Five myths about why the South seceded

[Raster]

BY JAMES W. LOEWEN
WASHINGTON POST June 23, 2015

One hundred fifty years after the Civil War began, we're still fighting it -- or at least fighting over its history. I've polled thousands of high school history teachers and spoken about the war to audiences across the country, and there is little agreement even about why the South seceded. Was it over slavery? States' rights? Tariffs and taxes?

As the nation begins to commemorate the anniversaries of the war's various battles -- from Fort Sumter to Appomattox -- let's first dispense with some of the more prevalent myths about why it all began.

1. The South seceded over states' rights.

Confederate states did claim the right to secede, but no state claimed to be seceding for that right. In fact, Confederates opposed states' rights -- that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery.

On Dec. 24, 1860, delegates at South Carolina's secession convention adopted a "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union." It noted "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery" and protested that Northern states had failed to "fulfill their constitutional obligations" by interfering with the return of fugitive slaves to bondage. Slavery, not states' rights, birthed the Civil War.

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http://www.sunherald.com/2015/06/23/6290506/five-myths-about-why-the-south.html

[arcane1]

1. I highly recommend reading James Loewen's awesome books :)

And now, to read the article

[Raster]

2. I agree. "Lies my Teacher Told Me"

https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=James_W._Loewen

[ProfessorPlum]

7. Agreed - that's an amazing book

Really interesting stuff. His book about Sundown Towns sounds like required reading as well.

[pogglethrope]

3. Great thread,

but I've tired of beating up on the Confederacy, the South, and Southerners for the day. Good luck getting other posters to chime in.

Civil war veterans were still living when I was a kid, so it wasn't all that surprising that some animosity towards the North, Northerners, and the Union remained in the general area of the South I grew up in, in the state I grew up in. Since my home county sided with the North, not much animosity there. I'm unaware of any hostility towards the North in today's South, but some pockets might well still be around. Where I grew up, we had completely stopped fighting the Civil War by the 1970s.

However, it seems to me that more than a few DU posters still bear malice towards the South and even today's Southerners. They may well be unaware of their bias, their prejudice even, but it's not hard to detect. They seem to want to start a civil war of sorts on DU -- presumably because the North won the Civil War and the South lost. If the the outgunned and outmanned South had won, I suspect those posters would be less antagonistic towards the South and Southerners.

Have at it. I will no longer participate in any way in these gangbangs. Nor will I ever again see anything you've posted. Not worth the bother. Please reciprocate by adding me to your Full Ignore List. I signed up here to be in an echo chamber so I wouldn't be annoyed and bothered. I've found out I can't succeed in achieving my non-annoyance objective unless I ignore some posters. Congratulations -- you're the second.

PS. Yes, I realize that the South seceded from the Union because of its desire to continue slavery. Even its desire to create a Slave Empire, at least to the south and to the west. But that was more than 150 years ago and its far past time to move on.

[Raster]

11. I have no one on ignore. Not my style.

Good riddance.

[Major Nikon]

4. Living in Texas I hear a lot of neo-Confederates try to perpetuate these myths

Many actually believe it and parrot out this nonsense without realizing they are as full of shit as a Christmas goose.

[TreasonousBastard]

5. I'm not sure about #5...

I was under the impression that supporting slavery for field hands was getting too expensive after importing Africans was prohibited. (Yet another reason for them hating growing Northern political power.) Having enslaved house servants in places like New Orleans seems to have been growing, though. Historically, slavery-based societies haven't been able to keep the system going without a ready source of new bodies. (Rome went to war to replace slaves as much as for anything else)

And while Southern agricultural exports did dwarf Northern industrial ones, as did their agricultural economy, they had second-rate access to financing controlled in New York and Boston. And, the earlier nullification crisis was about the "Tariff of Abominations" and not so much about slavery-- Andrew Jackson shut that down by force, but Calhoun and others kept the nullification fight alive.

