The Civil War In The South’s Own Words
Remarkably, some disagree that the Civil War was primarily about slavery
“It wasn’t about slavery!”
So goes the inevitable response when one brings up the Civil War within earshot of a Confederate apologist. They are nothing if not predictable.
Despite being Michigan-born—and living, at various times, in the East and Midwest—I grew up hearing this claim. It’s a pervasive myth, even outside the Old Confederate South.
I’ve heard it my entire life, both in everyday and academic settings. But it wasn’t until last summer that I decided to search out the original documents from the Confederate states which outlined their reason for seceding. The impetus? I wrote about the Civil War as the necessary consequence of America’s original sin, and received the following comment:
Ah, “states’ rights,” the great fig leaf of those who wax poetic about the nobility of the Confederate cause.
From where does the myth come that the War Between the States began primarily for any reason other than slavery? As it turns out, a lot of places.
Confederate monuments litter the nation, like South Carolina’s at Gettysburg, which claims that, “Abiding faith in the sacredness of States Rights provided their creed.”
Confederate President Jefferson Davis, trying desperately to rehabilitate his image after the war, claimed that the “existence of African servitude was in no wise the cause of the conflict.” Alexander Stephens, who we’ll revisit in a moment, claimed “the War had its origin in opposing principles.”
This belief in a conflict of “opposing principles” is the foundation myth for the Lost Cause, the neo-Confederate effort over the subsequent 150 years to rewrite the Confederacy’s origin story.
It’s not just historical accounts that obfuscate the conflict’s true nature. One can also find contemporary commentary, not hidden away but in the most prominent places, denying the causal role of slavery in the Civil War. Gavin McInnes, who has been given lots of air time on Fox News, suggests that the conflict was “not about slavery,” and that “it was about secession.” McInnes suggested his Twitter followers “Google it,” a bold tactic indeed when your claims are easily disconfirmable.
McInnes is obviously a low-wattage provocateur, but what’s interesting is how the states’ rights explanation has influenced those who really should know better. As a military man and competent thinker in his own right, President Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, seemed to favor the states’ rights narrative in an interview last fall.
I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today.
As Civil War historian Caleb McDaniel notes in the Atlantic, “The truth is that Lee and his fellow slaveholders were ardent nationalists in the decades leading up to the Civil War.” This is not surprising, says McDaniel. After all, “For most of its history, the nation had usually protected and served the interests of slaveholders.”
What changed? What caused many of the slaveholding states to ditch their deep nationalist commitment? McDaniel writes: “the rise of the Republican Party and the election of Abraham Lincoln, who refused to use national power to advance slavery any longer.”
So what we have is clear evidence of Southern states, and men like Lee, ardently supporting nationalist causes in the years leading up to the Civil War — that is, in the years during which the nation supported their ability to perpetuate the “peculiar institution” — but then abandoning the project the moment slavery’s prospects were seriously threatened. It’s fairly open and shut: slavery was the cause.
But perhaps most surprising is how pervasive the states’ rights idea is in education. In his book Lies My Teacher Told Me, Jim Loewen says that 60 to 75 percent of high-school history teachers, not just in the South but across the country, believe and teach that the South seceded primarily due to states’ rights, and textbooks intentionally obfuscate the war’s primary cause.
Well, here’s the thing. It turns out several of the states in the Confederacy are super helpful on this point. They actually wrote down not just that they were leaving the Union, but why they were doing so.
They are called “Declaration of Causes”; there’s a website and everything.
One evening, I decided to take some time and read through them. Certainly, these documents form the basis of all those claims that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, right? Let’s find out.
First up, Mississippi. What I appreciate about Mississippi is they don’t seem to want to waste anyone’s time with a lengthy preamble about states’ rights. It turns out that we arrive at the slavery factor pretty quickly in this document:
A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.
In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery–the greatest material interest of the world.
Not to be outdone, Georgia mentions slavery in the second sentence:
The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years, we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.
Texas adopted what can only be described as a whiny tone when sounding the alarm on Northern states for failing to help Texas maintain an orderly slave labor system. It’s basically a paraphrase of: “You states in the north are not helping us do slavery to the utmost of our abilities! Shame on you!” In their own words:
The States of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa, by solemn legislative enactments, have deliberately, directly or indirectly violated the 3rd clause of the 2nd section of the 4th article [the fugitive slave clause] …
“Noble” Virginia puts it in their opening paragraph, with helpful capitalization:
… the Federal Government, having perverted said powers, not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States.
Apparently, in South Carolina “life, liberty, and the pursuit of fugitive slaves” were considered inalienable rights:
We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.
The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: “No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”
You have to dig a little for Alabama, but ultimately, the state doesn’t disappoint. In a call for a convention with the other Confederate states, it lists six ways the Civil War was about slavery:
Our delegates selected shall be instructed to submit to the general convention the following basis of a settlement of the existing difficulties between the Northern and Southern States, to wit:
1. A faithful execution of the fugitive slave law …
2. A more stringent and explicit provision for the surrender of criminals charged with offenses against laws of one State and escaping into another.
3. A guaranty that slavery shall not be abolished in the District of Columbia …
4. A guaranty that the interstate slave-trade shall not be interfered with.
5. A protection to slavery in the Territories …
6. The right of transit through free States with slave property.
Alexander Hamilton Stephens, who happened to be Vice President of the Confederacy, doesn’t want to be tedious about the truth when giving a speech about the shiny new Confederate Constitution:
But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other though last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.
[Our government’s] foundations are laid, its corner-stone 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.
The chief complaint of many of the Confederate states, that the Fugitive Slave Act wasn’t being enforced, is ironic considering that it was a federal law that…wait for it…stripped rights from the Northern states to treat runaway slaves in the manner they saw fit. So deep was the Confederate commitment to states’ rights that they apparently believed the Northern states shouldn’t be able to exercise their own.
At this point, Confederate apologists might say, “Well, it wasn’t only about slavery,” which is about as comforting as your significant other saying, “Well, it’s not only about this other person I’m seeing.”
It’s true that not all 11 Confederate states outlined their reasons for leaving the Union. Yet what’s also true is that of the documents I found, all of them mention slavery. Every. Single. One.
There wasn’t a single official document outlining reasons for secession that did not mention slavery as a motivating cause. Maybe they exist, but I’m not holding my breath.
Primary sources can be pesky things.
