Conventional wisdom of the moment tells us that the great war of
1861—1865 was “about” slavery or was “caused by” slavery. I submit that
this is not a historical judgment but a political slogan. What a war is
about has many answers according to the varied perspectives of different
participants and of those who come after. To limit so vast an event as
that war to one cause is to show contempt for the complexities of
history as a quest for the understanding of human action.
Two generations ago, the most perceptive historians, much more
learned than the current crop, said that the war was “about” economics
and was “caused by” economic rivalry. The war has not changed one bit
since then. The perspective has changed. It can change again as long as
people have the freedom to think about the past. History is not a
mathematical calculation or scientific experiment but a vast drama of
which there is always more to be learned.
I was much struck by Barbara Marthal’s insistence in her Stone Mountain
talk on the importance of stories in understanding history. I entirely
concur. History is the experience of human beings. History is a story
and a story is somebody’s story. It tells us about who people are.
History is not a political ideological slogan like “about slavery.”
Ideological slogans are accusations and instruments of conflict and
domination. Stories are instruments of understanding and peace.
Let’s consider the war and slavery. Again and again I encounter
people who say that the South Carolina secession ordinance mentions the
defense of slavery and that one fact proves beyond argument that the war
was caused by slavery. The first States to secede did mention a threat
to slavery as a motive for secession. They also mentioned decades of
economic exploitation and the seizure of the common government for the
first time ever by a sectional party declaredly hostile to the Southern
States. Were they to be a permanently exploited minority, they asked?
This was significant to people who knew that their fathers and
grandfathers had founded the Union for the protection and benefit of ALL
the States.
It is no surprise that they mentioned potential interference with
slavery as a threat to their everyday life and their social structure.
Only a few months before, John Brown and his followers had attempted
just that. They murdered a number of people including a free black man
who was a respected member of the Harpers Ferry community and a
grand-nephew of George Washington because Brown wanted Washington’s
sword as a talisman. In Brown’s baggage was a constitution making him
dictator of a new black nation and a supply of pikes to be used to stab
to death the slave-owner and his wife and children.
It is significant that not one single slave joined Brown’s attempted
blow against slavery. It was entirely an affair of outsiders.
Significant also is that six Northern rich men financed Brown and that
some elements of the North celebrated him as a saint, an agent of God,
ringing the church bells at his execution. Even more significantly,
Brown was merely acting out the venomous hatred of Southerners that had
characterized some parts of Northern society for many years previously.
Could this relentless barrage of hatred directed by Northerners
against their Southern fellow citizens have perhaps had something to do
with the secession impulse? That was the opinion of Horatio Seymour,
Democratic governor of New York. In a public address he pointed to the
enormity of making war on Southern fellow citizens who had always been
exceptionally loyal Americans, but who had been driven to secession by
New England fanaticism.
Secessionists were well aware that slavery was under no immediate
threat within the Union. Indeed, some anti-secessionists, especially
those with the largest investment in slave property, argued that slavery
was safer under the Union than in a new experiment in government.
Advocates of the “slavery and nothing but slavery” interpretation
also like to mention a speech in which Confederate Vice-President
Alexander Stephens is supposed to have said that white supremacy was the
“cornerstone” of the Confederacy. The speech was
ad hoc and
badly reported, but so what? White supremacy was also the cornerstone of
the United States. A law of the first Congress established that only
white people could be naturalized as citizens. Abraham Lincoln’s
Illinois forbade black people to enter the State and deprived those who
were there of citizenship rights.
Instead of quoting two cherry-picked quotations, serious historians
will look into more of the vast documentation of the time. For instance,
in determining what the war was “about,” why not consider Jefferson
Davis’s inaugural address, the resolutions of the Confederate Congress,
numerous speeches by Southern spokesmen of the time as they explained
their departure from the U.S. Congress and spoke to their constituents
about the necessity of secession. Or for that matter look at the entire
texts of the secession documents.
