Eric Foner is a major historian of the mid-19th century USA and a regular contributor to The Nation magazine. In a recent issue, he reviewed two books about politics in the South during and after the Civil War, Stephanie McCurry’s Confederate Reckoning and Victoria Bynum’s The Long Shadow of the Civil War. This paragraph of Foner’s got me thinking:
McCurry begins by stating what should be obvious but is frequently denied, that the Confederacy was something decidedly odd in the nineteenth century: “an independent proslavery nation.” The Confederate and state constitutions made clear that protecting slavery was their raison d’être. Abandoning euphemisms like “other persons” by which the US Constitution referred to slaves without directly acknowledging their existence, Confederates forthrightly named the institution, erected protections around it and explicitly limited citizenship to white persons. McCurry implicitly pokes holes in other explanations for Southern secession, such as opposition to Republican economic policies like the tariff or fear for the future of personal freedom under a Lincoln administration. Georgia, she notes, passed a law in 1861 that made continuing loyalty to the Union a capital offense, hardly the action of a government concerned about individual liberty or the rights of minorities.
I can certainly understand Foner’s exasperation with neo-Confederates who see the Old South as a proud symbol of liberty and elide the role of slavery in the Civil War. In the legal documents he cites, the Confederate States of America advertised its cause as the defense of slavery. In prominent speeches delivered at the outbreak of the war, such southern leaders as Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens and Confederate President Jefferson Davis said openly that the cause which justified secession was the threat that the newly ascendant Republican Party would free blacks from slavery. While Stephens and Davis each spent a great deal of time after the war trying to explain his earlier remarks away and argue that he had been motivated by concern for something other than the maintenance of human bondage, it is hardly unreasonable to attach greater weight to the contemporary documents and to say that in the Civil War, the South fought to defend slavery.
What is less reasonable is to leave it at that, with the implication that the North fought to abolish slavery. The evidence would suggest that when the United States armed forces were sent to quash secession, the men who sent them had little interest in emancipating anyone. Emancipation came later, propelled by the exigencies of war. As Davis and Stephens would shift their public statements from prewar calls to defend slavery to postwar invocations of the rights of the states, so too did the leaders of the North change their stands very substantially as the war went on. The most obvious example may be the contrast between Abraham Lincoln’s two Inaugural Addresses. Lincoln delivered his First Inaugural Address in March of 1861, when the war had not yet broken out. The Second Inaugural Address was delivered in March of 1865, a few weeks before the end of the war. Lincoln spends much of the First Inaugural Address vowing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and leave slavery alone in all the states where it was a legal institution. In the Second Inaugural Address, he looks back on the war as a struggle to emancipate the slaves and declares that it would only be just were God to decree that the war should “continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”
In the First Inaugural, Lincoln capitulates to every demand the South could possibly make in regard to slavery. Time and again, of course, Lincoln would declare his belief that people whose ancestors came from Africa could not live among whites except in conditions of subjugation, and he rarely missed a chance to distance himself from Abolitionists. These facts do not mean that the South was not fighting to keep blacks enslaved. Seeing that the Republicans, a party which did include a sizeable antislavery bloc, could elect as president a candidate who did not receive a single vote in the ten states south and west of Virginia, slaveholders might well have drawn the conclusion that their grip on the national government was permanently broken and that some future president would lead the push for abolition. While Lincoln himself might not in 1861 have had the inclination to take that task on, proslavery southerners may well have thought that it would have been unwise to wait for the crisis they feared.
What the First Inaugural does show, however, is that whatever the South may have been fighting for, the North was not at the outset of the war fighting against slavery. Why did the North fight to keep the South in the Union? Why for that matter did so many Northerners vote for Lincoln when it should have been clear that the election of a purely regional candidate would trigger secession? I suspect Foner’s dismissal, in the paragraph above, of the tariff as a cause for the war applies only to the motivations of the South. The South opposed a protective tariff because it wanted equal access to the products of industry in the North and in England. Indeed, the South wanted Northerners to bid competitively with English interests for Southern cotton. Since the chief goal of US policy since 1776 had been to get the British out of North America, the idea that the southern states of the USA would form an economic relationship with English industry that might very well lead to their absorption into the British Empire could hardly be expected to meet with general approval in the rest of the country.
The Second Inaugural is among the most widely read of all Lincoln’s writings, certainly the most widely read of his state papers. That is no surprise. Not only is it an extraordinary specimen of eloquence, but it also flatters Americans’ national self-esteem. The Second Inaugural caters to Americans who want to look at the Civil War and see a moral awakening to the evils of human bondage and to the possibility that black and white might live together in equality. Beyond that; it also allows us to cast that moral awakening as a drama in which our enlightened twenty-first century selves have the leading role. The Civil War, Lincoln invites us to believe, was fought so that later generations of Americans could be untainted by the guilt of slavery. In other words, the dead had to die, so that we could look down on them.
If, instead of reading the Second Inaugural and congratulating ourselves on our superiority to our ancestors, we Americans read the First Inaugural and put the Civil War in the context of international Realpolitik, we might shed some of our national narcissism and be warier next time some group of con artists try to sell us another war. We wouldn’t necessarily be any less proud of our country- opposing the British Empire was a mighty project in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it isn’t every country that would have the patience to stick with such a project until the UK’s prime minister openly declares his country to be the USA’s junior partner in world affairs. But we might learn to express pride in our country without pretending that the country itself has some divine commission to institute a world order based on pure justice.
3 comments:
No, the South did in no way fight to protect slavery.
They fought to SPREAD it. Not sorta, not kinda, not in a way, but totally, officially, emphatically, to spread slavery.
And they said so. Over, and over, and over.
For example, Southern leaders in Montgomery issued Five Ultimatums, in March of 1861. All five ultimatums were about the spread of slavery.
