Southern Nationalism

Exploring the roots of the Civil War

Charles Oliver from the August/September 2001 issue

p> a href= "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0847697223/reasonmagazineA"> /a>When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession, by Charles Adams, New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 255 pages, $24.95 /p> p> a href= "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0807848840/reasonmagazineA"> /a>The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, by Manisha Sinha, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 362 pages, $19.95 /p>

Apart from the American Revolution itself, the Civil War is the event that has most defined the United States. More than 130 years later, we still argue over its causes, effects, and meaning. Some argue that the main, though not only, cause of the war was slavery. Others insist that the war was provoked by an overreaching federal government that refused to recognize the Southern states' rights.

This debate isn't merely historical. As could be gleaned from the flaps surrounding statements by Attorney General John Ashcroft and Interior Secretary Gale Norton during their confirmation periods, issues stemming from the Civil War go to the heart of many current political debates: What is the proper role of the federal government? Is a strong national government the best guarantor of rights against local despots? Or do state governments stand as a bulwark against federal tyranny? And just what rights are these governments to protect? Those of the individual or those of society? Such matters are far from settled.

So why was the Civil War fought? That seems a simple enough question to answer: Just look at what those fighting the war had to say. If we do that, the lines are clear. Southern leaders said they were fighting to preserve slavery. Abraham Lincoln said the North fought to preserve the Union, and later, to end slavery.

Some can't accept such simple answers. Among them is Charles Adams. Given Adams' other books, which include For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization and Those Dirty Rotten Taxes: The Tax Revolts that Built America, it isn't surprising that he sees the Civil War as a fight about taxes, specifically tariffs.

In When in the Course of Human Events, he argues that the war had nothing to do with slavery or union. Rather, it was entirely about tariffs, which the South hated. The tariff not only drove up the price of the manufactured goods that agrarian Southerners bought, it invited other countries to enact their own levies on Southern cotton. In this telling, Lincoln, and the North, wanted more than anything to raise tariffs, both to support a public works agenda and to protect Northern goods from competition with imports.

Openly partisan to the South, Adams believes that the Civil War truly was one of Northern aggression. He believes that the Southern states had the right to secede and he believes that the war's true legacy is the centralization of power in Washington and the deification of the "tyrant" Abraham Lincoln. To this end, he collects all the damaging evidence he can find against Lincoln and the North. And he omits things that might tarnish his image of the South as a small-government wonderland.

Thus, we hear of Lincoln's use of federal troops to make sure that Maryland didn't secede. We don't learn that Confederate troops occupied eastern Tennessee to keep it from splitting from the rest of the state. Adams tells us of Union Gen. William Sherman's actions against civilians, which he persuasively argues were war crimes. But he doesn't tell us of Confederate troops capturing free blacks in Pennsylvania and sending them south to slavery. Nor does he mention the Confederate policy of killing captured black Union soldiers. He tells us that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus; he doesn't mention that the Confederacy did also.

Comments

|10.11.09 @ 7:23PM|#

If anyone doubts that Secession was about slavery -- just read the nearly hidden "Declarations of Causes" by almost every Southern State-- official documents written BY the South at the time.

These documents scream out that Slavery -- and Lincoln -- were the cause of secession.

Florida's Declaration said that Lincoln was out to stop the SPREAD of slavery - and said that alone, just the stopping the SPREAD of slavery, would be like burning the South slowly to death, because slaves would be worthless, and our children will have to live in equality with blacks. Therefore, the state of Florida decided to secede.

South Carolina took deep offense that unnamed people in the North had "called slavery a sin". Tariffs -- which some say was the real cause of secession -- was not even mentioned.

Texas said the North had advocated "the debasing heresy" that blaks and whites were equal.

A speech in support of Alabama's Secession shows that slave owners were actually talking about killing all their slaves if they had to free the slaves. Not that they hated the slaves -- but liberating slaves meant they would have to live in equality with them, and they would surely have to kill them before that could happen.

Reading the South's Declarations of Causes -- and the accompanying speeches, reminds me of reading Hitler's Mien Kampf.

It's no wonder the South has largely hidden their own Declarations of Causes. Oh you can find the Declaration of Secession -- a innocuous paragraph or two of boilerplate announcing secession.

But the Declaration of Causes, for some reason, they apparently hope you don't notice.