hanuman wrote:Namelessfly, as far as I understand things, the Union government's position was that the Constitution's Preamble provided for "a more perfect Union" than the Articles of Confederation, and that by ratifying the Constitution, the States had entered into a binding contract that precluded secession?
I'm not disputing what anyone said. You guys are Americans, so you have a better insight into your own history. I'm simply clarifying my own understanding, from an outsider's perspective. I'm always willing to learn, though, so I find this discussion truly interesting.
Nameless is essentially correct about the way in which what happened in Charleston changed the tempo and violence quotient of the secession crisis in 1861, although the question of what might have happened had
Major Anderson (he wasn't a general yet) not occupied Fort Sumter is certainly arguable. And he's also right that the reasons the war were fought are far more complex than many people are prepared to admit. I have no desire to turn this into a flame war, and I know this is an issue which is near and dear (and important) to a lot of hearts, but I think people who are claiming the war was a holy crusade to abolish slavery and say “history shows” that it was need to be a little careful about the inferences and conclusions they draw and the vigor with which they make their case.
Secession was a tool embraced by citizens of states which felt their legitimate rights were being violated/surpressed under the current national government. The notion first surfaced in
New England, not the South, about the time of the War of 1812. Despite assertions by some historians, the Hartford Convention (Dec. 1813-Jan. 1814) did not include secession from the Union among the proposals voted out, but the Federalists very definitely
tried to have it added to the pot. There was much opposition to the 3/5 rule (Article I, Section 2 of the US Constitution) under which every five slaves were counted as equivalent to three free citizens for apportionment calculations in the House of Representastives. The opposition in New England in the first quarter of the 19th century had very little (outside strict abolitionist circles, especially among the Quakers) with abolition, however. It had to do with the perception that the South had an unfair advantage in a Federal government which had already been dominated by the “Virginia dynasty” of Southern presidents. The folks in New England felt that the Louisiana Purchase (which the Federalists regarded as an unconstitutional land grab) had been pushed through by Southern interests and a Southern president (Jefferson) and would offer fertile territory for an expansion of the slave-based Southern agrarian economy. The primary concern was that this would institutionalize the 3/5 Rule’s “unfair advantage” for the South and West and leave New England permanently disadvantaged, and they regarded the War of 1812 as a result of what could happen/had happened as a result.
The “Warhawks’” pressure to declare war on Great Britain in 1812 was seen (correctly) as being driven largely by Western (and Southern) political power at the Federal level, while the war itself was ruinous to the New England economy. New England’s support for the war was minimal, to say the least. Virtually none of the New England governors honored requests for militia from the Federal government once the war began, claiming that they were needed for coast defense against the Brits. Because they refused to send the called for troops to serve under regular Army officers, Madison’s administration refused to pay their salaries out of the Treasury, and Massachusetts’ legislature appropriated something like $1 million (a
chunk of change in 1812) to raise a
state army of around 10,000 men while Caleb Strong, the governor, actually went so far as to send a secret mission to the British to discuss a separate peace.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the extent to which the Federalist Party in New England felt minimalized and threatened by the political equation of the first quarter of the 19th century, and its radicals strongly embraced the theory that secession (and what was later called nullification) was a legitimate response to a central government which was oppressive of their own rights and interests. It should be remembered that the Constitution had been signed only 25 years before the War of 1812 and that there were still a lot of people around who’d had a hand in the nationwide debates which had preceded it. It was still a "new shoe" that needed wearing in, and the people who had created/ratified it might be excused for thinking they could create/ratify yet another "new shoe" just as they had replaced the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution itself. At the time, New England saw its interests as radically threatened by the other sections of the country and virtually all of the recommendations of the Hartford Convention were aimed at reining in the "despotic" Federal (in this case, as NE saw it, Southern and Western) power by, among other things, not counting slaves
at all for apportionment and requiring that successive presidents could not be elected from the same state. There was no effort here to declare slaves the equals of free citizens; they were to be deleted from the apportionment count in any way. And the “successive president” rule was clearly aimed at breaking what seemed to be a Virginian monopoly on the presidency. In other words, these were pragmatic, sectional, economic and political issues, and had the more moderate leaders of the Convention not prevailed, the threat of secession would almost certainly have been added to the mix. Unfortunately for the Convention (and the Federalists) about the time their delegates got to Washington with their resolutions, Jackson won the Battle of New Orleans, which was disastrous for the Federalists as a party (they were now seen as disloyal, pusillanimous, self-seeking traitors) and put secession back into its bottle for a time. Nonetheless, I think its significant as an indication if how the whole question of states rights were viewed in the US --- that is, of the fact that it was no a "lunatic fringe" issue --- that prior to the American Civil War the country was referred to as "
These United States of America and not
The United States of America.