The first Ultimatum was that slavery MUST be spread into the territories -- against the will of the people there, and against the will of the legislatures there.
They meant, of course, Kansas. Kansas had just rejected slavery in a vote 98% to2%. Plus of course, the four year war to stop slavery from being forced down their throats.
But the FIRST Ultimatum, was the slavery must be spread there. Kansas must "accept and respect" slavery.
Southern newspapers shouted with glee--- Richmond papers headlines were "THE TRUE ISSUE".
Newspapers North and South carried reports of the Ultimatums. New York papers wanted Linclon to obey the demands, to avoid war.
Lincoln would not.
But this was much more than just the drunken rantings of Southern leaders and Southern editors.
This was the heart of the dispute for over 60 years. This is what the South demanded in 1820, then again in 1850.
Only, the earlier times, the Southern leaders claimed they were just giving white men what they wanted - the right to own others.
But here, Kansas was probably the most anti-slavery place on earth. So the Southern leaders tossed aside even the pretense of State's Rights, and and showed the naked truth.
It was about the spread of slavery, and nothing else. The Southern Ultimatums specifically said states had NO rights to decide issues for themselves about slavery or blacks within their own borders.
In every US history text book, there should be two pages in the middle. On the left side, the Southern Ultimatums as declared by Southern newspapers to be "THE TRUE ISSUE"
And on the other page, Lincoln's Gettysburg address.
http://fivedemands.blogspot.com/
"Seeker" is an understatement. We make some slight efforts to publicize Los Thunderlads, the blog on which all these posts originally appeared, but this backup site is very obscure. You should call yourself "Finder."
As for your comment, thanks for expanding on my point that secessionist spokesmen at the outset of the war presented their cause in terms of slavery first and foremost.
I'm sure the Confederates would have liked to spread slavery; efforts to open new territories to slavery had certainly been the main thrust of Southern policy from the invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s until the final defeat of proslavery forces in Kansas in 1859. As you point out, there was no popular support for slavery in Kansas. Nor could there have been any economic demand for it there, given the geography of the place. The Great Plains are not suited to growing cotton, tobacco, rice, or sugar, the three crops that slaves enriched their masters by producing in the USA in the nineteenth century. The Great Plains are suited to the production of grains and the herding of livestock, activities in which slave labor had not been profitable since Roman antiquity. Producers in those sectors had for centuries preferred to rent workers' labor bit by bit rather than laying out large lump sums to buy a worker's whole productive capacity at once. The failure of proslavery efforts in Kansas proved, not so much the power of moral enlightenment, but the force of economic rationality. The American Southwest and the Rocky Mountain region were if anything even less suited to the cultivation of cotton, tobacco, sugar, and rice than were the Great Plains, leaving the West Coast as the only North American territory into which geography would have allowed slavery to have expanded in the 1860s. Even there, employers had clearly chosen the greater flexibility of wage labor over slave labor by that point.
So, if secession had been a means for expanding slavery's geographical reach, it would have been quite irrational for the South to have resorted to it only after all prospect of such an expansion had been foreclosed once and for all. Why, then, did so much secessionist rhetoric focus on demands for such an expansion? Were Southerners simply deluded, rebelling en masse against economic realities that the result of the Kansas war had made inescapably clear to everyone?
Maybe! Or maybe not. Consider what else they might have said. If secessionist leaders had called on people to rally to their cause so that the South could become an economic dependency of the British Empire, they would hardly have been able to paint themselves as the heirs of Washington and Jefferson. On the contrary, it would have been impossible for them to keep labels like "treason" from sticking to their cause.
The comparison I would make is to Taiwanese politics. When some Taiwanese politicians claim that they want to invade and conquer mainland China, mainland Chinese leaders respond with equanimity. When other Taiwanese politicians claim that they want to break away from the mainland and coexist with it peacefully, mainland Chinese leaders respond with sharp words and grave threats. Americans and other outside observers are puzzled by this state of affairs, but when we look at the words of Firebreather documents like the Montgomery Declaration, I think we can see that Chinese and Americans are not so different. When they claimed to have designs on the rest of North America, the Confederates could present themselves as still loyal to a common history and a common identity rooted in 1776 and its legacy. However impossible it may have been to realize any such designs in fact, as images in propaganda they enabled secessionists to gloss over the trading relationship they proposed to create with the USA's traditional enemy.
Moreover, remember the refrain that permeates Frederick Law Olmsted's 1861 book The Cotton Kingdom: "If there were no free states, the poor whites of the South would be slaves." That may not have been true, but evidently it was as thought that was in the air when Olmsted was touring the South in the 1850s and in the North at the outbreak of the war. As Olmsted was among the first to document, literacy was a rare attainment for poor whites of the Southeast in the antebellum period; they likely had little notion of the realities of life outside their region, little enough that they may sincerely have believed that a Confederate States of America could have grown geographically. Such belief may have reconciled them to secession. If there were new territories, then poor whites could resist enslavement by threatening to move to them, as in the antebellum era they secured their freedom by threatening to move to the North. Had the secessionists' official line been a realistic assessment of an independent South's economic prospects, it's hard to imagine them raising an army of any sort.
You suggest that students of the Civil War should read the Montgomery Declaration and similar statements issued early in 1861 in tandem with the Gettysburg Address, a statement issued late in 1863. Wouldn't it be better to compare contemporaneous statements? The advantage of thus comparing like with like is that it would enable us to examine the motives, not only of secession, but of United States policy as well. That policy showed precious little regard for the rights and dignity of African Americans, and a great deal of concern for what was needed, first, to develop large scale industrial operations in the USA and, second, to keep the British from inserting themselves into affairs between the 49th parallel and the Caribbean.
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