Our advocates of slavery causation practice the same superficial and
deceitful tactics in viewing their side of the fight. They rely mostly
on a few pretty phrases from a few of Lincoln’s prettier speeches to
account for the winning side in the Great Civil War. But what were
Northerners really saying?
I am going to do something radical. I am going to review what
Northerners had to say about the war. Not a single Southern source,
Southern opinion, or Southern accusation will I present. Just the words
of Northerners (and a few foreign observers) on what the war was
“about.”
Abraham Lincoln was at pains to assure the South that he intended no
threat to slavery. He said he understood Southerners and that
Northerners would be exactly like them living in the same circumstances.
He said that while slavery was not a good thing (which most Southerners
agreed with) he had no power to interfere with slavery and would not
know what to do if he had the power. He acquiesced in a proposed 13th
Amendment that would have guaranteed slavery into the 20th century.
Later, he famously told Horace Greeley that his purpose was to save the
Union, for which he would free all the slaves, some of the slaves, or
none of the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation itself promised a
continuance of slavery to States that would lay down their arms.
All Lincoln wanted was to prevent slavery in any territories, future
States, which then might become Southern and vote against Northern
control of the Treasury and federal legislation. From the anti-slavery
perspective this is a highly immoral position. At the time of the
Missouri Compromise, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison said that
restricting the spread of slavery was a false, politically motivated
position. The best thing for the welfare of African Americans and their
eventual emancipation was to allow them to spread as thinly as possible.
Delegation after delegation came to Lincoln in early days to beg him
to do something to avoid war. Remember that 61% of the American people
had voted against this great hero of democracy, which ought to have led
him to a conciliatory frame of mind. He invariably replied that he could
not do without “his revenue.” He said nary a word about slavery. Most
of “his revenue” was collected at the Southern ports because of the
tariff to protect Northern industry and most of it was spent in the
North. Lincoln could not do without that revenue and vowed his
determination to collect it without interruption by secession. He knew
that his political backing rested largely on New England/New York money
men and the rising power of the new industrialists of Cleveland,
Detroit, and Chicago who were aggressively demanding that the federal
government sponsor and support them. The revenue also provided the
patronage of offices and contracts for his hungry supporters, without
which his party would dwindle away.
Discussing the reaction to secession, the New York Times
editorialized: “The commercial bearing of the question has acted upon
the North. We were divided and confused until our pockets were touched.”
A Manchester, N.H., paper was one of hundreds of others that agreed,
saying: “It is very clear that the South gains by this process and we
lose. No, we must not let the South go.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress officially declared that the war WAS NOT
AGAINST SLAVERY but to preserve the Union. (By preserving the Union, of
course, they actually meant not preserving the real Union but ensuring
their control of the federal machinery.)
At the Hampton Roads peace conference a few months before Appomattox,
Lincoln suggested to the Confederate representatives that if they
ceased fighting then the Emancipation Proclamation could be left to the
courts to survive or fall. Alexander Stephens, unlike Lincoln, really
cared about the fate of the black people and asked Lincoln what was to
become of them if freed in their present unlettered and propertyless
condition. Lincoln’s reply: “Root, hog, or die.” A line from a minstrel
song suggesting that they should survive as best they could. Lincoln
routinely used the N-word all his life, as did most Northerners.
A statement in which Lincoln is said to favour voting rights for
black men who were educated or had been soldiers has been shown to be
fraudulent. Within a few days of his death he was still speaking of
colonization outside the U.S.
The South, supposedly fighting for slavery, did not respond to any of
these offers for the continuance of slavery. In fact, wise Southerners
like Jefferson Davis realized that if war came it would likely disrupt
slavery as it had during the first war of independence. That did not in
the least alter his desire for the independence and self-government that
was the birthright of Americans. Late in the war he sent a special
emissary to offer emancipation if European powers would break the
illegal blockade.
