When it comes to slavery's involvement in secession, most everyone fits comfortably within one of two groups, neither of which is correct. The first argues that slavery had nothing to do with secession; the other claims slavery was the sole cause. Jeb Smith explains.
This is part 3 in a series of extended articles form the author related to the US Civil War. Part 1 on Abraham Lincoln and White Supremacy is here, and part 2 on the Causes of Southern Secession is here.
General John Gordon.
"Slavery is only one of the minor issues and the cause of the war, the whole cause, on our part is the maintenance of the independence of these states....neither tariffs, nor slavery, nor both together, could ever been truly called the cause of the secession.... the sovereign independence of our states. This, indeed, includes both these minor questions, as well as many others even greater and higher."
-Daily Richmond Examiner August 2, 1864, quoted in Rosch, From Founding Fathers to Fire Eaters Shotwell Publishing 2018
"In his message, Mr. Lincoln announced a great political discovery. It was that all former statesmen of America had lived, and written, and labored under a great delusion that the States, instead of having created the Union, were its creatures; that they obtained their sovereignty and independence from it, and never possessed either until the Convention of 1787."
-Edward A Pollard The Lost Cause : A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates E. B. Treat & Co. Publishers NY 1866
Slavery had varying degrees of influence on the Deep South's decision to secede.[1] There is no question that some in the South were willing to leave the Union to preserve slavery if it came to that. Southern slave owners viewed northern abolitionists as foreign invaders dictating their lives. To Southerners, slavery was a constitutional, Biblical, and state right, and no Northern radical was to have greater authority. Thomas Jefferson said that slavery was "The exclusive right of every state."
The Cotton States had great economic importance riding on slavery, Mississippi alone had four billion dollars’ worth of value invested in slaves, and almost the whole economic system of the state depended on slavery. They wished to defend the financial system that had brought them so much prosperity. Yet even in Mississippi, slavery was not the sole cause of secession. James McPherson quotes the Jackson Mississippian, "Let not slavery prove a barrier to our independence...although slavery is one of the principles that we started to fight for... if it proves an insurmountable obstacle to the achievement of our liberty and separate nationality, away with it."
As I have already mentioned, I think that many causes led to the secession of the Deep South. Yet, I would not wholly disagree if someone were to say that slavery was the leading cause of withdrawal in the Deep South. But there is a vast difference between saying that the South left solely to keep slaves in bondage and saying that the federal intrusion on the states' rights over the issue of slavery was the leading cause of separation. Many overstate slavery's involvement in the Deep South secession because slavery was the "occasion" to which the fight over the nature of the Union was fought.
"That institution is not a cause of this war, but simply an occasion of it. It is only the object against which the radicalism of the North has arrayed itself in Abolitionism. Had not this object existed, that Dragon from the bottomless pit, would have discovered some other eminence of Southern life, on which to expend its fury. We are leading the great battle for the sum of modern history--for the regulated liberty and civilization of the age. It is conservative religion against atheism--constitutional law against fanatical higher law--social stability against destructive radicalism."
-Rev. William A. Hall, The Historic Significance of the Southern Revolution Printed by A. F. Crutchfield Petersburg Virginia 1864
The leading cause of separation was not preserving something these states already had legal protection for, that is, slavery. Instead, it was the federal expansion past its constitutional limits and encroachments upon the states' rights. Is the federal government restricted to the powers given in the Constitution? Or was it released to step outside of its delegated powers, thus nullifying the Constitution and limited government? In 1864 Confederate general Patrick Cleburne said, "Between the loss of independence and the loss of slavery, we assume that every patriot will freely give up the latter. Give up the negro slave rather than be a slave himself."
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
-10th amendment U.S. Constitution
"The Constitution... contains no grant of power to the Federal Government to interfere with this species of property...slave property rests upon the same basis, and is entitled to the same protection, as every other description of property."
-Isham G. Harris Call for a Referendum on a Tennessee Secession Convention January 7, 1861
In 1862 Rose Greenhow wrote, "Slavery, although the occasion, was not the producing cause of dissolution." R.L.Dabney wrote, "Slavery was not the cause, but the occasion of strife...Rights of the states were the bulwarks of the liberties of the people, but that emancipation by federal aggression would lead to the destruction of all other rights." Just as decades earlier, John Calhoun had identified the tariff of abominations as "The occasion, rather than the real cause" of dispute. The real issue was over a limited central government.
Where you stand on the "real cause" will necessarily cause disagreement on any issue that arises; a national bank, internal improvements, slavery and so on. If the two sides fundamentally disagreed on the Constitution and the purpose of the central government, they could then never agree on any of these side issues. In Virginia Iliad, H.V Traywick quotes an article in the N.Y. Times on April 8, 1861, saying, "Slavery has nothing whatever to do with the tremendous issues now awaiting decision...The question which we have to meet is precisely what it would be if there were not a negro slave on American soil."
