Causes of the Civil War: Introduction
Today’s prevailing synopsis is that Southerners caused the Civil War by illegally seceding from the United States to perpetuate black slavery, the original seven-state Confederacy started the fighting when it bombarded Fort Sumter, Northerners virtuously responded by suppressing the Confederacy’s rebellion thereby ending slavery and intending to establish a postbellum Union providing racial equity.
Almost all that summary is erroneous or deceptive.
First, Northerners could have evacuated Fort Sumter and let the seven cotton states depart in peace. The South was not allowed to leave peacefully chiefly because Northerners wanted to avoid the economic consequences of disunion, including the effects of a low-tariff Confederacy being adjacent to the federal Union. The overpriced goods of tariff-protected Northern manufacturers would have lost their Southern markets to more efficient European producers. Federal tax revenue, predominantly reliant upon customs duties, would have declined by the proportion Southerners paid. Northerners would have lost their legal monopoly on Southern coastal shipping and the USA would have lost 60% of its exports thereby becoming a perpetual debtor nation to its trading partners.
About a month before Sumter a Boston newspaper concluded that the seven cotton states did not secede to protect slavery, but to form a new country that would be an economic rival to the North. Specifically, The Boston Transcript editorialized on March 18, 1861:
“Alleged grievances in regard to slavery were originally the causes for the separation of the cotton States, but the mask has been thrown off, and it is apparent that the people of the seceding States are now for commercial independence. . . The merchants of New Orleans, Charleston, and Savannah are possessed with the idea that New York, Boston, and Philadelphia may be shorn . . . of their mercantile greatness by a revenue system verging upon free trade. If the Southern Confederation is allowed to carry out a policy by which only a nominal duty is laid upon imports, no doubt the businesses of the chief Northern cities will be seriously injured.”
The Transcript’s analysis underscores the importance of evaluating Northern motivations for coercion instead of merely Southern motivations for secession.
A second deception is the use of hindsight to determine secession’s illegality. In 1860 there was no consensus on its legal status. In fact, the Northeastern states threatened secession at least five times between the founding of the Republic in 1789 and 1850. First was during George Washington’s presidency when Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton warned that the Northeastern states would secede unless the federal government agreed to assume an obligation to pay-off their Revolutionary War debts.
Next, in 1803 New Englanders threatened to secede over the Louisiana Purchase. They didn’t want new territories that would ultimately become new states thereby reducing New England’s influence. Connecticut Senator James Hillhouse warned, “The Eastern states must and will dissolve the union and form a separate government” if they did not get their way.
In 1807 New England again threatened to secede after President Jefferson tried to avoid the War of 1812 with a trade embargo. New Englanders objected because their region was then America’s maritime center and traded extensively with Great Britain. After the War of 1812 started, most New Englanders cooperated little in our nation’s defense. They traded liberally with the enemy and refused to put their militia into federal service. When the British finally blockaded New England during the last seven months of the thirty-month war, the region held a convention in Hartford to discuss secession. In January 1815 it sent emissaries to President Madison to demand five additional constitutional amendments. Upon arriving in Washington, however, they learned that the war had ended and went home in embarrassment.
Northeastern leaders again threatened secession over the proposed annexation of Texas. In 1843 twelve congressmen, including former President John Quincy Adams, signed a public letter claiming that Texas annexation would not only cause the “free states” to secede but would “fully justify it.” The Massachusetts legislature underscored his opinion by declaring the 1845 Texas annexation to be unconstitutional.
In truth, secession was a remedy that geographically isolated political minorities repeatedly considered from 1789 to 1861. It tended to find favor within those regions that were out-of-power in Washington. It was popular in New England when Virginians were President. Conversely, it tempted the South when Northerners controlled Washington, or merely the House of Representatives where the South never had a majority.
The third deception is that the four states that joined the Confederacy after President Lincoln raised troops to coerce the first seven cotton states also seceded to protect slavery. In truth, the four—Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas—seceded because they had earlier warned Washington that they considered the forced reunification of any state to be unconstitutional and would fight against it. After joining the cotton states, they provided half of the white population from which the eleven-state Confederacy drew nearly all her soldiers.
Fourth, as noted, the Confederacy had no purpose to replace the federal government. Everyone knew Southerners would make no attempt to overthrow Lincoln, or militarily invade the Northern states, if the cotton states had been allowed to depart peacefully.
A fifth pretext is the assumption that Southern secession was an unacceptable alternative to war because slavery would otherwise have never ended. Author James Oakes correctly observes in his Scorpion’s Sting that slavery would eventually end if it could not spread geographically. Southerners fully appreciated the point. Historian Oakes, however, erroneously assumes that only the Republican Party’s blanket ban on slavery in the territories insured that the institution would be isolated in the South.
