends upon the collection of the imposts, and consequently that is its first and highest duty. To preserve peace by permitting a usurper to seize its revenues is to make war on itself...is to commit suicide and end its existence with its own hands. When a government declines to collect its revenues it begins to die, as a man begins to die when he refuses to eat. The sort of 'peace' which will be obtained by the non-collection of Federal duties in Southern ports, will be the peace of the grave yard....If Lincoln's administration fails to collect the revenue throughout the whole Union, it will cease to be. Jeff Davis' government will collect them and reign in its stead. The whole matter resolves itself into the simple question of which of these governments shall collect the revenues in the Southern ports. The one that don't, dies. The one that does, rules..."
Chicago Tribune, 25 March 1861 (both)
6)"We learn through private sources that there are indications of a marked change of sentiment on the part of those connected with the great commercial interest of New York city. Heretofore that class have been the staunchest upholders of the pro-slavery policy of the Democracy....
But these great interests have become seriously alarmed at the present aspect of commercial affairs....By the adoption of a lower tariff of duties than is in force in the United States, foreign imports are likely to seek the ports of the seceding States, and the commercial supremacy of New York is seriously threatened. This is more than the flunkeys of that city bargained for or expected. The objection to enforcing the laws is daily growing weaker. The very men who clamored so lustily against their execution thirty days ago, now begin to ask, 'Have we a Government?' We shall be surprised if, within the next thirty days, the merchants of New York are not calling loudly upon the Administration to enforce the laws, to blockade the ports of the rebel States, to reinforce the forts, and to disperse the rebels who have taken up arms against the Federal Government."
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery." [Mississippi Declaration of Causes]
"For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery." [Georgia Declaration of Causes]
"What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North-was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery." [Henry Benning of Georgia to the Virginia Secession Convention, 18 Feb 1861]
"In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States." [Texas Declaration of Causes]
"On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States." [South Carolina Declaration of Causes]
"Our people have come to this on the question of slavery. I am willing, in that address to rest it upon that question. I think it is the great central point from which we are now proceeding, and I am not willing to divert the public attention from it." [Lawrence Keitt in South Carolina Secession Convention, taken from the Charleston, South Carolina, Courier, dated Dec. 22, 1860]
"The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution -- African slavery as it exists amongst us -- the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the 'rock upon which the old Union would split.' He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact." Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the CSA, 21 Mar 1861, Savannah, Georgia]
"The South had always been solid for slavery and when the quarrel about it resulted in a conflict of arms, those who had approved the policy of disunion took the pro-slavery side. It was perfectly logical to fight for slavery, if it was right to own slaves." [John S. Mosby, _Mosby's Memoirs,_ p. 20]
"The Confederacy had come into existence over slavery, and with slavery as its fundamental social institution. It is impossible to imagine the breakup of the Union without the presence of slavery. Seceding southerners spoke about building a slaveholding republic, and the Confederate Constitution declared slavery a bedrock of the new nation. The southern white conception of liberty had long been intimately tied to slavery for blacks. That connection was central in the initial formation of Confederate identity. The widespread mention of slave soldiers in the winter of 1865 underscored the feelings of desperation seeping through the Confederacy." [William J. Cooper, Jr., _Jefferson Davis, American,_ p. 554]
The southern states sent secession commissioners to other slaveholding states to persuade them to join the secession movement. Prof. Charles Dew, in his book, _Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War,_ has gathered together all the surviving speeches and letters of the secession commissioners. Every one of them identified the reason for secession as the protection of slavery.
"Therefore it is that the election of Mr. Lincoln cannot be regarded otherwise than a solemn declaration, on the part of a great majority of the Northern people, of hostility to the South, her property and her institutions-- nothing less than an open declaration of war-- for the triumph of this new theory of Government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations, and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans. Especially is this true in the cotton-growing States, where, in many localities, the slave outnumbers the white population ten to one.
"If the policy of the Republicans is carried out, according to the programme indicated by the leaders of the party, and the South submits, degradation and ruin must overwhelm alike all classes of citizens in the Southern States. The slave-holder and non-slave-holder must ultimately share the same fate-- all be degraded to a position of equality with free negroes, stand side by side with them at the polls, and fraternize in all the social relations of life; or else there will be an eternal war of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting and destroying all the resources of the country.