Saying that the South was fighting only to defend the evils of
slavery is a deceitful back-handed way to suggest that, therefore the
North was fighting to rid America of the evils of slavery. Nothing could
be further from the truth. First of all, secession did not necessarily
require war against the South. That was a choice. Slavery had existed
for over two hundred years and there was no Northern majority in favour
of emancipation. Emancipation was not the result of a moral crusade
against evil but a byproduct of a ruthless war of invasion and conquest.
Not one single act of Lincoln and the North in the war was motivated by
moral considerations in regard to slavery.
Even if slavery was a reason for secession, it does not explain why
the North made a war of invasion and conquest on a people who only
wanted to be let alone to live as they had always lived. The question of
why the North made war is not even asked by our current historians.
They assume without examination that the North is always right and the
South is always evil. They do not look at the abundant Northern evidence
that might shed light on the matter.
When we speak about the causes of war should we not pay some
attention to the motives of the attacker and not blame everything on the
people who were attacked and conquered? To say that the war was
“caused” by the South’s defense of slavery is logically comparable to
the assertion that World War II was caused by Poland resisting attack by
Germany. People who think this way harbor an unacknowledged assumption:
Southerners are not fellow citizens deserving of tolerance but bad
people and deserve to be conquered. The South and its people are the
property of the North to do with as they wish. Therefore no other
justification is needed. That Leninist attitude is very much still alive
judging by the abuse I receive in print and by e-mail. The abuse never
discusses evidence, only denounces what is called “Neo-Confederate” and
“Lost Cause” mythology. These are both political terms of abuse that
have no real meaning and are designed to silence your enemy unheard.
Let us look at the U.S. Senate in February 1863. Senator John Sherman
of Ohio, one of the most prominent of the Republican supporters of war
against the South, has the floor. He is arguing in favour of a bill to
establish a system of national banks and national bank currency. He
declared that this bill was the most important business pending before
the country. It was so important, he said, that he would see all the
slaves remain slaves if it could be passed. Let me repeat this. He would
rather leave all the slaves in bondage rather than lose the national
bank bill. This was a few weeks after the issuing of the Emancipation
Proclamation.
What about this bill? Don’t be deceived by the terminology. So-called
National Banks were to be the property of favoured groups of private
capitalists. They were to have as capital interest-bearing government
bonds at a 50% discount. The bank notes that they were to issue were to
be the national currency. The banks, not the government, had control of
this currency. That is, these favoured capitalists had the immense power
and profit of controlling the money and credit of the country. Crony
capitalism that has been the main feature of the American regime up to
this very moment.
Senator Sherman’s brother, General Sherman, had recently been working
his way across Mississippi, not fighting armed enemies but destroying
the infrastructure and the food and housing of white women and children
and black people. When the houses are burned, the livestock taken away
or killed, the barns with tools and seed crops destroyed, fences torn
down, stored food and standing crops destroyed, the black people will
starve as well as the whites. General Sherman was heard to say: “Damn
the niggers! I wish they were anywhere but here and could be kept at
work.”
General Sherman was not fighting for the emancipation of black
people. He was a proto-fascist who wanted to crush citizens who had the
gall to disobey the government.
The gracious Mrs. General Sherman agreed. She wrote her husband thus:
“I hope this may not be a war of emancipation but of
extermination, & that all under the influence of the foul fiend may
be driven like swine into the sea. May we carry fire and sword into
their states till not one habitation is left standing.”
Not a word about the slaves.
As the war began, the famous abolitionist Theodore Weld declared that
the South had to be wiped out because it is “the foe to Northern
industry—to our mines, our manufactures, our commerce.” Nothing said
about benefit to the slaves. The famous abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher
enjoyed a European tour while the rivers of blood were flowing in
America. Asked by a British audience why the North did not simply let
the South go, Beecher replied, “Why not let the South go? O that the
South would go! But then they must leave us their lands.”