In truth, a principle involving local-option voting—termed Popular Sovereignty—demonstrated almost two years before the Civil War started that it would block slavery expansion. That happened when Kansas voted down a slave constitution by a margin of over five-to-one in 1858. If Southerners could not make a slave state out of Kansas with Popular Sovereignty, they could not do so with any of the federal territories remaining in 1860. Those west of Texas were too arid, and those north of Kansas too cold, for slave-based agriculture.
Nevertheless, it is often overlooked that the 1860 Southern Presidential candidate, John C. Breckinridge, included Popular Sovereignty in his platform. To be sure, the Southern version pertained to votes that occurred when the pertinent territories applied for statehood. Prior to that, Southerners claimed a right to take slaves into any of the federal territories because such territories were legally common to the entire country. Without such freedom to emigrate, all future states would be admitted as free states by default.
If the 1860 Republicans had also adopted Popular Sovereignty, they could have kept slavery quarantined in the South peacefully. They instead rejected it because it would be inconsistent with their 1856 platform. Such a policy shift, they felt, would be political suicide.
Thus, Republicans were prepared to endanger the Union by deferring to the Party’s self-preservation instinct, which was ultimately chained to a meaningless point of honor. That is why President-elect Lincoln rejected any compromise.
One compromise proposal would have allowed slavery in the present-day states of New Mexico and Arizona where it could not thrive. After the Senate rejected the bill with all Republicans voting “nay,” its sponsor—Kentucky Senator John Crittenden—asked that it be submitted to the country as a national referendum. Realizing that voters would likely approve it, the Republican-controlled Senate never took action. Historian Kenneth Stampp concluded:
“Republicans looked upon compromise as the shortest route to political suicide. It would have necessarily required a repudiation of their [slavery ban] platform. . .To the Republicans, then, belonged the responsibility that no compromise was ever offered to the South.”
A sixth dubious presumption of the synopsis is that Southern secession was a bad alternative to preserving the Union militarily. Rejecting secession resulted in America’s bloodiest war.
Notwithstanding the country’s 1860 population of only one-fourth that of 1940, about 700,000 American soldiers died in the Civil War as compared to 400,000 in World War II. Since America’s white 1860 population—from which she mainly obtained her soldiers—was only 27 million, the 700,000 Civil War soldier deaths translate to a loss ratio of 2.6%, which would equate to over 8.5 million deaths if applied to America’s current population.
Furthermore, as a wartime President, Lincoln ran roughshod over civil liberties. He arrested Maryland legislators to prevent the state’s secession, disbanded Missouri’s legislature under federal bayonets, suspended habeas corpus in defiance of a contrary ruling by the Chief Justice, shut down opposition newspapers, imprisoned thousands of citizens on political whim, and manipulated the 1864 soldier vote. The Civil War may not have been worth the cost of the violence done to the Constitution and its irrevocable push toward a progressively more centralized government.
Seventh, historians who cite the seven cotton states’ secession Declarations of Causes as proof for the primacy of slavery often overlook other disputes between Northerners and Southerners that are revealed by comparing their respective constitutions. Unlike the federal Constitution, the Confederacy’s did not allow protective tariffs. Southerners also outlawed public works spending, which instead had to be financed by private industry or the states themselves. Southerners also constitutionally prohibited subsidies for private industry.
The Confederate Constitution only permitted spending for military defense, repayment of national debt, and the operating costs of the central government. It also included a number of features that underscored a states’ rights philosophy. Constitutional amendments, for example, could only be initiated by a convention of states, not Congress.
Additionally, historians who cite the Declarations of Causes to assert the primacy of slavery as a cause for the Civil War, generally fail to note that at least ten Northern free states concurrently passed legislative resolutions explaining their objections to secession. Not one stated any wish to abolish Southern slavery. The most consistent complaint was against the breakup of the Union. Thus, Northerners mainly went to war to avoid the economic consequences of disunion, as explained earlier.
Eighth, although antebellum Northerners increasingly opposed the expansion of slavery before the Civil War, it was chiefly to reserve the western lands for whites, not a noble gesture to end slavery. Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot made the first attempt to block the expansion of slavery while leaving it untouched in the slave states. Twelve weeks after the Mexican War started, he attached a rider to a $2 million funding bill. His rider would require that slavery be prohibited in any territories acquired because of the war. Although the soon-named Wilmot Proviso is commonly misinterpreted as a moral attack slavery, it was really motivated by white supremacy.
Specifically, Wilmot said, “I make no war upon the South, nor upon slavery in the South. I have no squeamish sensitiveness upon the subject of slavery, nor morbid sympathy for the slave. I plead the cause of the rights of white freemen. I would preserve for free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.”
