What Caused the Civil War?
Part I—The Gun Powder and the Spark
Depending on how the question is asked, you could receive several legitimate answers to “What was the cause of the Civil War?” One of the best analogies I have heard likened the Civil War to an explosion. There was the underlying cause (the gun powder) and the ignition source (the spark).
Without one, the other doesn’t result in an explosion.
The easier, and less controversial, part of the analogy is the spark. On April 12, 1861, troops under the command of Pierre Gustav Toutant Beauregard fired a cannon from James Island in Charleston, South Carolina at the federal installation Fort Sumter and its garrison of United States troops. That shot began a 34 hour barrage that ignited the Civil War.
So, what was the explosive that laid dormant just waiting for the spark to change that potential energy into kinetic energy?
I realize that distilling down nearly a century of regional strife into one word is simplistic and that there were lots of aggravating actions that drove the country closer and closer to civil war over a period of decades. But, if you look deeper than the surface on every other cause that is credited to the Confederates as a motivation for the unilateral secession that caused the war, it always comes back to slavery.
Many people will take issue with this simple word. Such a small percentage of the Southern population actually owned slaves that it is unfathomable that poor white southerners would go to war for such a paltry reason, they say. They were fighting for their states’ rights and against an encroaching Federal government. Many of these people trust what they have been told by family, friends, heritage groups and people who are simply echoing what others have said, too.
To be fair, there was a time I too was told this by an educator I respected a great deal. I believed what they said because they had the formal education and were the “authority” on the subject. I wasn’t a particularly good history student at that time. Or maybe to be kinder to myself, I wasn’t really a mature historian at that time. I trusted what other people told me and considered neither their personal motives or their actual familiarity with the information they taught. It just so happened that the idea that a war was the result of states’ rights was both more palatable than the thought of people defending the indefensible act of human bondage and it aligned with my own personal view of the appropriate role of government. Logically, it made sense.
As I became less a history student and more a historian (amateur though I may be), I started meeting declarative statements differently. I demanded of others, “Prove it,” “Show me,” or “Sources, please.” When I did so of this particular question, too often the proof was either non-existent or it had what my favorite television lawyer, Jack McCoy, would generously label “a credibility problem”.
Contrary to what some people like to believe, this is neither a liberal belief nor revisionist history. Our understanding of history changes as new information is found. As long as something is supported by a documentary history, I am fine with that change in interpretation.
Ultimately, my understanding of history is based as much as it can be on Primary Sources. These are the kinds of evidence that Jack McCoy likes best—confessions, eye witness testimony, recordings (written in this case) from the people involved. Though Jack might call in an expert witness, the potential flaw is always that personal bias and misinterpretation of results may color their findings. And of course, hearsay testimony is excluded except in rare instances.
So, if you wanted to hear from the eye witnesses and the people who actually set the agenda and made the policy for the newly forming Confederacy, where would you go? Well, to the Primary Sources, of course! The Confederates left a long trail of official documentation, speeches and personal correspondence that outlined why they felt it was necessary to exercise their perceived states’ right to unilaterally sever a connection with the Union and why it was urgent to do so in late 1860-early 1861.
Can it really be revisionist history to listen to the very people who made these decisions and actually take them at their word? I certainly don’t think so.
Part II—The Confederate Cause in Their Own Words
The first official documents issued by the states that would create the Confederacy were the Ordinances of Secession issued by all of the seceding states (and unofficial governments in Kentucky and Missouri whose official governments sided with the Union). These documents were the official statements of the governments of the seceding states severing their ties with the Union.
These documents are short, and permeated with legal language and were documentation of the action, not the motivation thereof. Four of the seceding states—South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia and Texas—chose to issue a second document (called in most cases the Declaration of Causes….. and in Georgia’s case the Declaration of Secession). These documents followed the Founding Father’s example laid out in the Declaration of Independence by sharing exactly why they were taking the step of unilateral secession.
The Declarations of Causes are the State’s justification for their actions. They are declarations to not only the Federal government, but to other states and other nations about their motivations.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. (Mississippi Declaration of Causes that Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union)
Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.