Then there is the Massachusetts Colonel who wrote his governor from the South in January 1862:
“The thing we seek is permanent dominion. . . . They
think we mean to take their slaves? Bah! We must take their ports, their
mines, their water power, the very soil they plow . . . .”
Seizing Southern resources was a common theme among advocates of the
Union. Southerners were not fellow citizens of a nation. They were
obstacles to be disposed of so Yankees could use their resources to suit
themselves. The imperialist impulse was nakedly and unashamedly
expressed before, during, and after the war.
Charles Dickens, who had spent much time in the U.S. a few years
before the war, told readers of his monthly magazine in 1862: “The
Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious
humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the
Southern states.”
Another British observer, John Stuart Mill, hoped the war would be
against slavery and was disappointed. “The North, it seems,” Mill wrote,
“have no more objections to slavery than the South have.”
Another European thinker to comment was Karl Marx. Like many later
Lincoln worshippers, Marx believed that the French Revolution was a
continuation of the American Revolution and Lincoln’s revolution in
America a continuation of the French. He thought, wrongly, that Lincoln
was defending the “labour of the emigrant against the aggressions of the
slave driver.” The war, then, is in behalf of the German immigrants who
had flooded the Midwest after the 1848 revolutions. Not a word about
the slaves themselves. Indeed, it was the numbers and ardent support of
these German immigrants that turned the Midwest from Democrat to
Republican and elected Lincoln. It would seem that Marx, like Lincoln,
wanted the land for WHITE workers.
Governor Joel Parker of New Jersey, a reluctant Democratic supporter
of the war, knew what it was all about: “Slavery is no more the cause of
this war than gold is the cause of robbery,” he said. Like all Northern
opponents and reluctant supporters of Lincoln, he knew the war was
about economic domination. As one “Copperhead” editor put it: the war
was simply “a murderous crusade for plunder and party power.” “Dealing
in confiscated cotton seems to be the prime activity of the army,” he
added.
Wall Street agreed and approved. Here is a private circular passed among bankers and brokers in late 1861:
“Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power and
this I and my friends are all in favor of, for slavery is but the owning
of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the
European plan, led on by England, is that capital shall control labor by
controlling wages. The great debt that capitalists will see to it is
made out of the war must be used as a means to control the volume of
money.”
It is not clear whether this is authentic or a satire, but it tells the truth whichever.
The libertarian Lysander Spooner, an abolitionist, called the Lincoln
rule “usurpation and tyranny” that had nothing to do with a moral
opposition to slavery. “It has cost this country a million of lives, and
the loss of everything that resembles political liberty.”
Here is Frederick Douglass, the most prominent African American of the 19th century:
“It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit . . .
Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our
man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits
of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man. He was
preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare
of white men. He was ready and willing at any time . . . to deny,
postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to
promote the welfare of the white people of his country.”
What better testimony is needed that emancipation was a by-product,
not a goal, of a war of conquest. Let me repeat: emancipation was a
by-product of the war, never a goal.
How about these curiosities from the greatest of Northern
intellectuals, Emerson. He records in his journals: “But the secret, the
esoteric of abolition—a secret, too, from the abolitionist—is, that the
negro and the negro-holder are really of one party.” And again, “The
abolitionist wishes to abolish slavery, but because he wishes to abolish
the black man.” Emerson had previously predicted that African Americans
were like the Dodo, incapable of surviving without care and doomed to
disappear. Another abolitionist, James G. Birney, says: “The negroes are
part of the enemy.”
Indeed a staple of Northern discourse was that black people would and
should disappear, leaving the field to righteous New England
Anglo-Saxons. My friend Howard White remarks: “Whatever his faults
regarding slavery, the Southerner never found the existence of Africans
in his world
per se a scandal. That particular foolishness had its roots in the regions further North.”
In 1866, Boston had a meeting of abolitionists and strong Unionists.