But, yes, slavery was the consistent evil at the core of Southern complaints. War seemed inevitable in the mid 19th century as the North was pissed at "slave power" (that 3/5 of a person that increased the population of slave states) and the South was pissed at the North for insisting new territories and states be non-slave.

[Jim Lane]

8. I had a different impression about the ban on the slave trade.

You write: "I was under the impression that supporting slavery for field hands was getting too expensive after importing Africans was prohibited. (Yet another reason for them hating growing Northern political power.)"

Given that we're discussing a system in which human beings were treated as property, what would be the economic effect of the ban on the slave trade? It would increase the value of the slaves already held. Put another way, as long as slaves could be imported, slave traders were a source of competition for domestic slaveowners who wanted to sell some slaves. (Remember that children born into slavery were slaves from birth. If a slave owner provided good enough conditions in terms of food and so on, the natural tendency would be for the number of slaves to increase over time, yielding an excess that could be sold.) For that reason, I thought that the upper crust, the people who owned many slaves, were in favor of the ban on importation.

I don't know why slavery for field hands would get too expensive. The work has to be done. Forcing slaves to do it must be less expensive for the slaveowners than if they had to pay fair market value for the labor in a voluntary exchange.

The increase in the slave population might mean that each slave was less valuable (again, looking at this from the horrible perspective of appraising human beings as property) but the total market value of all the slaves would be higher. I took the author's point to be that, as time went on, ending slavery would have entailed more and more of an economic dislocation. Either that "property" would be lost, making the slaveowners much worse off economically, or the government would have had to compensate them, which would have become more and more expensive. The point is that, without the forced abolition of the 1860s, one can't simply assume that slavery would have ended anyway.

Would an independent CSA in 2015 still have slavery? It's hard to conceive of the "peculiar institution" continuing this long, even assuming a Southern victory in the war, but it's also hard to see exactly how the abolition would have occurred.

[TreasonousBastard]

10. You might think it would work out that way, but...

apparently managing that "free" labor supply was more expensive than one would think. Breeding humans for work, or sale, isn't quite as easy as breeding kittens.

As the Romans, and many others, discovered, slaves die faster than they reproduce, or if they didn't die just got too old and crippled to work, but still must be fed and cared for. Just as pregnant women and children must be cared for until they are physically able to work the fields. The Romans simply went to war and enslaved the losers, but the South bought them from African traders.

(Imagine if they used the Roman model and enslaved native Americans...)

I doubt a modern CSA would still have slavery since it would be an outcast in a world where it is banned by all modern nations. Even South Africa had to give up its apartheid, and the pressure to give up slavery would be intense. Besides, it might have just run out of steam with the labor shortages around the turn of the century.

[Igel]

6. In the '60s and '70s pornography was a big issue.

Was it okay to ban the wrong kinds of pictures and words?

For many, it was about the right to publish pornography, to buy it, and to possess it.

Some said it was about free speech, but really, it was about the right to publish pornography, to buy it, and to possess it.

See the difference between the two claims?

To see the right to publish, buy, and possess are instances of free speech. One doesn't argue the principle if the generalization is immediately obvious, esp. if there's not a specific clause in the Constitution that gives you the prefab phrase to make it easier. So many did use the 1st Amendment's phrase, ready made for the occasion. However, the argument wasn't for "freedom of speech" to be promulgated because that's far too broad a category and in many ways was already implemented. There was no prefab phrase for the ability of states to manage their own internal affairs and to have other states respect those limited kinds of sovereignty. Later, in a culture in which "rights" were all-important, the phrase was coined. At the time, it was all about letting states do as they want in a free union. The war itself ended much of the debate about the US being a free union. It was a bound union and judged irrevocable, and with the North's victory the central government's authority grew by leaps and bounds. (Most think this a good idea; that the federal government only after the Civil War gained much of its authority isn't really in dispute.) Some of the change in authority was due to mere interpretation: The commerce clause, presumably, would have seriously altered the role and scope of slavery. While this article points to "profit," most of the profit from slavery was in the breeding and export of slaves to new territories. In those territories new immigrants had money and a culturally preset toolkit of ideas as to how to make them. In Texas, new immigrants also brought slaves with the same ideas. Slavery didn't take off in much of Texas because the economic model was wrong. In areas where you could have plantations, it was tried--but even in the South the black belt was the real driving force of slavery because the crops there were amenable to how slaves would be used. In Texas, the crops were less amenable. And if you want to have a bunch of slaves riding the open range herding cattle ... Yup, give that group of slaves with a single overseer a couple months' worth of supplies, horses, whips and guns and expect them to return with the livestock as told? C'mon. Really?

