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.
You are both right when you allude to the fact Southerners did NOT want white labor and even worked against it in the South in favor of slave labor.
From the book, A Pro-Slavery Crusade:
"Economic competition between white laborers and slaves had existed in the South for a long time. In South Carolina, even as early as 1720, slave labor drove white artisans from the colony; and in 1742, a grand jury, concerned for the interests of white workingmen, demanded a law to prevent the hiring out of slave tradesmen. "I hear the Negroes in Carolina," a Georgian declared, "learn all Sorts of trade, which takes away the bread of a poor white trades'man Likewise." Similar sentiments were expressed about a century later during the famous slavery debate in the Virginia legislature of 1831-32. Slavery, declared Charles James Faulkner, "banishes free white labor, exterminates the mechanic, the artisan, the manufacturer. It deprives them of occupation. It deprives them of bread...Shall all interests be subservient to one--all rights subordinate to those of the slaveholder? Has not the mechanic, have not the middle classes their rights--rights incompatible with the existence of slavery?" In New Orleans, white mechanics declared they would never train slaves; and in Baltimore, the white shipyard apprentices brutally attacked Frederick Douglass, a young slave worker.
A decade later the competition between the white and slave laborers increased. During the 1840'2, partly due to the collapse of cotton prices and the consequent surplus of slave labor, many planters diverted their slaves into the mechanic trades. The white workers protested. In Mississippi white mechanics forced the enactment of municipal ordinances prohibiting slaves from hiring their own time. South Carolina grand jury presentments between 1849 and 1851 demanded the enforcement of the law against Negro competition....
In the 1850's slaveholders continued to pit their slaves directly against white workers. In Texas slaveholders underbid the German laborers for the contract to construct the state capitol building, and in Savannah shipping merchants used slaves to break a white labor strike in 1856...
Thus the rise in cotton prices during the 1850's along with the demand for more labor, the high slave prices, the high wages in the South, and the increasing movement of white workers into the South seemed to predict the rise of a Southern white working force. And it was this forecast that struck fear in the minds of many African slave-trade radicals. They pointed out that the increase in cotton prices and the consequent rise in the demand for labor would force the South to find some way to meet this new demand. Since the African slave trade was closed, the flow of labor would have to come from the North and Europe, and the new labor demand and the high wages in the South would attract these outside workers. Thus the ranks of free labor in the South would be augmented and slavery would be threatened. "If we cannot supply the demand for the slave labor," Governor Adams warned in his message of 1856, "then we must expect to be supplied with a species of labor we do not want, and which is, from the very nature of things antagonistic to our institutions..."
Thus, in societies where labor was white and free, workers had certain political rights and could not be effectively controlled and suppressed. The South, however, had a system of labor based on racial supremacy and the absolute power of the white master class. So long as the Southern workers were black and in bondage, the South would be an ideal conservative society. In Spratt's judgment, while democracy and the "contest of classes" threatened to plunge free labor societies in the North and in Europe into revolution and anarchy, slave-labor society in the South was essentially safe from class turmoil, for the Southern black working class was enslaved and powerless."
More to follow,
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
An interesting view of slavery from that of the nonslaveholder is presented in this section of the book, Chapter 3, The Pro-African Slave Trade Argument, pp. 58-60.
"...Like [Hinton] Helper and Northern abolitionists, many African slave trade radicals viewed Southern nonslaveholders as a potential internal danger to slavery and the slaveholding class. But actually nonslaveholders were true to the South and slavery. Like Helper, many nonslaveholders depised the Negro. "I wish there warn't no n i g g e r s here," a poor white farmer told a traveler. "They are a great cuss to this country..." Unlike Helper, however, many nonslaveholders feared that emancipation would not mean exclusion of Negroes from the South but economic competition with Negroes and race wars. They were reminded of the horrors of the bloody slave revolts in St. Domingo and regarded the emancipation of three million slaves in the South as a prospect of certain destruction of white society. Little wonder slave patrols were ordinarily recruited from the yeoman class.
