By Alexander Marriott
As we approach the sesquicentennials of the Battle of
Antietam (17 September), Lincoln’s provisional emancipation proclamation (22
September), and the Emancipation Proclamation (1 January), people are taking
time to consider what the American Civil War was all about, it’s outcome and
immediate (unfulfilled) legacy, and the continuing relevance it has in American
life and politics today. One such person, scientist and former White House advisor
to Bill Clinton, Jeff Schweitzer, recently penned a short essay for the
Huffington Post entitled “Slavery
and the Civil War: Not What You Think.” In the essay, Schweitzer (without
one quote or appeal to supporting primary source evidence) tells us that “what
we are all taught in school,” that “slavery was of course the central point of
contention” is not accurate and is, at best, fundamentally misleading. While
slavery was, indeed, a prime example of what motivated Southern anger and
morally destroyed any and all sympathy one could reasonably have for the
Confederacy then and now, it was not, argues Schweitzer, “the issue...per se.”
Then what was the war all about? “The war was fought over
state’s rights and the limits of federal power in a union of states,” says
Schweitzer, “The perceived threat to state autonomy became an existential one
through the specific dispute over slavery.” Of course, historians and Americans
hear this argument all the time—it is neither new nor original. What makes this
particular appeal odd is that we usually hear this argument in a delimited and
obvious number of places. First, many of the Confederate leaders—Jefferson
Davis for instance—downplayed slavery as only a point of conflict in a larger
more principled disagreement: “The right solemnly proclaimed at the birth of
the States, and which has been affirmed and reaffirmed in the bills of rights
of States subsequently admitted into the Union of 1789, undeniably recognize in
the people the power to resume the authority delegated for the purposes of
government. Thus the sovereign States here represented proceeded to form this
Confederacy, and it is by abuse of language that their act has been denominated
a revolution. They formed a new alliance, but within each State its government
has remained, the rights of person and property have not been disturbed. The
agent through whom they communicated with foreign nations is changed, but this
does not necessarily interrupt their international relations.”[1]
You would almost think there was no slavery.
Why did they do this if they were not sincerely correct (as
most credible historians, myself included, maintain)? The first and most
obvious reason had to do with foreign relations. The Confederacy’s surest path
to independence was recognition and assistance from Great Britain—something
that would have been quite out of the question had the chief public claim to
the world for why the Confederates should prevail been the exaltation of human
slavery. This is one of the reasons why historians focus so much on the
contemporaneously embarrassing and revealing extemporaneous speech delivered by
the Confederacy’s Vice President, Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia in Savannah
on 21 March 1861. At the end of explaining all the ways in which the new
Confederate Constitution had allegedly remedied the errors of the Constitution
of 1787 they had so recently abandoned, Stephens ended his elaboration in a
remarkable indictment of Thomas Jefferson and full-throated defense of the
Confederacy’s truly great innovation (it is a long speech, this is a long
excerpt, but every utterance of it is absolutely essential):
But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes
for the better, allow me to allude to one other though last, not least. 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. But whether
he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands,
may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading
statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the
enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was
wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they
knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day
was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be
evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the
constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is
true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should
last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional
guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those
ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of
the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the
government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind
blew."
Our
new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are
laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal
to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his
natural and normal condition.
This,
our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this
great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the
process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of
science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can
recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their
day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty
years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal
above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an
aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity.
One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is
forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery
fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that
the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges
and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their
conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their
whole argument fails. I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of
the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of
Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled,
ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to
war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or
mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining
slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle
founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to
him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he
and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately
fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully
against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted;
but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring
against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the
Creator had made unequal.
In
the conflict thus far, success has been on our side, complete throughout the
length and breadth of the Confederate States. It is upon this, as I have
stated, our social fabric is firmly planted; and I cannot permit myself to
doubt the ultimate success of a full recognition of this principle throughout
the civilized and enlightened world.
As I
have stated, the truth of this principle may be slow in development, as all
truths are and ever have been, in the various branches of science. It was so
with the principles announced by Galileo it was so with Adam Smith and his
principles of political economy. It was so with Harvey, and his theory of the
circulation of the blood. It is stated that not a single one of the medical
profession, living at the time of the announcement of the truths made by him,
admitted them. Now, they are universally acknowledged. May we not, therefore, look
with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon
which our system rests? It is the first government ever instituted upon the
principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in
furnishing the materials of human society. Many governments have been founded
upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the
same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system
commits no such violation of nature's laws. With us, all of the white race,
however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with
the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against
Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The
architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the
proper material-the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum
of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by
experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the
inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the
ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His
ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to
differ from another, as He has made "one star to differ from another star
in glory."
The
great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His
laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things
else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with
these laws. This stone which was rejected by the first builders "is become
the chief of the corner" the real "corner-stone" in our new
edifice.