Although the 1846 Proviso passed the House it failed in the Senate. Nonetheless, it gave birth to Popular Sovereignty as a concept that might end the endless arguments over the future of slavery. In 1854 Democrat Senator Stephen A. Douglas sponsored the Kansas-Nebraska bill, which would carve the Nebraska Territory out of a part of the Kansas Territory and authorize each to decide for themselves whether they shall be slave or free by popular vote at such time as they apply for statehood. That same year future President Abraham Lincoln admitted, “The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these [western] territories. We want them for the homes of free white people. . .”
The Party’s true objective was to quarantine blacks in the South. Consider that from Texas statehood in 1845 to the present day, twenty of the twenty-two states that joined the Union had only one percent of their populations composed of blacks. The two exceptions were the border states of West Virginia and Oklahoma. The Northern “free states” refused to accept black refugees during the Civil War thereby forcing blacks to remain in Southern “contraband camps”, a euphemistic term for concentration camps. As late as 1910 ninety percent of blacks remained in the South.
Nineth, contrary to popular belief, postbellum Republicans were not indulgent toward their defeated foe. The victors’ peace was primarily shaped by their antebellum economic priorities, which impoverished the South.
One example was the deterrence tariff, a powerful tool enabling Northern manufactures to establish domestic monopolies by blocking imports. It also encouraged Europe’s manufacturing economies to buy raw materials from countries other than America because it limited their ability to sell imports into the USA that would yield the dollars needed to purchase our exports. It was the North that went to war over tariffs, not the South.
On the eve of the Civil War tariffs on dutiable items averaged 19% but increased to an average of 45% for the next fifty years. Consider railroad iron. In 1861 the 11-state Confederacy had more railroad milage than any country except the United States. Even though Southern roads badly needed rebuilding after the war, deterrence tariffs caused railroad iron to sell for $80 a ton in New York compared to $32 in Liverpool. Even though Midwestern grain states might otherwise have supported free trade, the Republican Party held power by indirectly bribing former Midwestern Union soldiers with generous veterans’ pensions. The pensions, argued the GOP, required high tariffs to fund them.
The Republican Party generally controlled national politics from the start of the Civil War in 1861 to the bottom of the Great Depression in 1932—over seventy years. Each of the twelve states that joined the Union during the 35 years from 1861 to 1896 added two new Republican senators. Not until Oklahoma joined forty-two years after the war ended did a new state enter the Union with a Democrat senator.
Republicans transformed the South into an exploited internal colony much like Great Britain had done with Ireland. Perhaps because of slavery, the region was the World’s low-cost producer of cotton before the war. But it remained the World’s low-cost producer long thereafter because nearly all her people had been impoverished, not just the slaves.
Most American cotton was exported well into the twentieth century. In 1860 the South’s per capita income was at the 72nd percentile of the national average. After the Civil War it dropped to the 51st percentile and stayed there for at least thirty-five years. It did not return to its still-below-average 1860 percentile until 1950, ninety years later.
Shortly after the war, Republicans set up puppet Southern regimes by disfranchising many ex-Confederates and transforming Freedmen into a Republican-loyal voting bloc. They made false promises to the Freedmen and taught them to hate their former masters. When Republican Ulysses Grant was elected President in 1868, he won only a minority of America’s white votes and gained the popular vote edge only because of the ex-slave vote.
Postbellum Republicans launched the Gilded Age of crony capitalism by giving away 200 million acres to Northern railroads, which was about twice the property presently within California’s borders. Only negligible land grants went to former slaves. By 1877 Republicans had abandoned the blacks because the Party could control Congress and the presidency without them. The “more perfect Union” that Lincoln had hoped to form became one in which black and white Southerners had been dumped into peonage. Even as late as the 1940s both races worked under conditions little different than Russian serfs of the nineteenth century.
The conqueror’s version of black civil rights did not include having blacks live among Northerners. Since Freedmen comprised a decisive Republican-loyal Southern voting bloc until 1880, the GOP wanted to keep them there. Simultaneously, Northern workers did not want job-seeking blacks to cross the Ohio River or the Mason Dixon Line. Republican Congressman George Boutwell proposed to reserve the states of South Carolina and Florida exclusively for blacks.
Contrary to the misrepresentations of social activist historians, nineteenth century and Jim Crow era Northerners were often at least as racist as Southerners. When French tourist Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1830, he observed that race prejudice was most obvious in the states that never had slavery.
In 1858 Abraham Lincoln said, “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races . . . and as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” During the Jim Crow era in 1915 when a white boxer beat the aging black heavyweight champion, a crowd of Wall Street bankers watching the telegraphed results “pounded their unknown neighbors on the back” and acted like gleeful schoolchildren.
One of the prime reasons I wrote the Causes of the Civil War was to counter the one-sidedness that has induced mob hysteria against Confederate heritage. As noted, historian James Oakes is probably correct when concluding that slavery would have ended if quarantined in the South after 1860. But that could have been accomplished with Popular Sovereignty, which did not require the complete ban on slaves in the territories, as the Republican Party demanded out a self-preservation instinct. The result was Civil War.
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