The nonslaveholders' worry about emancipation was partly based on their fear of the Negro man as a sexual danger to the white woman. They were warned that emancipated blacks would rape and murder Southern poor white women, and that the dreaded horror of forced miscegenation would follow the abolition of slavery. Albert G. Brown of Mississippi cautioned that freedom for the slave would mean among other things that the black man's "son shall marry the white man's daughter." If the Negro were liberated, declared Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, "blood, rape and rapine will be our portion. You can't get rid of the Negro except by holding him in slavery." Hence, for many nonslaveholders, slavery was valued not as a system of labor but as a system of race control, especially the sexual control of the black man. For a long time, the image of the highly sexed black man worried whites in America. Black men, Jefferson claimed, preferred white women to black "as uniformly as is the preference of the Oran-utan for the black women over those of his own species." Colonial laws not only provided for the sexual separation of the two races but also emphasized the abhorrence of sexual unions between Negro men and white women. Seventeenth-century Maryland and Virginia legislation clearly reveals that white women were being singled out for special protection and special separation from Negro men very early in the history of race relations in America. This white male anxiety over miscegenation between Negro men and white women must have been extreme, for a number of colonies castrated Negro men guilty of sexual aggressions against white women."
More to follow,
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
Today in Southern communities, a common sight is the mixed race couple, almost invariably black male and white female.
I knew one such couple. They had lived up North for a number of years and found they were not fully accepted by the black community or the white community. The same was true in the South.
"Thus slavery guaranteed order in the biracial society of the South. In this society, the nonslaveholder could feel he belonged to the white aristocracy, and thus all white people, according to Senator Albert G. Brown, could associate with each other on terms of perfect social equality. The presence of Negroes in the South, Jefferson Davis explained, not only raised all white men to the same general level but also dignified and exalted every white man. Even the poor white, who had so little economically, had a social and psychological interest in slavery: it assigned status to his white skin. He was told that in the South "color, not money, marks the class; black is the badge of slavery; white the color of freemen; and the white man, however poor...feels himself a sovereign..." Thus, despite his despised and wretched condition, the poor white could find psychological comfort in the whiteness of his skin, and he could cherish Calhoun's claim that the "two great divisions of [Southern] society are not the rich and poor, but the black and white." Furthermore, the nonslaveholder, many believed, could become a slaveholder through hard work. Every white man in the South, D. R. Hundley explained, had "just as much right to become an Oligrach as the most ultra fire-eater." A writer for De Bow's Review claimed that many wealthy planters had begun their fortunes as nonslaveholders, and that "chepa lands, abundant harvest, high prices gives [sic] the poor man soon a negro." Later, in his story about the young South Carolina Irishman, Wilbur J. Cash would sing about the epic rise of the Old South's one-generation slaveholding aristocracy.
No doubt the Afican slave-trade radicals recognized that nonslaveholders had interests in slavery. Some advocates even expressed great confidence in the nonslaveholders allegiance to the peculiar institution. In his essay, "The Non-Slaveholders of the South," James De Bow offered detailed reasons why the interest of the poorest nonslaveholder was "to make common cause with, and die in the last trenches in defence of, the slave property of his more favored neighbor." But many advocates, including De Bow himself, had doubts about nonslaveholders. While De Bow's essay on the nonslaveholders was a declaration of their loyalty, it was also an appeal for their support for slavery. African slave-trade advocates like De Bow and Spratt feared that until white men acquired property in slaves they were not completely committed to the institution, and that high slave prices were making it extremely difficult for nonslaveholders to purchase slaves. If many Southerners could not own or even hope to own slaves, could they be expected to support the peculiar institution? Would they not be antagonistic towards slavery and the slaveholding class? Would they not rally to Hinton Helper's cry for revolution within the South? Worried about the high slave prices, a Louisiana editor offered his readers this gloomy prediction. "Let things go on as they are now tending, and the days of this peculiar institution of the South are necessarily few. The present tendency of supply and demand is to concentrate all the slaves in the hands of the few, and thus excite the envy rather than cultivate the sympathy of the people." Echoing the same anxiety, a Texas editor warned that thousands of citizens were unable to own slaves at the present "exorbitant monoply prices," and that "the very inability with som many thousands among us to be slaveowners" had a tendency to create an unfriendly feeling towards the institution. If cheap African slaves could be imported, advocates promised, slaves could be more widely distributed, and the tensions between slaveholders and nonslaveholders in the South could be eased."
