When speaking to the average Civil War enthusiast you may hear them remark something like “all the founding Confederate documents mention slavery,” while simultaneously citing the ordinances of Mississippi or South Carolina. This often leads people to believe the entire conflict was over the singular issue of slavery. There’s no denying these documents, but the truth is that these claims are much smaller pieces in a much larger puzzle.
In fact, only four of the thirteen Southern States mentioned the issue of slavery directly within their secession documents. (1) Not all the states declared the slavery issue. Take Virginia for example. Virginia—the Mother of States and Statesmen—the home of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, James Madison, and George Washington, the land of our very own beloved Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. When the waves of secession first broke out, the Old Dominion did not immediately join the secession movement as some may assume. Under the legal referendums held, she chose to remain within the Union. It wasn’t until Lincoln called for Virginia to provide troops to invade the Southern states, overthrow their elected state governments, and replace them with appointed military governors that she chose to stand with the Confederacy. (2) Did Virginia secede because of slavery?
When slavery is mentioned within these Southern documents, what is expressed is outrage toward the abolitionist crusade. You see, the abolitionists were not your typical anti-slavery movement. Simply put, they were radicals. Largely, they were crude amalgams of ideologies taken from the anti-hierarchical European revolutions, and animated by their same fervor for destruction. Their aim in ending American slavery was not a practical one—neither economically, nor social—no, their idea for its demise was that of race war and murder. This is documented in their newspaper articles and leaflets and was explicitly showcased in the John Brown fiasco of the 1850’s.
On the night of May 24, 1856, Captain John Brown and his small band of Yankee abolitionist-equipped men descended on a settlement of Southerners at Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas. They carried with them newly sharpened swords – a prominent symbol in Mrs. Howe’s song, the Battle Hymn of the Republic (You can read more about that here). There they proceeded, under cover of darkness, to split the skulls and hack to death five innocent people. The first three of their victims, James P. Doyle and his sons, twenty-two-year-old William and twenty-year-old Drury—Catholics from Tennessee. They were never slave owners and when later asked why her husband and sons had been so brutally murdered, Mrs. Doyle replied, “Just we were southern people, I reckon.” Drury had made an attempt to flee, which resulted in particularly gruesome hacking, and his body, left limbless, appeared more as viscera. The other victims were Allen Wilkinson, hacked to death while his wife and children watched in horror, and William Sherman, whose mutilated body was found floating in the creek with his left hand hanging by a strand of skin, his skull split open and some of his brains washed away. (3) When Julia Ward Howe, the famed abolitionist, received word of the massacre, her own words revealed that she was perversely thrilled and inspired by this grisly crime. Like Mr. Brown, Mrs. Howe both remain symbols of the abolitionist movement, and both today are portrayed as heroes in modern textbooks.
In the book, The Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired with John Brown, by Edward J. Renehan, he states “…very few know the story of how a circle of Northern aristocrats covertly aided Brown in his quest to ignite a nationwide slave revolt. These influential men, who called themselves the “Secret Six,” included the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, a world-famous physician, a Unitarian minister whose rhetoric helped shape Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, an educator and close friend of Emerson and Thoreau, and two prominent philanthropists…these pillars of Northern society came to believe that armed conflict was necessary to purge the United States of a government-sanctioned evil… the messianic Brown enlisted their support, and they sought to cover up their association with him – even perjuring themselves before a congressional investigation – after his bloody debacle.”
I too would be outraged if a group of people, hundreds of miles away, were not only lying about my culture but attempting to foment its upheaval in the most gruesome way possible. These were the radicals who admired John Brown’s efforts and those who made up the newly formed Republican Party, whose highly unpopular presidential candidate won the 1861 presidency. The Southern outrage about slavery which is expressed in a handful of secession documents was directed at a specific radical group that aimed to destroy the Union as it was on behalf of their own moral crusade.
The Republican party today is known as the “conservative” party. This was not the case in 1860. This was the party of Lincoln—the radical German socialists—the unitarians who denied the deity of Christ—and those who wanted a powerful centralized government. I am generalizing, but these were the kind of people who made up the Republican Party of 1860.
Another important factor to consider is that if the threat to Southern slavery had been the singular issue pushing the South toward secession, all the states would have needed to do was return to the Union. The Federal government attempted to entice them back using the Corwin Amendment—the first proposed 13th Amendment: “No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.” This would have permanently protected slavery within the U.S. Constitution. (4) It was passed by the House and Senate and supported by many Northern States. Why didn’t these states rejoin the Union if their aim was simply to defend slavery?