In 1798, Jefferson and Madison’s Virginian and Kentucky Resolutions laid out a separate challenge to Federal authority in what came to be known as the Doctrine of Nullification. That is, the doctrine that states had the right to nullify Federal statues of which they disapproved within their own territory. There were several attempts to apply nullification over the years, including the 1832 Nullification Crisis in which South Carolina declared the Federal tariff provisions nullified within the state and found itself in conflict with the Jackson Administration. This was largely the result of a major shift in US policy following the War of 1812 to build internal US industry through tariffs which placed near-prohibitory duties on imported manufactured goods. In this instance, the tariff policy was supported by the mid-Atlantic and Western states, who saw it as a necessary defense against the cheaper foreign goods (especially British) being exported to the US and sold at prices US manufacturers couldn’t match. The 1828 “Tariff of Abominations” was truly punitive to both the Southern agrarian interests and to the New England shipbuilding and importing interests and was bitterly hated in both sections. It became a contentious issue in the 1828 presidential campaign and Andrew Jackson was elected with the expectation (by many of those who voted for him) that he would repeal it. Instead, he signed a new tariff law in 1832 which, while lower than that of 1828, was still painful for Southern and New England interests. John C. Calhoun, who was Jackson’s vice president at the time, pushed for nullification as a means of self-defense at the state level. The Southern economy, especially, was being hammered by several factors, one of which most definitely was tariff policy. Another factor — the downturn in purchase of Southern cotton by the British textile industry — was related to the US’s tariff policy, as well. American protectionism affected British exports to the US (“balance of trade” concerns, anyone?), which reduced the British ability/willingness to “buy American.” There was also pressure from British abolitionists not to buy slave-grown cotton, just as they were also pressuring British citizens not to buy slave-produced sugar from the Caribbean, but most of the drop in cotton purchases was due to other market forces, including a downturn in the international economy during the same period.
SC’s Ordnance of Nullification was enacted in response to the 1832 Tariff, a compromise which reduced some of the 1828 Tariff’s duties but by no means all of them. The tariff act would become null and void in SC as of February 1833, and the state began military preparation to forcibly resist any effort by the Federal government to enforce it. The crisis was defused in February when Congress passed both a Force Act, authorizing the use of force, and a new Tariff Bill which reduced duties far enough for South Carolina to climb back down from its limb.
My point here is that states rights and sectional concerns didn’t suddenly appear in 1860, nor were they linked directly to the
institution of slavery. The South perceived other sections of the country (specifically the mid-Atlantic states) as receiving preferential treatment and major Federal investment in highways and port facilities which were paid for on the backs of Southern interests in the form of the tariffs imposed upon the imported goods the South’s agrarian economy
had to have for the befit of Northern manufacturing interests who then turned around and sold their goods to the South at protected and exorbitant prices. New England in 1812 objected not so much to the
existence of slavery as to the “unfairness” of the 3/5 rule which gave Southern states undue legislative clout. When the abolition movement began to gather steam on a national level, it was simply one more issue in a continuum of issues which had sharpened sectional divides, and the Secession Ordnance of 1860 was only one more in a series of increasing polarized debates over the power of the Federal government to impose its “despotism” on the states.
The entire issue of the Fugitive Slave Act (based very firmly on Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution) and the agitation against Slavery on the national level contributed strongly to the South’s sense that it was (1) being simultaneously exploited by Northern industrial interests, (2) being demonized by the abolitionists, (3) seeing the basis for its entire existing economy directly threated (should abolition succeed on the national level), (4) losing its parity in the Federal government because of the admission of “free states” which would be natural allies of its political foes, and (5) likely to see the 3/5 rule come under attack once more (it was
being attacked, steadily and loudly, in the Abolitionist press), despite Article V’s specific prohibition of any amendment which would affect Article I, Section 9. They could actually point to evidence that this was happening in the refusal of free states to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act despite the fact that the Constitution specifically
required its enforcement. (At least one state — Wisconsin, I think — actually invoked the theory of nullification to absolve it from enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act.)
