Civil War 101..the South did not secede over slavery!

The talking points of the looney left...they embrace Lincoln over his  "Emancipation Proclamation"...and insist the South left the Union Exclusively over slavery...this is a myth...as is the myth that conservatives are racists...Fact: the KKK was started by the DNC at the end of the Civil War in both the South and the North!

Let's take a trip back in time via History 101: 


The issues that caused the Civil War had been brewing since the United States was formed. The most important causes Southerners listed for the war were unfair taxation, states' rights, and the slavery issue. Here are some primary sources that show how heated these issues had become by the late 1850s.

Unfair Taxation The history and economy of the North were very different from those of the South. Factories developed in the North, while large cotton plantations developed in the South. The Southern plantation owners relied on slave labor for economic success. Their crops were sold to cotton mills in England, and the ships returned with cheap manufactured goods produced in Europe. By the early 1800s, Northern factories were producing many of those same goods, and Northern politicians were able to pass heavy taxes on imported goods from Europe so that Southerners would have to buy goods from the North. These taxes angered Southerners.

• Laws unfavorable to the South were passed. 

States' Rights
Southerners felt that the Federal government was passing laws, such as import taxes, that treated them unfairly. They believed that individual states had the right to "nullify", or overturn, any law the Federal government passed. They also believed that individual states had the right to leave the United States and form their own independent country. Most people in the North believed that the concepts of "nullification" and "states' rights" would make the United States a weaker country and were against these ideas.

• "The Union must be preserved" -- Henry Clay, 1850
• Kentucky Resolutions -- 1798
• Lincoln's inaugural address
• "South has the right to secede" -- Jefferson Davis' inaugural address, February 1861
• "The South has the right to secede from the Union" -- Alabama letter to Kentucky Governor   

Why Did the South Secede?

Submitted by Webmaster Ann on Fri, 02/29/2008 - 17:15

Why Did the South Secede?

Michael T. Griffith

2004

@All Rights Reserved

Nearly all textbooks give the impression that the South withdrew from the Union merely to protect the institution of slavery.  This is a misleading, overly simplistic characterization.  Slavery was not the only factor that led the South to secede.  In fact, some of the wealthiest slaveholders opposed secession.  They believed, for good reason, that slavery would actually be safer in the Union than out of it.  Historian William Klingaman notes that even Lincoln argued that the South would have a harder time protecting slavery outside the Union:

But secession, Lincoln argued, would actually make it harder for the South to preserve slavery. If the Southern states tried to leave the Union, they would lose all their constitutional guarantees. . . . (Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation, New York: Viking Press, 2001, p. 32) 

Most people aren’t aware that, even as president, Lincoln supported a proposed constitutional amendment that would have guaranteed slavery’s continuation forever.  Lincoln mentioned his support for this amendment in his first inaugural address.  In the years leading up to the Civil War, Lincoln acknowledged that slavery was protected by the Constitution.  He also supported the Fugitive Slave Law.  Therefore, some Southern statesmen didn’t believe Lincoln was going to threaten slavery’s existence.  Yet, they supported secession anyway. 

Most Southern leaders who advocated secession in order to protect slavery did so because they believed that Lincoln and the Republicans in Congress would try to abolish slavery by unconstitutional means and that Southern slaveholders would not receive compensation for their slaves.  Southern spokesmen felt this would be unfair, since Northern slaveholders had been able to receive various types of compensation for their slaves when most Northern states had abolished slavery several decades earlier.  They knew that emancipation without compensation would do great damage to the Southern economy.  Critics note that many Southern statesmen voiced the view that slavery was a “positive good.”  Yet, even the “positive good” advocates acknowledged that slavery had its evils and abuses.  In any case, there were plenty of Southerners who opposed slavery and who were willing to see it abolished in a fair, gradual manner, as had been done in most Northern states.  After all, 69-75 percent of Southern families did not own slaves.  However, few Southerners believed the Republicans were interested in a fair, gradual emancipation program.  The more extreme Republicans, who were known as “Radical Republicans,” certainly weren’t interested in such a program. 

Few people today understand why the South distrusted the Republican Party.  Not only was the Republican Party a new party, it was also the first purely regional (or sectional) party in the country’s history.  Republican leaders frequently gave inflammatory anti-Southern speeches, some of which included egregious falsehoods and even threats  (Susan-Mary Grant, North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era, University of Kansas Press, 2000).  Historian William C. Cooper points out that the Republicans “had no interest in cultivating support in the South, which they branded as basically un-American,” and that “No major party had ever before so completely repudiated the South” (Jefferson Davis, American, Vintage Books Edition, New York: Vintage Books, 2000, pp. 294, 295).  British historian Susan-Mary Grant notes that the Republican Party that came into being in 1854 was “a sectional party with a sectional ideology . . . that was predicated on opposition to the South, to the economic, social, and political reality of that section” (North Over South, p. 17).  