Once you can put the slavery issue into its proper historical perspective, you can more easily understand the other issues that Southerners were contending with. purveyors of the modern narrative will quickly give you historical texts concerning slavery without further context, but rarely will they talk about other founding Confederate documents and their economic implications pertaining to the war.
Here's another secession document, mentioning a major issue that Southerners were contending with:
“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. It is no longer a free government, but a despotism.… The Southern States now stand exactly in the same position toward the Northern States that the Colonies did towards Great Britain. The Northern States, having the majority in Congress, claim the same power of omnipotence in legislation as the British parliament.” (5)
Ahh, they must be talking about the North perpetuating this despotism because they hated slavery, right? Read on…
“…with the Southern States, towards the Northern States, in the vital matter of taxation. They are in a minority in Congress. Their representation in Congress is useless to protect them against unjust taxation; and they are taxed by the people of the North for their benefit, exactly as the people of Great Britain…the taxes laid by the Congress of the United States, have been laid with a view of subserving the interests of the North….Taxed by duties on imports, not for revenue…to promote, by prohibitions, Northern interests in the products of their mines and manufacturers…after the taxes are collected, three-fourths of them are expended at the North.” (6)
The primary political aim of the Republican Party’s platform, upon the candidacy of Abraham Lincoln, was that tariffs were non-negotiable. The party and the Federal government had a vested interest in one another. Whilst the powers in Washington were protecting domestic manufacturing for the Republican party’s key supporters, they collected most of their revenue from these import tariffs. Lincoln stated in his inaugural address that any state that did not collect its fair share of tariff revenues would be met with military intervention by his administration. (5) When Lincoln was asked why he would not allow the South to be let go in peace he stated, “What about the revenue? What would I do about the collection of duties?" (7) The Charleston Mercury summarized the issue well early on in its publication on December 23, 1860—right before the Fort Sumter incident, “The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the government of the United States, and in the revolution the north has effected in this government from a confederated republic to a national sectional despotism.” (8) R.L. Dabney, theologian and philosopher, and Stonewall Jackson’s Chief of Staff, speaks in greater detail of Lincoln’s Republican party and its economic aim in perpetuating war, entitled The Real Cause of the War: Over Lincoln's Tariff? (we sell this booklet on ConfederateShop.com)
Slavery, tariffs, sectional differences, Constitutional violations—it’s a heap of issues. Simply put, if the war wasn’t all about slavery, what was it over? Why did the South secede? The Southern states established their independence in order to exercise self-government, just like their forefathers in 1776. They desired to establish a government “instituted among men…deriving their just powers from [their] consent.” (8) You hear the term “states-rights” thrown around by our side, what should be emphasized is the South’s desire for self-determined government—the right of a body of people, who hold legal referendums and elections, to decide what is best for themselves and their posterity: economically, socially, and culturally.
References
Virginia General Assembly voted in January 14th, 1861 to hold an election on whether to hold a state convention, and if a convention was held, to elect delegates to that convention. That election occurred on February 4, 1861. The Convention met on February 13, 1861.
In fact, George W, Summers of Kanawha County said that the best way to protect slavery was to remain in the Union and that secession would be bad for slavery. He said, “We are to become to use a homely phrase, the outside row of the cornfield,” meaning secession would move the Canadian border, in effect, down to the Ohop River. A slave escaping into Canada could not be retrieved. After secession, a slave escaping across the Ohio could not be retrieved. George H. Reese (ed.), Proceedings of the Virginia State Convention of 1861 (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1965), vpl. 1, pg. 618.John Brown: The Making of a Martyr, Robert Penn Warren, 1929, pp. 161-166.
https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/artifact/hj-res-80-proposing-amend-constitution-united-states-corwin-amendment-february-28-1861
William Livingstone, Livingstone’s History of the Republican Party, (Detroit: Wm. Livingstone, 1900), I:122.
Rhett, R., An Address of the People of South Carolina. In Journal of the Convention of the People of South Carolina, held in 1860, 61, 62 (pp. 467-476) Columbia: R.W. Gibbes, printer to the Convention.
Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, 579 ff., esp. 583
Testimonial of Delegate Col. John Baldwin of the Virginia secession convention, April 4, 1861, private interview with Lincoln. Sourced from valley.lib.virginia.edu
Delay,” Charleston Mercury, December 3, 1860, p. 1, col. 2.
Declaration of Independence, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
One of the great misconceptions among modern Americans is that prior to the Civil War, the dispute over slavery was primarily moral in nature, when in fact it was more political in nature. The political tension regarding slavery had its roots in the Constitution, and exploded following the acquisition of territory after the Mexican American War. Unfortunately, most Americans don’t understand that history is complicated, and that major questions cannot be solved with simple, one-word answers.