"Who can look upon such a picture without a shudder? What Southern man, be he slave-holder or non-slave-holder, can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters, in the not distant future, associating with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality, and the white man stripped, by the Heaven-daring hand of fanaticism of that title to superiority over the black race which God himself has bestowed? In the Northern States, where free negroes are so few as to form no appreciable part of the community, in spite of all the legislation for their protection, they still remain a degraded caste, excluded by the ban of society from social association with all but the lowest and most degraded of the white race. But in the South, where in many places the African race largely predominates, and, as a consequence, the two races would be continually pressing together, amalgamation, or the extermination of the one or the other, would be inevitable. Can Southern men submit to such degradation and ruin? God forbid that they should." [Letter of Stephen F. Hale, Secession Commissioner from Alabama, to Gov. Magoffin of Kentucky, 27 Dec 1860]
"This population outstrips any race on the globe in the rapidity of its increase; and if the slaves now in Alabama are to be restricted within her present limits, doubling as they do once in less than thirty years, the children are now born who will be compelled to flee from the land of their birth, and from the slaves their parents have toiled to acquire as an inheritance for them, or to submit to the degradation of being reduced to an equality with them, and all its attendant horrors. Our people and institutions Must be secured the right of expansion, and they can never submit to a denial of that which is essential to their very existence." [Letter from Isham Garrott and Robert H. Smith of Alabama to the Governor and legislature of North Carolina]
"They have demanded, and now demand, equality between the white and negro races, under our Constitution; equality in representation, equality in the right of suffrage, equality in the honors and emoluments of office, equality in the social circle, equaliity in the rights of matrimony."
"Our fathers made this a government for the white man, rejecting the negro, as an ignorant, inferior, barbarian race, incapable of self-government, and not, therefore, entitled to be associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political, or social equality.
"This new administration comes into power, under the solemn pledge to overturn and strike down this great feature of our Union, without which it would never have been formed, and to substitute in its stead their new theory of the universal equality of the black and white races. ...
"Mississippi is firmly convinced that there is but one alternative:
"This new union with Lincoln Black Republicans and free negroes, without slavery, or, slavery under our old constitutional bond of union, without Lincoln Black Republicans, or free negroes either, to molest us.
"If we take the former, then submission to negro equality is our fate. if the latter, then secession is inevitable ...
"Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, the part of Mississippi is chosen, she will never submit to the principles and policy of this Black Republican Administration.
"She had rather see the last of her race, men, women and children, immolated in one common funeral pile [pyre], than see them subjected to the degradation of civil, political and social equality with the negro race." [Address of William L. Harris, Secession Commissioner of Mississippi, to Georgia Legislature, 17 Dec 1860]
7)"In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwide 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"
Chicago Daily Times, 10 December 1860
8)"The government cannot well avoid collecting the federal revenues at all Southern ports, even after the passage of secession ordinances; and if this duty is discharged, any State which assumes a rebellious attitude will still be obliged to contribute revenue to support the Federal Government or have her commerce entirely destroyed"
Philadelphia Press, 21 December 1860
9)"The millions of people who inhabit the vast and fertile region tributary to the trade of the Mississippi, will never permit themselves by any contingency to be cut off from the commerce of the world. To the great marts beyond our own borders they must and will go--'peaceably if they can--forcibly if they must.' Such is the spirit of the Northwest, and when secession attempts to eject the jurisdiction of the United States from that great outlet, there will be a tornado of indignation there which will force its way to the Gulf in spite of all opposition."
Buffalo Morning Express, 24 December 1860
10)"What we have before said, we now say again: The Northwest will be a unit in maintaining its right to a free and unobstructed use of the Mississippi river throughout its entire course....the Mississippi will not pass into the hands of a foreign power, or our trade and intercourse up and down that river be left at the mercy of a mere treaty, until after a long and desperate struggle, in which the Northwest shall have been vanquished....We are not to be coerced by South Carolina, or Louisiana, or Mississippi, into a dishonorable surrender of our indisputable Rights....This is our position; and be the result what it may, this position we shall maintain."
Cincinnati Daily Gazette, 14 January 1861
11)"It is the enforcement of the revenue laws, not the coercion of the State that is the question of the hour. If those laws cannot be enforced, the Union is clearly gone; if they can, it is safe"
Philadelphia Press, 15 January 1861
12)"It is very clear that if the secessionists, in their madness, insist upon a blockade of the Mississippi river, a bloody conflict must be the result. The potent voice of the Northwest, speaking by the tongue of a Democratic member from Illinois, (Mr. McClernand,) has already declared that the free people who inhabit the region of the Mississippi Valley will never consent to the destruction of their commerce....'Will an empire of ten million people in the West be content to become subordinate--a nation of herdsmen? Perish rather;' said Mr. McClernand in the House. 'The slightest obstruction or annoyance offered by real or pretended sovereignties to navigation upon the mighty thoroughfare of northwestern commerce would arouse a spirit that would cuts its way to and through the mouths of the Mississippi, or sacrifice tens of thousands of lives in the attempt'..."
