How America Broke Apart During A Past New Year’s
And why the divisions aren’t as serious this time
As our divided country stumbles into the New Year, we may be able to learn from another holiday season when the United States actually split apart.
In the waning days of 1860, Southern states began drafting the declarations of secession that would lead to the Civil War. Although this marked perhaps the most momentous event in our nation’s history, polls show that modern-day Americans, as with so many other issues, are divided by region and political party over what actually caused the war.
For example, a 2011 Pew Research Poll found that a plurality of Americans believe that states’ rights precipitated the conflict.
But a McClatchey-Marist poll last year found that most — except for respondents in the South and members of the Tea Party — view slavery as the cause.
The next generation is likely to be as confused as the current one. Whereas many students are learning that slavery was the main cause, 5 million schoolchildren in Texas — where a member of the state board of education described slavery as a “side issue to the Civil War” — are using textbooks that put a greater emphasis on sectionalism and states’ rights.
Perhaps this is to be expected, given how people of different viewpoints keep seeing reality in different ways. But it would come as a surprise to Confederate leaders. During the holiday season of 1860, they made it as clear as possible that they were pulling out of the country because of one primary reason: slavery.
South Carolina went first. In its declaration of secession, issued on Christmas Eve 1860, state leaders pointed to “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery.” They felt they had to leave the nation because the election of Abraham Lincoln meant that “war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.”
The second state to secede, Mississippi, was even blunter. Its declaration of secession, issued about a week after New Year’s, stated: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.”
Underscoring this further, the Texas declaration of secession warned that northern policies would lead to “desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states” because of “the destruction of the existing relations between the two races.”
Just in case there was still any doubt over why the Southern states were leaving, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens made it even plainer. “African slavery…was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution,” he said in his Cornerstone Speech in March 1861. Of the Confederate government, he added, “its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”
To the extent that states’ rights and sectarian differences played a role, it was because slavery became inextricably tangled up in those issues. Northern states wanted the right to shelter fugitive slaves; Southern states wanted the right to continue and expand slavery.
Why is this important today?
One reason is that downplaying the role of slavery illustrates how far we’ve come. We may argue over a lot of things — including, increasingly, race relations — but at least we’re not debating the constitutionality of slavery. That’s why the language of secessionists feels so shocking today, and why it’s easier to think of the war breaking out over an issue that still resonates, like states’ rights.
If you’re uncomfortable about the collective amnesia over our history, just think of how you’d feel if people started saying, “Damn right the South fought to keep slavery. Wish they had won.”
The other reason is that the declarations of secession reveal just how hard it is to ignite a civil war. Like our forebears more than 150 years ago, we’re facing regional divides (although not as stark as North vs. South), as well as seemingly unbridgeable differences over social issues, treatment of minorities, and international trade — another issue that worsened friction in 1860.
At times it doesn’t even seem that we’re speaking the same language.
But it took slavery — the foundation of the Southern economy and the existential difference between the societies of North and South — to provide the catalyst for the only civil war in our nation’s history. If there’s any comfort to take from that fateful holiday season of 1860–61, it’s that actual warfare, thankfully, does not happen easily.