On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States. (Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union)
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. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war.
The Presidential election of 1852 resulted in the total overthrow of the advocates of restriction and their party friends. Immediately after this result the anti-slavery portion of the defeated party resolved to unite all the elements in the North opposed to slavery and to stake their future political fortunes upon their hostility to slavery everywhere. This is the party to whom the people of the North have committed the Government. They raised their standard in 1856 and were barely defeated. They entered the Presidential contest again in 1860 and succeeded.
The prohibition of slavery in the Territories, hostility to it everywhere, the equality of the black and white races, disregard of all constitutional guarantees in its favor, were boldly proclaimed by its leaders and applauded by its followers.
With these principles on their banners and these utterances on their lips the majority of the people of the North demand that we shall receive them as our rulers.
The prohibition of slavery in the Territories is the cardinal principle of this organization. (Georgia Declaration of Secession)
In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.
For years past this abolition organization has been actively sowing the seeds of discord through the Union, and has rendered the federal congress the arena for spreading firebrands and hatred between the slave-holding and non-slave-holding States. (A Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union)
In February 1861, the seven states in the Deep South—South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas (aka the Cotton Seven)—met to create a Constitution for the newly minted Confederate States of America. In large part, it mirrored the Constitution of the United States of America. It does include language to restrict the power of central government (a line item veto and one six year term of the President), but it also restricts state’s right in a very significant way. It Constitutionally ensures that Confederate land will always recognize slavery and forbids states the opportunity to legislate or outlaw slavery within their own boarders (Article IV; Sec . 2 (3)).
In March 1861, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens gave a speech to a group in Savannah, Georgia about the differences between the United States Constitution and the Confederate States Constitution. He enumerates all of the changes and why they were important. The speech builds up to the most important difference between the two governing documents.
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. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split”...
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its 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. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. (Cornerstone Speech)
At this same time, while the fledgling Confederacy was creating its government and declaring its purpose, the new Confederate states began a campaign to convince the other 8 slave states to join the Confederate ranks. Confederate leaders knew that without the support of the more populous and industrious Upper South states (North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland and Delaware), the new Confederacy could die on the vine.
To make the case to the men deciding the fate of their respective states, the Confederate states appointed emissaries to speak with policy makers, legislators and at secession conventions. They sent letters and made speeches outlining their case for secession and why they believed it was imperative to take such a drastic and unprecedented action. The speeches and letters are meant to not only justify their own state’s actions, but to persuade others to join them. They are reflective of the secessionists’ motivations, but also instructive as to what the people of the secession movement believed would motivate others. To successfully persuade people, a speaker or writer will use the words and ideas most calculated to resonate with their audience.
There are many speeches and letters from the Secession Commissioners to state officials and state secession conventions. There was a repetitive theme among them, best represented by these Commissioners’ words:
What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery. This conviction, sir, was the main cause. It is true, sir, that the effect of this conviction was strengthened by a further conviction that such a separation would be the best remedy for the fugitive slave evil, and also the best, if not the only remedy, for the territorial evil. But, doubtless, if it had not been for the first conviction this step would never have been taken. (Georgia Secession Commissioner Henry Benning’s Speech to the Virginia Secession Convention)
To Your Excellency or so intelligent a body as the Legislature of Maryland it would be superfluous to enter into an elaborate statement of the policy and purposes of the party which, by the recent election, will soon have the control of the General Government. The bare fact that the party is sectional and hostile to the South is a full justification for the precautionary steps taken by Alabama to provide for the escape of her citizens from the peril and dishonor of submission to its rule. Superadded to the sectional hostility the fanaticism of a sentiment which has become a controlling political force, giving ascendancy in every Northern State, and the avowed purpose, as disclosed in party creeds, declarations of editors, and utterances of representative men, of securing the diminution of slavery in the States and placing it in the course of ultimate extinction, and the South would merit the punishment of the simple if she passed on and provided no security against the imminent danger. (Letter of JLM Curry of Alabama to Maryland Governor Hicks)
African Slavery has not only become one of the fixed domestic institutions of the Southern States, but forms an important element of their political power, and constitutes the most valuable species of their property-- worth, according to recent estimates, not less than four thousand millions of dollars; forming, in fact, the basis upon which rests the prosperity and wealth of most of these States, and supplying the commerce of the world with its richest freights, and furnishing the manufactories of two continents with the raw material, and their operatives with bread. It is upon this gigantic interest, this peculiar institution of the South, that the Northern States and their people have been waging an unrelenting and fanatical war for the last quarter of a century. An institution with which is bound up, not only the wealth and prosperity of the Southern people, but their very existence as a political community. (Letter of S.F. Hale, Commissioner of Alabama to the State of Kentucky, to Gov. Magoffin of Kentucky)
As early as the 10th of February, 1860, her Legislature had, with the general approbation of her people, adopted the following resolution:
"Resolved, That the election of a President of the United States by the votes of one section of the Union only, on the ground that there exists an irrepressible conflict between the two sections in reference to their respective systems of labor and with an avowed purpose of hostility to the institution of slavery, as it prevails in the Southern States, and as recognized in the compact of Union, would so threaten a destruction of the ends for which the Constitution was formed, as to justify the slaveholding States in taking council together for their separate protection and safety."