Since the ratification of the Constitution, a conflict had been fought over whether we were to maintain a federated republic as understood by the states or if we were to become a centralized nation to benefit the most powerful interests and political parties. This debate raged politically on many battlefields before 1860. However, slavery was the chosen battleground of the nationalists in the fight to transform the Union in 1860. Instead of just a political issue, they would transform it into a moral issue.
The Republicans violated the Constitution and the Dred Scott v. Sandford 1857 Supreme Court ruling by trying to decide the fate of slavery by federal rather than state and individual control. Democratic plank 9 of the 1852 elections plainly stated that an attack on slavery was an attack on states' rights; you cannot separate the two issues. You cannot have the federal government decide on slavery without it greatly exceeding its original intent and purpose.
That the federal government is one of limited powers, derived solely from the Constitution, and the grants of power made therein ought to be strictly construed by all the departments and agents of the government; and that it is inexpedient and dangerous to exercise doubtful constitutional powers.
Democratic Plank 1 1852
That Congress has no power under the constitution to interfere with or control the domestic institutions of the several States, and that such States are the sole and proper judges of everything appertaining to their own affairs not prohibited by the constitution; that all efforts of the abolitionists or others made to induce Congress to interfere with questions of slavery, or to take incipient steps in relation thereto, are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences.
Democrat Plank 9 1852
The South viewed slaves the same way they did any other legal property. If the Government interfered with slaves, what would stop them from doing the same with any other property? If this violation by the Federal Government were allowed to happen, no rights would be safe: The Constitution would then be of no value. The Union of states that delegated certain limited powers to the Federal Government would be destroyed. And finally the Government would become limitless in power.
If the government was allowed to abandon any of its limitations, it would begin to dictate all manner of regulations and exert jurisdiction it previously was never considered to have. After a quick look at our lives today, who can say the South was incorrect in their assessment? The effects of the federal government stepping into areas past its jurisdiction delegated by the states are commonplace today. The Constitution is set aside so long as the masses' emotions are stirred over any one topic. Politicians and media provoke the mob, and no Constitution or ideas about limited Government can stop them. We have become an unlimited democracy ruled by a mob; the North destroyed the old Republic and Constitution in 1860. As a result, most outlaws in America today are found among elected officials and judges, and we simply accept their lawlessness because we have grown accustomed to servitude.
Well before the war, on July 4 1854, famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison publicly burned a copy of the Constitution and spoke of it as a "Covenant with Death, an agreement with Hell." Abolitionist John Brown seceded from the Union and created his own anti-slavery provisional Constitution. In the book, The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists 1836; former South Carolinian congressman William Drayton wrote, "The abolitionists in urging their designs against the South, are guilty of infringing the acknowledged rights of those states ...it looks to revolution, it teaches that the constitution "is null and void" when opposed to their schemes." In other words, whatever the issue was, the Constitution could take a back seat if it impeded the political agenda of the day.
An unregulated democracy, such as our Government today, has more power and violates our rights more than when we were under King George; it is not even comparable. In Red Republicans and Lincoln's Marxists, Al Benson Jr and Walter Kennedy write, "By focusing upon slavery, the bona fide story of the death of real states’ rights and the beginning of Imperial America is overlooked...we stand naked before the awesome power of our federal master."
Unlike today, antebellum America was a time when the federal government did not spread into the dominion of the states. Through the states, people were allowed self-rule and self-governance. Southerners understood that if the federal government was allowed to infringe on the states' rights on the issue of slavery, it would become an authoritarian body that no longer followed its limitations under the Constitution. These were the costs of the South's defeat in the Civil War; self-governance, and limited government.
To desire a limited government and maintain the Constitution as handed down for generations, one did not need to be pro-slavery. Northerner writer Frederick Law Olmsted opposed slavery but objected to abolishing it "by federal edict." In 1864, Vermont Bishop John Henry Hopkins wrote, A Scriptural, Ecclesiastical, and Historical View of Slavery, where he supported the South and the compact theory of the Union, arguing for gradual and consensual abolition.
Southerners heeded the warnings of the Founders. In a letter to Charles Hammond on August 18, 1821, Thomas Jefferson wrote, "When all Government domestic and foreign in little as in great things shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one Government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the Government from which we separated."
"I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That "all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people. To take a single step beyond the boundaries, thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition."