New York Evening Post, 23 January 1861
13)"The free navigation of the Mississippi will never become the subject of treaty between the people of the Northwest and any other people whatsoever. It will never be accepted as a gratuity. It is their right, and they will assert it to the extremity of blotting Louisiana out of the map....This overrunning and exterminating may be a shocking thing, but if it becomes necessary to put an entirely new race of men in possession of Louisiana, to secure the great national right...the thing will be done. Call it by what name you choose it will be done."
Chicago Tribune, 25 February 1861
14)"The States of Mississippi and Louisiana, and the Montgomery Convention, have deemed it worth while to assure the commercial world that they guarantee the freedom of the Mississippi, 'in times of peace.' This reservation implies a right of the rebel Confederacy over that river--an assumption as unfounded as it is impudent, and one which will not be conceded for a moment, either by the General Government, or by anyone of the half dozen States directly interested in its uninterupted navigation.
Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, 4 March 1861
15)"Blockade Southern Ports. 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"
Philadelphia Press, 18 March 1861
16)"...The government...is bound to collect the revenue duties on every ship which enters a Southern port. Its revenue cutters can and will hover out of reach of the shore guns round the mouth of the ports, and compel the payment of the Federal tribute...."
The Living Age, Boston, 23 March 1861
17)"...That either the revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the port must be closed to importations from abroad, is generally admitted. If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed; the sources which supply our treasury will be dried up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe. There will be nothing to furnish means of subsistence to the army; nothing to keep our navy afloat; nothing to pay the salaries of public officers; the present order of things must come to a dead stop...."
New York Evening Post, March 1861
18)"The predicament in which both the Government and the commerce of the country are placed, through the non-enforcement of our revenue laws, is now thoroughly understood....If the manufacturer at Manchester [England] can send his goods into the Western States through New Orleans at less cost than through New York, he is a fool for not availing himself of his advantage....If the importations of the country are made through Southern ports, its exports will go through the same channel. The produce of the West, instead of coming to our own ports by the millions of tons, to be transported abroad by the same ships through which we received our importations, will seek other routes and other outlets. With the loss of our foreign trade, what is to become of our public works, conducted at the cost of many hundred millions of dollars, to turn into our harbor the products of the interior? They share in the common ruin. So do our manufacturers....Once at New Orleans, goods may be distributed over the whole country duty free....
We were divided and confused till our pockets were touched..."
In the title of this thread, in that it depicts THE cause of the Civil War, I am in complete agreement with you.
Four million slaves valued at four billions of dollars plus the amount in dollars value rendered at extremely low cost for maintence, clothing, food and shelter minus the money that was not paid them for such labor.
By 1860, the dollar value of slave property is greater than the dollar value of ALL of American railroads, ALL of America's banks, ALL of America's manufacturing put together.
This also does not take into account the millions earned by the products produced by this valuable enslaved labor force, which accounted for the most valuable cash crop produced during the pre Civil War days, cotton.
Did you realize that the American South by 1860 produces seven eighths of the world's cotton? That's the equivalent of OPEC today and oil production.
But again, this does not take into account other cash crops produced by the valuable, enslaved, labor force, such as sugar, rice, hemp, tabacco, etc., & etc.
The following information at this website might help with this view also:
Yes, I am inclined to agree with you, Money; THE Cause, with a side order of greed at the expense of human suffering. Those that had the most to lose, definately left the Union over the over-riding, all consuming, all important issue of money.
Good luck with your new thread and I hope you explore every aspect of this point of view.
Sincerely,
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
In the Battle of the Editorials, by my own count, Cash still leads Battalion 22 to 18 at the end of the 1st Quarter.
I would point out that my quotes came from those who actually led the way in secession and in the war. They weren't sitting in armchairs in newspaper offices guessing what policy should be. They were the ones determining the policy, and they were the ones who were determining the policy for the side that actually started the war.
19)"...after Boston, Chicago has been the chief instrument in bringing war on this country. The Northwest has opposed the South as New England has opposed the South. It is you who are largely responsible for making the blood flow as it has.
You called for war until we had it....
Go home and raise your six thousand extra men. And you, Medill, you are acting like a coward. You and your Tribune have had more influence than any paper in the Northwest in making this war. You can influence great masses, and yet you cry to be spared at a moment when your cause is suffering. Go home and send us those men!"
....- Abraham Lincoln to a delegation from Chicago (sent to Washington to protest a call for more troops). The delegation included Joseph Medill editor of the Tribune.
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