Southerners were alarmed when dozens of Republican congressmen endorsed an advertisement for Hinton Helper’s book The Impending Crisis of the South, which spoke approvingly of a potential slave revolt that would kill untold numbers of Southern citizens in a “barbarous massacre.”  The Republican Party even distributed an abridged edition of the book as a campaign document, and Republican editors added captions like “The Stupid Masses of the South” and “Revolution . . . Violently If We Must.”  Southerners also noticed that the Republicans broke the long-established tradition of having a sectionally balanced presidential ticket.  For decades, all major political parties had nominated tickets that consisted of one candidate from the North and one from the South.  Each of the three other parties in the 1860 election followed this tradition, but not the Republican Party.  Another reason that Southerners were worried about the Republicans was that the party’s leaders made it clear they would push for several policies that the South believed were harmful and unconstitutional.  Many Southerners feared that Republican leaders were determined to subjugate and exploit the South by any means.  With these facts in mind, perhaps it’s not hard to understand why the election of Lincoln triggered the secession of seven Southern states. 

As mentioned, slavery was not the only factor that led to secession.  If one reads the Declarations of Causes of Secession and the Ordinances of Secession that were issued by the first seven states of the Confederacy, one finds that there were several reasons these states wanted to be independent and that some of the reasons had nothing to do with slavery.  For example, the Georgia and Texas Declarations of Causes of Secession included economic complaints, in addition to concerns relating to slavery.  The Texas declaration complained that unfair federal legislation was enriching the North at the expense of the Southern states. The Georgia declaration complained about federal protectionism and subsidies for Northern business interests. 

The South’s long-standing opposition to the federal tariff was another factor that led to secession.  The South’s concern over the tariff was nothing new.  South Carolina and the federal government nearly went to war over the tariff in 1832-1833.  In the session of Congress before Lincoln’s inauguration, the House of Representatives passed a huge increase in the tariff, over the loud objections of Southern congressmen.  Naturally, this alarmed Southern statesmen at all levels, since the South was always hit hardest by the tariff.  One only has to read the many speeches that Southern senators and representatives gave against the 1860-1861 tariff increase to see how seriously they took this issue.  Moreover, in the congressional debates from the previous four decades, one can find dozens of Southern speeches against the tariff.  Opposition to the tariff led some Southern leaders to talk of secession over thirty years before the Civil War occurred (Walter Brian Cisco, Taking A Stand: Portraits from the Southern Secession Movement, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania: White Mane Books, 2000, pp. 1-44).  Scholars who argue that Southern statesmen didn’t really care about the tariff and that this was merely a “smoke screen” are ignoring a massive body of historical evidence. 

The South had valid complaints about the tariff.  Jeffrey R. Hummel, a professor of economics and history, notes the negative impact of the tariff on the Southern states and concedes that Southern complaints about the tariff were justified:

Despite a steady decline in import duties, tariffs fell disproportionately on Southerners, reducing their income from cotton production by at least 10 percent just before the Civil War. . . .

At least with respect to the tariff’s adverse impact, Southerners were not only absolutely correct but displayed a sophisticated understanding of economics. . . .  The tariff was inefficient; it not only redistributed wealth from farmers and planters to manufacturers and laborers but overall made the country poorer. (Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War, Chicago: Open Court, 1996, pp. 39-40, 73) 

A major point of contention between the North and the South was the issue of the size and power of the federal government as defined by the Constitution.  Most Northern politicians supported a loose reading of the Constitution and wanted to expand the size and scope of the federal government, even if that meant giving the government powers that were not authorized by the Constitution.  Most Southern statesmen supported a strict reading of the Constitution and believed the federal government should perform only those functions that were expressly delegated to it by the Constitution.  From the earliest days of the republic, Southern and Northern leaders battled over this issue.  Our textbooks rarely do justice to this important fact. 

Four of the eleven Southern states did not join in the first wave of secession and did not secede over slavery.  Those four states—Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia—only seceded months later when Lincoln made it clear he was going to launch an invasion in order to “save” the Union.  In fact, those states initially voted against secession by fairly sizable majorities.  However, they believed the Union should not be maintained by force.  Therefore, when Lincoln announced he was calling up 75,000 troops to form an invasion force, they held new votes, and in each case the vote was strongly in favor of secession.  Thus, four of the eleven states that comprised the Confederacy seceded because of their objection to federal coercion and not because of slavery.

Virtually no history textbooks mention the fact that each Confederate state retained the right to abolish slavery within its borders, and that the Confederate Constitution permitted the admission of free states into the Confederacy.  In his analysis of the Confederate Constitution, historian Forrest McDonald says the following:

All states reserved the right to abolish slavery in their domains, and new states could be admitted without slavery if two-thirds of the existing states agreed—the idea being that the tier of free states bordering the Ohio River might in time wish to join the Confederacy. (States’ Rights and the Union, University of Kansas Press, 2000, p. 204)