– Thomas Jefferson, "Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank" February 15, 1791
A government of unlimited or undefined powers will eventually become totalitarian. This was widely known amongst Southerners. Thomas Jefferson believed that states' rights were the best protection to preserve liberty and a republican form of Government. John Taylor of Caroline warned, "If a government can take some, it may take all." St. George Tucker taught, "Power when undefined, soon becomes unlimited." In the first annals of Congress, James Jackson said, "We must confine ourselves to the powers described in the Constitution, and the moment we pass it, we take an arbitrary stride towards a despotic Government." James Rosch quotes John Randolph of Roanoke addressing Congress "If they begin with declaring one law of one state unconstitutional, where were they to stop? They might go on until the state governments, stripped of all authority...a great consolidated empire established upon their ruins...in such a contest the states must fall, and when they did fall, there was an end of all republican Government in the country."
In other words, the only method to prevent an unlimited government is to counter all minor steps it takes beyond its authority. To do so, there must be a check from outside the government itself since it will not limit its own powers, only expand them. In our federated Republic, this check was the state governments who were to maintain the Founders’ principles for their peoples. Future president John Adams, a Massachusetts federalist, agreed that arbitrary power could not be left unchecked;
"Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterward. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society. "
– John Adams, Novanglus Letters, 1774
The claim that the Deep South left the Union to preserve slavery does not make sense; no one was trying to abolish slavery within those states. In his book, The Yankee Problem, Clyde Wilson quotes Horace Greeley at the 1860 Republican convention saying, "An anti-slavery man per se cannot be elected, but a tariff, river-and -harbor- Pacific Railroad, free homestead man, may succeed although he is anti-slavery." Historian David Donald wrote, "No responsible political body in the north in 1860 proposed to do anything at all about slavery where it actually existed." On Tuesday, March 5, 1861, the N.Y. Times editorial (which celebrated Lincoln's inaugural) said the president’s address was "explicit and emphatic in its guarantees to the alarming interest of the southern states." Lincoln "Disavowed all thought" of "interfering with slavery in any state where it exists."
On September 23, 1862, the N.Y. Times printed the preliminary emancipation proclamation with a headline that read, "the war still to be prosecuted for the restoration of the union." And in a letter to the federal minister in Paris, the secretary of the state William Seward wrote, "The condition of slavery in the several States will remain just the same, whether it succeeds or fails. The rights of the States, and the condition of every human being in them, will remain subject to exactly the same laws and form of administration, whether the revolution shall succeed or whether it shall fail." Union generals such as McClellan and McDowell returned fugitive slaves to their masters during the war.
Since slavery wasn't being threatened where it existed in the Union, it would be hard to accept that Southerners would fight a war and leave the country just to have slavery extended into new territories. In fact, if slavery were extended, it would provide more competition to the southern slave state's monopoly on cotton. In 1843 many wealthy southern planters and men, such as John Calhoun, voted against Texas joining the Union because they said it would reduce the price of cotton. Furthermore, the South forfeited federal protection for their runaway slaves under the fugitive slave laws by leaving the Union. They were also giving up their right to bring slaves into the territories of the United States.
If the South fought only to preserve slavery, with no regard for states' rights, they could have remained in the Union. During the war, Lincoln told southerners if they laid down arms, they could come back into the Union with slavery intact. Even the Emancipation Proclamation was an attempt to reconcile slave states back in the Union. John Cannan in The Peninsula Campaign writes, "The emancipation proclamation was actually an offer permitting the south to stop fighting and return to the union by January 1 and still keep its slaves," and the South understood it as such. In July 1863, a Raleigh newspaper stated, "Peace now would save slavery, while a continued war would obliterate the last vestiges of it." Confederate Major General John Gordon wrote, "At any period of the war from its beginning to near its close the South could have saved slavery by simply laying down its arms and returning to the Union" Yet, for other reasons mentioned, the South chose to continue the fight.
Slavery was permitted in the South, but that does not mean it was always celebrated. Today we have legalized abortion, perhaps some view abortion as many southerners viewed slavery, as a necessary evil.
Virginia freed more slaves before the Civil War than New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New England combined. South Carolinian Mary Chestnut said that slavery was a curse, yet she supported secession. She and others hoped the war would end with a "Great independent country with no slavery." But for the typical Southerner, the issue over slavery was much more profound as it involved states' rights and the nature of the Union.
"When the Government of the United States disregarded and attempted to trample upon the rights of the States, Georgia set its power at defiance and seceded from the Union rather than submit to the consolidation of all power in the hands of the Central or Federal Government."
-Joseph E Brown Georgia Governor to Jefferson Davis over the Conscription act 1862
In antebellum America, the states resisted federal expansion in various ways. The first issue between central and state governments arose over the alien and sedition acts. Later problems involved internal improvements, national banking, conscription, protective tariffs, land disputes, freedom of speech, free trade, state control of the militia, fugitive slave laws, etc. No matter the subject, states generally held firm and fought against federal expansions. The South was doing what states had done in antebellum America, resisting national expansion when it went past its constitutional bounds. The outcomes of the Republican victory have resulted in our current overbearing government, which has no regard for its ostensibly limited powers, proving the South correct.