By the time Lincoln was elected president, the nation had a 50-year history of debating secession and/or nullification (the two theories are legal and philosophical Siamese twins), and while slavery had become the moral “hot button issue” of the day, it was only one of many, many issues which were then dividing — and had
been dividing — the nation. There was a half-century legacy of hostility that went to the very core of the economic life’s blood of the sections, and Lincoln’s election was seen by Democrats (North and South) as a triumph of radicalism. South Carolina’s solution was to separate itself from a nation which obviously didn’t care about South Carolina’s interests — political and economic — and go its own way under the theory that it had been a sovereign nation before it signed the Constitution and had the right to be one again if it so chose. The fact that 10 other states — a third of the total states in the country — joined it in secession is an indication not simply of how deep the divisive issues went but also of how much credence the doctrine of secession had. I should also point out that the New York newspapers’ editorial view was that it was “time to let the erring sisters go” . . . until the city (whose extensive ports and bustling import trade had been built on the back of protectionism) discovered that the Confederacy intended to repeal all tariffs and make Charleston, Savanah, and New Orleans duty-free ports, at which point the headlines became “On to Richmond!” or their equivalent. Then, too, there are Lincoln’s pre-Battle of Antietam (i.e., prior to the Emancipation Proclamation) responses to people like Frederick Douglass and Horace Greeley about his war aims. In his 1860 State of the Union address, he specifically said “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so,” and he laid out his initial position by saying “The power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion -- no using of force against or among the people anywhere.” The “duties and imposts” remark is a direct reference to the contentiousness of tariff policy and sectional economic hostility and the entire passage was also an indication of the fact that he fully realized an overwhelming majority of US citizens wanted a peaceful resolution
and were willing to back off on the issue of abolition to get one.
Whether or not a negotiated settlement was as great a possibility as Nameless is suggesting has to remain one of the "what-if" questions of history, but it's clearly true that Anderson's decision to move his garrison into Fort Sumter --- secretly and by night --- put Lincoln into a position which forced him to act much more forcefully than he clearly wished to act at the same time that it convinced the authorities in Charleston that the Federal government
was going to resort to means
other than negotiation to settle the crisis. However that may be, Lincoln's 1862 letter to Greeley, which surely constitutes one of the greatest, clearest, and most concise policy statements of any political leader in world history summed up his goal in only 400 words, the heart of which were: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”
It’s highly unfortunate (from the perspective of legal scholars who might argue in favor of the doctrine of secession) that the flashpoint issue was “the peculiar institution,” but that was scarcely the only log on the fire of the American Civil War and people who attempt to reduce the ACW to a great anti-slavery crusade are guilty of gross simplification (and moral censorship) of the complex of fault lines and issues which tore the country apart.
Understand me clearly here. I am
not now attempting and never have attempted to justify the institution of slavery in the US. I will note in that regard only that slavery has been a part of every human civilization with which we are familiar and that the slaves on a Southern plantation were no worse treated, by and large, than those on any late-Empire Roman latifundium or those any of any of several other historical periods I could mention. Having said that, I will also observe that African slavery was a peculiarly demeaning form of slavery because it institutionalized the inferiority of an entire chunk of the human race on the basis of skin pigmentation, and also one in which slaves enjoyed fewer legal protections from their owners than in some other forms of the institution. But slavery was — and is; the institution is still with us — slavery, whatever the color of the slave. Slavery
of any type has no place in the modern world and, especially, not in a nation whose founding documents extoll the value of the individual and the unalienable nature of human freedom. That’s a fairly important strata of my own moral bedrock, which I hope comes across in the books I write.
Having said all of that, however, I find efforts to dismiss the American Civil War as a War to Defend Slaveholders’ Privileges simplistic, trivializing, demeaning, and culturally (and temporally) centric, saying far more about the cultural preconceptions of the individual than about the realities of the event or of the long-dead people who actually fought and died in it. Even worse, it precludes the possibility of actually
learning from what happened because the people who over simplify cull from the experience only those things which support views they already hold.
All of us do this to one extent or another whenever we look at
any past period in history, but I think it's important for us to remember that we're doing it and make a conscientious effort to
avoid doing it to the greatest extent possible.
I was at a science fiction convention, once, when the discussion turned to the Civil War and its causes. Believe it or not, I wasn’t a prime instigator in the conversation; I came into it late, along with a Japanese scientist who was also a guest of the con. He listened to what was going on for the better part of an hour, then said to me “In Japan, we are taught that the American Civil War was entirely about slavery!” I replied “In the United States, we’re taught that the Russo-Japanese War was entirely about Japanese imperial territorial ambitions on the mainland of Asia," to which he replied “No, no, no! It was
much more complicated than that!”
At which point I merely raised my eyebrows.
