Why Civil War?
The causes and complexities of
the secession crisis and War of Union of the 1860s are often a topic of
discussion and dispute. Unfortunately, nearly
as often, these causes and complexities are distorted or exaggerated to justify
one side or the other. It is my hope to fairly and concisely lay out some of the key causes and
motivations that turned the sectional dispute into a war, especially hoping to
fill out an understanding of Southern motivations and rationale.
Usually the South is blamed for the
advent of Civil War; really a War of Independence or a War of Union. Secession and war are considered and treated
as equivalent to one another. Secession is war. There is an important
distinction, however, between the two, as history demonstrates. Let us begin with secession. Why did the South secede?
The Southern concerns were these: the
Northern states pursued a set of economic policies (on tariffs, internal
improvements, for instance) that undermined Southern economic interests. The tariff issue was no small matter for the South,
as Southern cotton exports made up more than half of American exports. Further, Northern states had proven unwilling
to recognize and enforce fugitive slave laws (as required by the Constitution),
and they had railed against the South and the institution of slavery, seeking
to restrict their ability to bring their "property" to the western
territories; this even after the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that affirmed that
as a Constitutional right. Add to this
the kind of affirming rhetoric that glorified John Brown at Harpers Ferry in
1859 and his militant anti-slavery techniques. A
host of issues divided the sections, and slavery, important in itself, became
symbolic for them all.
The South may have lost control
of the House of Representatives some years before, but had been able to rely on
its standing in the Senate and the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court to
broker compromises or defend its regional interests. With the admission of several free states
without new Southern states to balance, the South lost its equal status in the
Senate. On top of that, when the
Republican Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was elected President, he was not even on the
ballot in any of the states that would form the Confederacy except Virginia (in
the Old Dominion, he received 1.1% of the vote; as an interesting side note,
Lincoln carried California with 32.3% of the vote!). That means that Lincoln did not receive a
single popular vote, never mind electoral vote, in NC, SC, GA, FL, TN, AL, MS,
LA, AR, and TX.
Presidential Election of 1860.
For the fire-eaters in places
like South Carolina, they determined to get out while the getting was good.
They lost Congress, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court would soon inevitably
follow. They had no expectations that the federal government would ever
protect their interests, especially when they had shown that they weren’t
willing to uphold their Constitutional rights.
As far as they were concerned, the Union that was the United States, no
longer protected their interests, and they understood that departure from this
free Union was their legal right. States
like Virginia, when they ratified the Constitution, expressed their
understanding that they had the right to withdraw if the new government acted to
injure or oppress the people. (Cf., Ratification of the Constitution by the State of Virginia)
John
B. Gordon, a Confederate general, and later Governor of Georgia and member of the U.S. Senate, expressed the
Southern understanding thus: “The South
maintained with the depth of religious conviction that the Union formed under
the Constitution was a Union of consent and not of force; that the original
States were not the creatures but the creators of the Union; that these States
had gained their independence, their freedom, and their sovereignty from the
mother country, and had not surrendered these on entering the Union; that by the
express terms of the Constitution all rights and powers not delegated were
reserved to the States; and the South challenged the North to find one trace of
authority in that Constitution for invading and coercing a sovereign State.”
(cf., General Gordon's Reminiscences)
Conventions
were called, delegates elected, and the secession crisis was at hand.
Hence, the Deep South (The Cotton States: SC, GA,
FL, AL, MS, LA, and TX) went ahead and seceded, from December 1860 to February
1861, before Lincoln even took office in March 1861. These states (like MS) did express the
protection of slavery as a reason for secession. (The MS ordinance can be
viewed here: Mississippi Secession Ordinance) The Vice-President of the new Confederacy,
Alexander Stephens, himself a Unionist opposed to secession, but who remained
loyal to Georgia, famously expressed this in his “Cornerstone Speech.” (Cf., Stephens: Cornerstone Speech)
For the upper South (The Tobacco States: VA, NC, TN,
AR), secession only came after President Lincoln actually called up troops to
invade the Cotton States after Fort Sumter. Virginia had actually voted against
secession at the beginning of April (Cf., VIRGINIA CONVENTION VOTES AGAINST SECESSION),
but reconsidered once Lincoln proposed to make it a war and invade the Deep
South to compel them to remain. For
Virginia, the debate was about coercion. Governor Letcher of
Virginia responded to the call for troops to subdue the Deep South thus: "You have chosen to
inaugurate civil war, and having done so, we will meet it in a spirit as
determined as the Administration has exhibited towards the South." (Cf., New York Times: GOV. LETCHER REPLY TO SECRETARY CAMERON)
North Carolina, too, initially opposed secession, not even calling a
convention. The Tar Heel State changed her tune when President Lincoln called up troops: “Congressman
Zebulon Vance, a western Unionist, was gesturing to the heavens ‘for peace and
the Union of our Fathers’ when someone handed him news of Lincoln’s call for
troops. ‘When my hand came down,’ Vance recalled later, ‘it fell slowly and
sadly by the side of a secessionist. I immediately, with altered voice and
manner, called upon the assembled multitude to volunteer, not to fight against
but for South Carolina.’” (Cf., NY Times Opinionator: ‘The Death Knell of Slavery’):
This is an important point – the
Southern states actually seceded at different points with different specific
reasons and motivations. All of them
were content to separate from the United States without a war. Confederate Vice-President Stephens in his “Cornerstone
Speech” remarked in March 1861: “This revolution has been signally marked, up to this time,
by the fact of its having been accomplished without the loss of a single drop
of blood.” Nevertheless, they were also clearly willing to defend their right to secede with force of arms.