"The South's concept of republicanism had not changed in three-quarters of a century; the North's had. With complete sincerity, the South fought to preserve its version of the republic of the Founding Fathers--a government of limited powers that protected the rights of property, including slave property, and whose constituency comprised an independent gentry and yeomanry of the white race undisturbed by large cities, heartless factories, restless free workers, and class conflict. The accession of the Republican party, with its ideology of competitive, egalitarian, free-labor capitalism, was a signal to the South that the Northern majority had turned irrevocably toward this frightening future."
-James M. McPherson Ante-bellum Southern Exceptionalism A New Look at an Old Question Kent State U Press 1983
South Carolina Secession Document
"The one great evil, from which all other evils have flowed, is the overthrow of the Constitution of the United States. The Government of the United States is no longer the government of confederated republics, but of a consolidated Democracy... the limitations in the Constitution have been swept away; and the Government of the United States has become consolidated, with a claim of limitless powers in its operations."
-Address of South Carolina to Slave-Holding States, Convention of South Carolina 1860
South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union. If the state declaration of the causes of secession is read in full, it gives an excellent example of slavery as a state's rights issue. In the document, quoting from a resolution of the state convention of 1852, it was declared "That the frequent violations of the constitution by the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union." At that time they had refrained, but their situation had only worsened and they could no longer remain. In their declaration of the causes of independence, the writers wanted it known that state rights were the true motivator of secession. That is why at first glance through the text, you will see "FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES," with minor variations in the phrasing, capitalized three times in the document.
The document goes into the history of states' rights in America. It mentions the federal government's failure to uphold the Constitution and the government's interference with the rights of the states. South Carolina stated that if they were to stay in the Union, the "guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost" and that the federal government would become its enemy. While slavery is mentioned six times, states' rights, independent states, and state sovereignty are mentioned sixteen times. States' rights are discussed without any connection to slavery, yet slavery is always mentioned in connection with states' rights. Just as Southern democrats had been saying for decades in their political party planks, an attack on slavery was an attack on states' rights.
"For more than thirty years the people of South Carolina have been contending against the consolidation of the government of the United States...the United States Government has steadily usurped powers not granted- –progressively trenched upon States Rights."
-Charleston Mercury South Carolina April 20, 1861
Slavery in the Territories
"The struggle in our territories...has not been a struggle for the emancipation of slaves. It has been a contest for power...The Northern people, in attempting to preclude the Southern people, by the legislation of Congress...a party hostile both to the Constitution and the decisions of the Supreme Court, have been placed in control of the Government...Whether all the States composing the United States should be slaveholding or non-slaveholding States, neither the Northern nor Southern States ought to have permitted to be a question in the politics of the United States."
-Report of the Committee on Foreign Affairs C.S.A 1861- Provided by the Abbeville Institute September 4, 2014
The fight over the expansion of slavery into the new western territories was a political battle. Were the states coming into the Union allowed their state rights as all previous states had been, or was the federal Government allowed to infringe on those rights and command them? Were states sovereign or subject to federal control? The South fought for these new states coming into the Union to be allowed to decide on their own about slavery regardless of the outcome.
Further, was the federal Government allowed to command where slave owners were allowed to go within the Union? Could they prevent their migration to the western territories, thus giving political control to the Republican party? Were Southerners full citizens in their own country with the same rights as non-slave owners? Would the Federal Government be allowed to discriminate against any minority group that lacked the powers to defend themselves?
But the southern objection was more than a fight for seats in Congress, as slavery was very unlikely to extend west. According to David Donald in Lincoln Reconsidered, "Slavery did not go into New Mexico or Arizona, Kansas, after having been opened to the peculiar institution for six years, had only two negro slaves." To many Southerners, the fight was to maintain states’ authority in the Union and preserve the Constitution and people's self-government.
That when the settlers in a Territory, having an adequate population, form a State Constitution, the right of sovereignty commences and being consummated by admission into the Union, they stand on an equal footing with the people of other States, and the State thus organized ought to be admitted into the Federal Union, whether its Constitution prohibits or recognizes the institution of slavery. [Emphasis added.]
-Southern Democrat Party Platform 1860
Jeb Smith is the author of Missing Monarchy: What Americans Get Wrong About Monarchy, Democracy, Feudalism, And Liberty (Amazon US | Amazon UK) and Defending Dixie's Land: What Every American Should Know About The South And The Civil War (written under the name Isaac. C. Bishop) - Amazon US | Amazon UK
You can contact Jeb at jackson18611096@gmail.com
[1] This article was taken with permission from a section of Defending Dixie’s Land: What Every American Should Know About The South And The Civil War.