More slaves seems to be the answer for every problem.
More to follow,
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
"I ask the Senator from Massachusetts [Wilson] has any southern Senator or any southern member of the other House introduced any proposition here that looked to repealing the prohibitory laws against the African slave trade?
[Senator Wigfall supplies the answer-] None..."
"The Senator from Massachusetts...reads extract after extract from resolutions introduced into southern Legislatures, that were laid upon the table or thrown under it, or voted down by overwhelming majorities, and reads extracts from newspapers, and he cannot tell whether they were communications or editorials. He charges the whole South with desiring to reopen the African slave trade...
...I desire to say explicitly that, from the year 1808 to the present time, I am not aware of any effort on the part of the South to reopen the African slave trade...."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Senator Davis of Mississippi-
"With the permission of the Senator from Massachusetts...I merely wish to say that whilst he can produce individuals, whilst he can produce articles from newspapers or from pamphlets advocating the revival of the African slave trade, he can probably go into his own town...and certainly, if he goes to his own port of Boston, he will there find men, too, who would like to revive it and engage in it."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Senator Brown of Mississippi-
"It is mere mockery for gentlemen to pretend that they think the southern people are desirous of reopening the African slave trade...
Those in the southern States in favor of reopening this traffic are a mere handful compared with the great mass of the people...."
"Gentlemen may make some political capital at home out of this question of the African slave trade, but it is humbug capital; it is a kind of capital which no statesman ought be proud of."
__________________ POWER & MONEY
"Your New-York bankers and merchants are shrewd people, but I never gave them credit for so much sagacity as when they took the Government Loan. It was not merely patriotism, it was a high stroke of policy. It has saved the Government, and what they will regard as equally important, saved them from a great financial disaster."
__________________ "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
"I ask the Senator from Massachusetts [Wilson] has any southern Senator or any southern member of the other House introduced any proposition here that looked to repealing the prohibitory laws against the African slave trade?
[Senator Wigfall supplies the answer-] None..."
"The Senator from Massachusetts...reads extract after extract from resolutions introduced into southern Legislatures, that were laid upon the table or thrown under it, or voted down by overwhelming majorities, and reads extracts from newspapers, and he cannot tell whether they were communications or editorials. He charges the whole South with desiring to reopen the African slave trade...
...I desire to say explicitly that, from the year 1808 to the present time, I am not aware of any effort on the part of the South to reopen the African slave trade...."
Perhaps what Wigfall is saying here might be technically true -- but the man is lying by misdirection if it is.
Wigfall had been selected Senator in 1859, and it is thought that it was largely pushed through in reaction to John Brown's Harpers Ferry raid, Wigfall being one of the most radical Fire-Eaters in Texas. He was at the time a member of the state legislature, and in theory it was illegal for him to take the US Senator post, so it required a substantial re-interperting of the state constitution to appoint him. Once he arrived in Washington, he was referred to as the "Third Senator from South Carolina" because of his close association with the policies of the Fire-Eaters there (his native state).
When appointed, Mr. Wigfall gave a speech to the Texas legislature. In it, he comes out strongly in favor of allowing the re-opening of the Atlantic slave trade. In fact, he explicitly states that Congress had no power to interfere with it or to declare it piracy. So we know for sure that Senator Wigfall himself favored re-opening the Atlantic slave trade, no matter what is said in these little snippets you are posting. How about posting the complete text so we can see what he really says here?