Sometimes we don't want to use the phrase "states rights." The entire issue with marijuana legalization and whether the feds can ban what the states authorize is "states rights"--but again, there are reasons for not using that particular phrase. The abstract defense of the state to manage its own affairs at odds to federal policy without interference from the feds is, however, states rights. It also came up during speed limit debates, how to handle some of the EPA mandates for waterways that don't cross boundaries, and it's part of the debate over gay marriage--to what extent do states have the authority to not honor contracts and laws in force in another state? Now the attitude is that if a couple marries in MD that union must be honored in a state without gay marriage; the state has no authority to deny MD's right to say that a contract is in force. States don't have that right. (Ah. States rights. So in 1860, a man who bought a slave in Georgia had a contract in force in that state. But New York didn't honor that contract. States did have that right.)

Back to the utility of prefab phrases as a substitute for thinking. In the North in 1859 you'd probably not find abolitionists arguing for "human rights". If anything, you'd find "Christian brotherhood" or, if of an Enlightenment frame of mind, "brotherhood of man." The fact that the North didn't argue for "human rights" doesn't mean that the anti-slavery crusaders wouldn't glom onto that phrase as a good expression of what they intended.

Interpreters and translators run into this hassle from time to time. Sometimes there's no prefab phrase. But really irritating are amateurs who have a smattering of the target language and know that they know one of the words you must use. They listen or read your translation and fail to find precisely that term. Therefore, you mistranslated it. It's a narrow, strait kind of thinking, but there it is. Synonyms, circumlocutions, even the presence of idiom chunks or reworking an allusion never occurs to them, let's leave aside the very idea that different cultures may differ not so much in language but in what needs to be expressed overtly.

The "tariffs and taxes" business is similar. Commerce was a big deal. The need for cheap labor was crucial. "Macroeconomic policy" couldn't have been an issue because nobody said those words, right? But it was. Slavery was macroeconomic policy. Tariffs and taxes was also macroeconomic policy.

Slavery wasn't the main reason for Lincoln's going to war. But it wasn't far from his mind, either. Politics is not an all-or-nothing game. So Obama is looking at the TPP for trade. At the same time, it's part of his political "Asian pivot." There are elements of economic assistance and human rights in there. Environmental issues, too, supposedly. In the House and Senate there are various arguments for and against. So, quick: The one and goal goal that Obama, the House and the Senate have for the TPP is (a) trade, (b) Asian pivot, (c) economic assistance; (d) human rights; (e) environment. You can only pick one because they must all have exactly the same reason and a person can only have one reason for doing something. If you pick (a) you're saying that this was the one and only reason. (Personally, I think this conception makes cardboard cutouts look multifaceted, multidimensional, complex and compelling. It's how you teach history to elementary school kids to prep them for the multiple choice test.)

You look at the public debates that were going on, North and South, and you get away from the quick and easy thinking of what's preserved in simple declarations and lack of hot-button phrases. In other words, you think of the people involved as actual people, and the polities involved as groups of actual people, and simplistic and oft solipsistic justifications tend to crumble.

[Prism]

9. "State's rights" sets my teeth on edge

The whole tipping point was that the Slave Powers were trying to federalize their pro-slavery views, trampling northern state's rights to do it. Fugitive Slave Act, expansion into the territories, Dred Scott.

It's one of the most willfully ignorant misreadings of American History of all time.