I
have been asked, what of the future? It has been apprehended by some that we
would have arrayed against us the civilized world. I care not who or how many
they may be against us, when we stand upon the eternal principles of truth, if
we are true to ourselves and the principles for which we contend, we are
obliged to, and must triumph.[2]
Stephens’s elaborate and euphoric exaltation of the new era
his government heralded was a public relations nightmare internationally. Great
Britain, the world’s leading power and arch-foe of international slavery could
hardly make any moves against Lincoln on behalf of a power that purported to be
ushering in a new millennium of chattel slavery.
Of course, after the war was over and lost, Confederates for
the most part began to clean up their historical legacies. Stephens went so far
as to claim that his famous speech was not actually his at all. Jefferson
Davis, till the end, pretended the whole effort had a larger more grandiose
purpose and sympathetic historians have, ever since, taken him at his word.
The next group, outside of bona fide Confederates, one
usually sees this argument from are late 19th century reconciliation
historians whose ideas—Civil War a tragedy with heroes on both sides,
Reconstruction a horrible social experiment that did not end soon
enough—lingered well into the 20th century (they are still with us
in a marginalized, angry, and perniciously belligerent form). Why such people
would endorse the notion that slavery was not the actual motivator behind the
Confederacy and the Civil War is rather obvious given the aftermath of the war.
While the North remained surprisingly committed to policing the South with an
occupying army and guaranteeing the citizenship and voting rights of the
freedmen, that effort eventually collapsed and white Northerners were all too
willing to quickly slide back into a racially indifferent hands-off policy
toward the Southern States—all of which were quickly “redeemed” by former
Confederates completely uninterested in the civil rights of their poor black
neighbors. Since whites nationally where not sufficiently outraged by this
development to exercise federal power to do anything to stop it, the temptation
to reconcile with Southern whites and share a common heritage that downplayed
the festering problem of Black civil rights proved too good to resist. Slavery
moved to the background—the war, indeed, was fought over States’ rights (right
to do what precisely was left to the murky libraries that professional
historians were content to ignore for decades).
The only people today that one usually sees this argument
from are modern Southerners who, contrary to Schweitzer’s claim, are not taught
the notion in schools that the war was all about slavery. One also sees it in
“Politically Incorrect” histories published by hack historians looking to cash
in on prejudice rather than scholarship and facts. It’s odd to see a modern
Democrat on the Huffington Post repeating these tired lines from those whose
motivations are typically soaked or tinged in racial animus.
I do not believe Jeff Schweitzer is a dupe or a racist.
Instead, I think his essay has a very obvious contemporary political purpose
that is revealed quite plainly to anyone familiar with the primary sources
surrounding the Confederate theory of the Union and Constitution, as well as
the intellectual justifications for nullification and secession. According to
Schweitzer (and this is rather original, though it has been repeated by many on
the Left, like Chris
Matthews and Michael
Lind), what was actually motivating the South was not some long gone moral
crime like chattel slavery but something eerily familiar: “Specifically, eleven
southern states seceded from the Union in protest against federal legislation
that limited the expansion of slavery claiming
that such legislation violated the tenth amendment, which they argued trumped
the Supremacy Clause. The war was indeed about protecting the institution
of slavery, but only as a specific case
of a state’s right to declare a federal law null and void.” Now here is a
claim that, surprise!, links a modern political agenda—the affinity of modern
Conservatives, from Clarence Thomas to Ronald Reagan, for the tenth amendment
as a tool to put the breaks on the federal government—to a cause that “was
unjust, ... unseemly,” and “treasonous.”
But, since Schweitzer provides absolutely no evidence for
this claim, what—if any—evidence is there that the Confederates believed the
tenth amendment trumped the Constitution’s supremacy clause and allowed them to
secede, and that this is why the war came? According to Schweitzer, the war
could just as easily resulted from the Federal government passing a law to do
anything that Southern states decided was beyond the pale (in the case of the
war, of course, they seceded largely before Lincoln was even inaugurated into
office, the rest after he called for volunteers after Sumter). This is a very
large claim. Now, I, of course, believe that it is quite plain, historically,
that the doctrines of secession and nullification were inventions of political
expediency, first to try to scare off interference with slavery within the
Union and finally as a way of getting out of the Union “legally.” That is,
without a war that Southerners had known for nearly a century would destroy
slavery entirely. I have covered this development broadly in a post entitled “The
History of Nullification: Origins, Context, and Dangers (Part One)” and
which will be completed shortly in a concluding essay.
