Southern Nationalism

Exploring the roots of the Civil War

Charles Oliver from the August/September 2001 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Secession, then, was an attempt by the slave-owning class to preserve its regional hegemony. At the very least, Lincoln's election meant the Slave Power could no longer use the national government to advance its interests. Further, having a president who firmly stated that slavery was immoral would embolden Northern abolitionists. If the South remained in the U.S., Northerners might feel more free to defy the Fugitive Slave Act, despite Lincoln's vow to enforce it. And more John Browns might come South to provoke slave uprisings.

Further, a thriving Republican Party might attract non-slaveholding Southerners -- who were coming to resent the power wielded by slave owners, if not slavery itself. Slave owners thought they could keep the Republicans from playing on those conflicts by leaving the Union. In fact, those tensions exploded during the Civil War.

In western Virginia, the mostly non-slaveholding population had long resented a political system that favored slave owners. When Virginia seceded, the western counties refused to join, eventually forming the state of West Virginia. And in western North Carolina, east Tennessee, and parts of north Georgia, initial enthusiasm for secession quickly soured. These were areas in which few slaves were owned, and they became dangerous places for Confederate forces and their sympathizers to tread. Union sympathizers waged guerrilla war there, fighting a civil war within the Civil War.

"Slave society," Sinha writes, "could not withstand even a mildly antislavery president, who could effectively challenge the regional mastery of southern planters and slaveholders without ever abolishing slavery." The actions the slave-holding class took to defend its privilege ended up hastening its demise.

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.