This was the ground taken, gentlemen, not only by Mississippi, but by other slaveholding States, in view of the then threatened purpose, of a party founded upon the idea of unrelenting and eternal hostility to the institution of slavery, to take possession of the power of the Government and use it to our destruction. It cannot, therefore, be pretended that the Northern people did not have ample warning of the disastrous and fatal consequences that would follow the success of that party in the election, and impartial history will emblazon it to future generations, that it was their folly, their recklessness and their ambition, not ours, which shattered into pieces this great confederated Government, and destroyed this great temple of constitutional liberty which their ancestors and ours erected, in the hope that their descendants might together worship beneath its roof as long as time should last. (Speech of Mississippi Secession Commissioner Fulton Anderson to the Virginia Convention)
This, gentlemen, brings me directly to the causes which I desire to lay before you. For fully thirty years or more, the people of the Northern States have assailed the institution of African slavery. They have assailed African slavery in every form in which, by our contiguity of territory and our political alliance with them, they have been permitted to approach it.
During that period of thirty years, large masses of their people have associated themselves together for the purpose of abolishing the institution of African slavery, and means, the most fearful were suggested to the subject race-rising and murdering their masters being the charities of those means. In pursuance of this idea, their representatives in the federal government have endeavored by all the means that they could bring to bear, so to shape the legislation as almost to limit, to restrict, to restrain the slaveholding States from any political interest in the accretion of the government. So that as my distinguished colleague [Judge Benning], stated to you on yesterday, the decree goes forth that there are to be no more slave States admitted into the Union.
Secondly, then, in pursuance of the same purpose that I have indicated, a large majority of the States of the Confederation have refused to carry out those provisions of the Constitution which are absolutely necessary to the existence of the slave States, and many of them have stringent laws to prevent the execution of those provisions; and eight of these States have made it criminal, even in their citizens to execute these provisions of the Constitution of the United States, which, by the progress of the government, have become now necessary to the protection of an industry which furnishes to the commerce of the Republic $250,000,000 per annum, and on which the very existence of twelve millions of people depends. In not one of these seventeen States can a citizen of one of the fifteen States claim his main property, and in many of them the persons of the citizens of these States have been violated, and in numerous cases the violence has resulted in murder.
Third. The citizens of not less than five of our confederates of the North have invaded the territory of their confederates of the slaveholding States, and proclaimed the intention of abolishing slavery by the annihilation of the slaveholders; and two of these States have refused to surrender the convicted felons to the demand of the invaded States; and one of these-one of the most influential-one, perhaps, recognized as the representative of what is called American sentiment and civilization, has, in its highest solemn form, approved of that invasion; and numbers of people, scattered throughout the whole extent of these seventeen States, have made votive offerings to the memory of the invaders.