BTW, anyone looking to see what the attitude about re-opening the Atlantic slave trade was in Texas can get a quick start by looking at section 5, "The Question of Re-Opening the African Slave Trade", in BEGINNINGS OF THE SECESSION MOVEMENT IN TEXAS by Anna Irene Sandbo in Southwestern Historical Quarterly (http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/publicati...article_5.html)
Take notice of all the counties voting on the issue in conventions. Here's a sample:
=====
As early as 1856, the State Gazette began to note closely all discussions relating to the reopening of the slave trade that took place in the other Southern states. It not only quoted liberally from the press of these states, but gave its own opinions freely. For instance, in an editorial of March 1, 1856, the editor of the Gazette commenting on a discussion in the Georgia legislature on the question of repealing all laws obstructing the importation and sale of salves in Georgia, said that discussion was a very good move, because all laws interfering with the freedom of trade were wrong, and that the law of supply and demand should control every department of commerce. “Indeed we would urge, if practicable, the importation of negroes from Africa, and it would not only improve their physical condition but add to their happiness, while at the same time subserving the purposes of civilization in our own country.” From that time the question was never lost sight of. The State Gazette, perhaps one of the most influential papers in the state, did all in its power to mould public opinion in its favor. By 1858 slavery, according to this paper, had become both just and expedient, in accordance with divine law, and a moral, social, and political blessing. It argued that there were not enough slaves in the South, and that every planter in Texas felt the want of slave labor; that this want of labor cramped the energies and diminished the resources of the planters and retarded the general prosperity of the state. The Highland Eagle, a Bell County newspaper, urged the Gazette to spread far and wide the truths as to slavery, its divine origin and beneficent effects. It further urged all papers to do the same, and then, according to this zealous advocate of slavery, “we shall in good time be the most united and the strongest people on earth.”
===== Tim
__________________ "Let us, then, consider all attempts to weaken this Union, by maintaining that each state is separately and individually independent, as a species of political heresy, which can never benefit us, but may bring on us the most serious distresses."
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, 1740-1824, Revolutionary War soldier, one of the authors of the US Constitution in 1787, speaking at the South Carolina Ratifying Convention in 1788.
"With the permission of the Senator from Massachusetts...I merely wish to say that whilst he can produce individuals, whilst he can produce articles from newspapers or from pamphlets advocating the revival of the African slave trade, he can probably go into his own town...and certainly, if he goes to his own port of Boston, he will there find men, too, who would like to revive it and engage in it."
Senator Davis is being disengenuous here. He was another of those who wished end the Federal ban on the slave trade with Africa -- while expressing for public consumption the belief that he was personally opposed to the African slave trade and that it wasn't a good idea for Mississippi. "States' Rights", don't you know: the Federal government should not have the power to make it illegal, and the states should have the right to decide it for themselves, individually -- just the same line as Yancey, Rhett, Spratt, De Bow, Brown, etc.
Senator Davis, for example, advocated the abrogation of the 1820 treaty with Great Britain that made the international slave trade an act of Piracy under US law, along with many other Southern Senators and Representatives (including Wigfall, who you also quoted). Doing so is part of the effort to re-open the African slave trade. The man was two-faced on this issue, and his position is equivalent to the "I-am-personally-opposed-to-abortion" statement made by so many politicians who voted to make it legal: politically correct, but designed to give plausible deniability to what they were actually committing to do.
Tim
__________________ "Let us, then, consider all attempts to weaken this Union, by maintaining that each state is separately and individually independent, as a species of political heresy, which can never benefit us, but may bring on us the most serious distresses."
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, 1740-1824, Revolutionary War soldier, one of the authors of the US Constitution in 1787, speaking at the South Carolina Ratifying Convention in 1788.
Sec. 9. (I) The importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America, is hereby forbidden; and Congress is required to pass such laws as shall effectually prevent the same.
11 March 1861
__________________ POWER & MONEY
"Your New-York bankers and merchants are shrewd people, but I never gave them credit for so much sagacity as when they took the Government Loan. It was not merely patriotism, it was a high stroke of policy. It has saved the Government, and what they will regard as equally important, saved them from a great financial disaster."
CivilWarTalk.com -
A free and friendly Civil War community. 
Linear Mode