Blue: Free Union States.
Yellow: Slave Union States (Border States)
Light Red: Upper South States (Tobacco States), which seceded after Lincoln's call for troops.
Dark Red: Deep South States (Cotton States), which seceded after Lincoln's election.
["US Secession map 1861" by Júlio Reis - The source code of this SVG is valid.This vector image was created with Inkscape, and then manually edited.A trace, retouch, and recolour of Image:Secession Map of the United States, 1861.png by User:Tomf688.. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons]
When the Deep South seceded,
President James Buchanan of PA was in office, and would remain so until Lincoln’s
inauguration in March 1861. Buchanan
viewed secession as being illegal, but also believed that a President had no
legal power to make war on the states.
Hence, while he was President, there were attempts to retain federal
property (several forts did remain under federal control,
including Fort Sumter in SC, Fort Pickens in FL, and Fort Monroe in VA), but there was no war or invasion. In his Fourth Annual Address in December 1860, President
Buchanan observed: “The fact is that our Union
rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its
citizens shed in civil war. If it can not live in the affections of the people,
it must one day perish. Congress possesses many means of preserving it by
conciliation, but the sword was not placed in their hand to preserve it by
force.” (Cf., Fourth Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union)
President Abraham Lincoln, too,
considered secession illegal, but curiously, like Buchanan, also maintained a right of the
people to Revolution: “This country, with its
institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow
weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right
of amending it or their revolutionary right to
dismember or overthrow it.” First Inaugural Address, March 1861.
(Cf., First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln)
Ultimately, it was Abraham
Lincoln that determined that secession was illegal, the Union must be saved,
and it must be saved by the use of military force. For Lincoln, this was to be a war to save the
Union – and he said it was so in a letter to newspaper editor Horace Greeley of
NY in August 1862: “My paramount object in this
struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If
I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could
save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by
freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about
Slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this
Union, and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to
save the Union.” (cf., New York Times: Reply to Horace Greeley)
It is an interesting to ponder
the question of using coercion to compel so many states to remain in a free
union, even at the cost of over 600,000 lives and four years of war.
Without question, Abraham Lincoln
was opposed to slavery, but he was also very much against racial equality, having
said: "...I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any
way the social and political equality of the white and black races -- that I am
not...in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, not of qualifying them to
hold office, nor to intermarry with white people...there is a physical
difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever
forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political
equality." -- Abraham Lincoln, 18 September 1858; Fourth Debate with
Stephen Douglas. Lincoln himself
supported compensated emancipation and hoped to avoid racial issues in the U.S.
by encouraging freedmen to emigrate. (Cf., Civil War Daily Gazette: LINCOLN ARGUES IN FAVOR OF COLONIZING THE FREED SLAVES)
Later on, as the war progressed, the
decision was made to eradicate slavery.
The role of the freedmen in society, however, remained hotly
debated. Ending slavery and granting equal
rights were two rather different things.
New York had overwhelmingly voted down a referendum to extend voting
rights to blacks in 1860. Indeed, at the
time of the ratification of the 15th Amendment after the war, only 7
of the Northern states had extended voting franchise to African Americans.
That said, it should be
highlighted that the institution of slavery, as it existed in ante bellum America, was morally
problematic and certainly an injustice.
Perhaps the greatest injustice was the failure of U.S. laws to recognize
slave marriages or to legally prohibit the separation of families. Even if we seek to understand Southern
motivations, we certainly ought not try to whitewash or justify the evils of slavery
as it was practiced in the United States.
Of course, a study of slavery, to be complete, would also probe the
unseemly role of northern ports in the slave trade, and the motivation to
protect slavery in the calls for independence from Great Britain in the
American Revolution. America has had a race problem, and a problem
with racism, but it is not limited to the South. Of course, racism is hardly a uniquely American problem!
In sum, secession and war were
two different matters, and the reasons that various individuals and states
involved themselves in either certainly varied.
A great deal more could be said about the prosecution of the war and the era of Reconstruction that followed, but that is a subject for another day.
In all of these issues, it is
certainly important for the honest student of history to seek to understand the
motivations of both sides, the complexities of the issues, and seek to learn
what we can from the shortcomings of our forefathers and our Republic.
Live well!