The speaker, a clergymen, compared the South to a sewer. It was to be
drained of its present inhabitants and “to be filled up with Yankee
immigration . . . and upon that foundation would be constructed a new
order of things. To be reconstructed, the South must be Northernized,
and until that was done, the work of reconstruction could not be
accomplished.” Not a word about a role for African Americans in this
program.
One of the most important aspects of the elimination of slavery is
seldom mentioned. The absence of any care or planning for the future of
black Americans. The Russian Czar pointed this out to an American
visitor as a flaw that invalidated the fruits of emancipation. We could
fill ten books with evidence of Northern mistreatment of black people
during and after the war. Emancipation as it occurred was not a happy
experience. To borrow Kirkpatrick Sale’s term, it was a Hell. I
recommend Kirk’s book
Emancipation Hell and Paul Graham’s work
When the Yankees Come, which are available here.
I suspect many Americans imagine emancipation as soldiers in blue and
freed people rushing into one another’s arms to celebrate the day of
Jubilee. As may be proved from thousands of Northern sources, the Union
solders’ encounter with the black people of the South was overwhelmingly
hate-filled, abusive, and exploitive. This subject is just beginning to
be explored seriously. Wrote one Northerner of Sherman’s men, they “are
impatient of darkies, and annoyed to see them pampered, petted and
spoiled.” Ambrose Bierce, a hard-fighting Union soldier for the entire
war, said that the black people he saw were virtual slaves as the
concubines and servants of Union officers.
Many black people took to the roads not because of an intangible
emancipation but because their homes and living had been destroyed. They
collected in camps which had catastrophic rates or mortality. The army
asked some Northern governors to take some of these people, at least
temporarily. The governors of Massachusetts and Illinois, Lincoln’s most
fervid supporters, went ballistic. This was unacceptable. The black
people would be uncomfortable in the North and much happier in the
South, said the longtime abolitionist Governor Andrew of Massachusetts.
Happier in the South than in Massachusetts?
What about those black soldiers in the Northern army, used mainly for
labour and forlorn hopes like the Crater? A historian quotes a Northern
observer of U.S. Army activities in occupied coastal Carolina in 1864.
Generals declared their intention to recruit “every able-bodied male in
the department.” Writes the Northern observer: “The atrocious
impressments of boys of fourteen and responsible men with large
dependent families, and the shooting down of negroes who resisted, were
common occurrences.”
The greater number of Southern black people remained at home. They
received official notice of freedom not from the U.S. Army but from the
master who, when he got home from the Confederate army, gathered the
people, told them they were free, and that they must work out a new way
of surviving together.
Advocates of the war was “caused by slavery” say that the question has
been settled and that any disagreement is from evil and misguided
Neo-Confederates deceived by a “Lost Cause” myth.
In fact, no great historical question can ever be closed off by a
slogan as long as we are free to think. Howard White and I recently put
out a book about the war. Careful, well-supported essays, by 16 serious
people. Immediately it appeared on amazon, someone wrote in: “I’m so
tired of the Lost Cause writing. Don’t believe the bullshit in this
useless pamphlet.” He could not have had time to actually read the book.
It can be dismissed unread because he has the righteous cause and we do
not. This is not historical debate. It is the propaganda trick of
labeling something you do not like in order to control and suppress it.
Such are those who want the war to be all about slavery—hateful,
disdainful, ignorant, and unwilling to engage in honest discussion.
But if you insist on a short answer solution as to what caused the
war I will venture one. The cause of the greatest bloodletting in
American history was Yankee greed and hatred. This is infinitely
documented before, during, and after the war.
Glory, Glory, Halleluhah
Clyde Wilson is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the
University of South Carolina where he was the editor of the multivolume
The Papers of John C. Calhoun. He is the M.E. Bradford Distinguished
Chair at the Abbeville Institute. He is the author or editor of over
thirty books and published over 600 articles, essays and reviews.
More from Clyde Wilson