As Mr. Schweitzer has provided no evidence to substantiate
his claims, he is somewhat at my mercy, so I will be brief. First, let us
consider the South Carolina declaration of why they were seceding. There is
one, non-specified mention of the tenth amendment but that was not the linchpin
of the South Carolinian argument. In fact, mention of the tenth amendment (“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.”) was quite unessential for
Confederates. They grounded their theory of secession on the nature of the
Union as a compact between co-equal states. Much of the South Carolinian
declaration thus hinged on the notion that if any of the parties violated the
compact—in this case, Northern States hampering enforcement of the
constitutionally legitimate Fugitive Slave law of 1850—the offended parties
were free to exit: “We affirm that these ends for which this Government was
instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made
destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States
have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic
institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of
the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful
the institution of slavery; they have permitted the open establishment among
them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign
the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted
thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been
incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.”[3]
Yet, Schweitzer claims that us reading these documents is simply tunnel vision:
“We understandably focus on this specific while ignoring the broader issue in
contest. But a subset of a set is not the set. An example of an issue in not
the issue. Slavery was a specific issue of a perceived violation of a state’s
rights, over which the country went to war. Claiming the Civil War was about
slavery alone is like saying that the recent revolution in Egypt was about
unseating Mubarek and nothing else.”
I will come back
to this central claim about slavery in relation to the constitutional arguments
that Confederates came up with to try to save it within the system and then
from war outside the system in a moment. First let’s take a look at another
state’s formal declaration of what it was doing and why: Mississippi. “Our
position,” said the seceding delegates, “is thoroughly identified with the
institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.” Here there
is not one iota of tenth amendment talk—the entire salvo is slavery top to
bottom. Mississippi purported to leave the Union as a harried fox pursued by
ruthless dogs: “Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent
longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must
either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions
of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure
this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this,
our fathers separated from the Crown of England.”[4]
So, slavery was merely
a “specific issue”? Did those in the North reject the tenth amendment or
believe that the Constitution’s supremacy clause was in conflict with it? If we
take Lincoln’s first inaugural address as evidence, that seems entirely
unlikely: “One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended.
This is the only substantial dispute. The fugitive slave clause of the
Constitution, and the law for the suppression of the foreign slave trade, are
each as well enforced, perhaps, as any law can ever be in a community where the
moral sense of the people imperfectly supports the law itself. The great body
of the people abide by the dry legal obligation in both cases, and a few break
over in each. This, I think, cannot be perfectly cured; and it would be worse
in both cases after the separation of
the sections, than before.”[5]
The only substantial dispute. Either
Schweitzer believes Lincoln improperly diagnosed the problems of the Union—his
perspicacity is one of the things for which he was and is most famous—or
decided to gloss over the “real” issue at stake in the most important speech he
had ever given in his life up to that point.
The constitutional
filibustering of the Confederates, before and after the war, as well as their
historical apologists, should not blind us to the plain truth that slavery—and
its feared death through restriction to the States where it already existed,
perpetually under real and moral assaults from the North—was what agitated
Calhoun, Toombs, Stephens, Davis, Ruffin, Hammond, and all the rest of the
intellectual leaders of the Old South. The Constitution first served Calhoun as
an aegis through which he might carve out a space for slavery’s perpetual
protection. In the decade after Calhoun’s death, most of his legatees gradually
abandoned that notion and instead embraced an alleged Constitutional corollary of
nullification that would allow them to legally break up the government while—hopefully—avoiding
a war that was sure to destroy slavery. It was a long shot, but after Lincoln’s
election provided evidence that the South could be forever dominated by a more
dynamic, wealthier, and more populous North whose inhabitants had no interest in
the peculiar institutions of the South, many Southern leaders felt it was a
gamble they could no longer afford to ignore. And the war came. But the issue
was—and always was, from Missouri, through the Nullification fight, and the
crisis of 1850—slavery, slavery, and slavery. The rest was nefarious and
obscuring subterfuge, and still is to this day.
[1] Speech
in Montgomery, Alabama (Inaugural Address as Provisional President), 18
February 1861, Jefferson Davis: The
Essential Writings, ed. William J. Cooper, Jr. (New York: Modern Library,
2004), 199.
[2]
Alexander Stephens, “Corner-Stone” Speech, Savannah, Georgia, 21 March 1861, American Speeches: Political Oratory from
the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Library of America, 2006),
721-724.
[3] South
Carolina Declaration of the Causes of Secession, Charleston, 24 December 1860, The Civil War: The First Year Told By Those
Who Lived It, eds. Brooks D. Simpson, Stephen W. Sears, and Aaron
Sheehan-Dean (New York: Library of America, 2011), 153-154.
[4]
Mississippi Declaration of the Causes of Secession, Jackson, 9 January 1861, The Civil War: The First Year, 183-185.
[5] Abraham
Lincoln: First Inaugural Address, Washington D.C., 4 March 1861, The Civil War: The First Year, 216.
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