Fourth. The most populous, and by far, the most potent of our late confederates, has for years proclaimed, through the federal legislature and by her own sovereign act, that the conflict between slavery and non-slavery is a conflict for life and death. Now, there is the calm, oft-reiterated decree of a State containing three millions of people, conducting four-fifths of the commerce of the Republic, with additional millions diffused through the whole of these 17 States. And many of these States themselves have decreed that the institution of slavery is an offence to God, and, therefore, they are bound by the most sacred attributes which belong to human nature, to exterminate it. They have declared, in their most solemn form, that the institution of slavery, as it exists in the States of their political confederates, is an offence to their social institutions, and, therefore, that it should be exterminated. Finally, acting upon the impulse of their duties of self-protection and self-preservation, majorities, large majorities throughout the whole of these 17 States have placed the executive power of the Federal Government in the hands of those who are bound by the most sacred obligations, by their obligations to God, by their obligations to the social institutions of man, by their obligations of self-protection and self-preservation, to place the system of slavery as it exists in the Southern States upon a course of certain and final extinction. Twenty millions of people, having in their hands one of the strongest Governments on earth, and impelled by a perfect recognition of the most powerful obligations which fall upon man, have declared that the vital interests of eight millions of people shall be exterminated. In other words, the decree, the result of this cumulation which I have endeavored to show you, was inaugurated on the 6th of November last, so far as the institution of slavery is concerned, in the confederates of the Northern non-slaveholding States. That decree is annihilation, and you can make nothing shorter of it. (South Carolina Secession Commissioner Speech of John Preston to the Virginia Convention)
The direct evidence from the Confederate Founders themselves claims that their motivation for establishing a new nation was to protect their right to own slaves. All other motives either derived from slavery or were not significant enough to prompt unilateral secession.
Part III—All Those Other Things
The war was about secession.
Lincoln should have allowed the Confederates to take Fort Sumter.
The Confederates did nothing to warrant Lincoln’s call for troops, which was really the aggressive act that started the war.
The Southern slave states believed they were asserting their states’ rights to secede from what they considered a voluntary union. This decision was controversial at the time and had been addressed by Andrew Jackson during his presidency. Jackson, a slaveholder from Tennessee, responded to an 1832 threat by South Carolina to nullify unfavorable tariffs. Though the tariffs had been passed by the Federal government, South Carolina believed it retained its sovereignty separate from the Union and refused to implement the tariff. In response to the Nullification Crisis, Jackson laid out the case that states no longer retained their sovereignty to act independent in opposition to the Federal government.
The States severally have not retained their entire sovereignty. It has been shown that in becoming parts of a nation, not members of a league, they surrendered many of their essential parts of sovereignty. The right to make treaties, declare war, levy taxes, exercise exclusive judicial and legislative powers, were all functions of sovereign power. The States, then, for all these important purposes, were no longer sovereign. The allegiance of their citizens was transferred in the first instance to the government of the United States; they became American citizens, and owed obedience to the Constitution of the United States, and to laws made in conformity with the powers vested in Congress. This last position has not been, and cannot be, denied… it has been shown that in this sense the States are not sovereign, and that even if they were, and the national Constitution had been formed by compact, there would be no right in any one State to exonerate itself from the obligation...
...But the dictates of a high duty oblige me solemnly to announce that you cannot succeed. The laws of the United States must be executed. I have no discretionary power on the subject-my duty is emphatically pronounced in the Constitution. Those who told you that you might peaceably prevent their execution, deceived you-they could not have been deceived themselves. They know that a forcible opposition could alone prevent the execution of the laws, and they know that such opposition must be repelled. Their object is disunion, but be not deceived by names; disunion, by armed force, is TREASON. Are you really ready to incur its guilt?
That is not to say that this was settled law. However, if the southern states wished to dissolve their bond with the federal government and the other states, other methods besides unilateral secession were available to them. They did not choose to litigate their grievances in court despite the fact that, at the time of the Secession Winter of 1860-61 the Supreme Court was made up of 7 justices who had ruled against Dred Scott in his landmark case to be free from bondage after living in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory for four years. Nor did they seek a Constitutional Amendment that would explicitly grant states the right to secede from the Union. And neither did they petition their fellow states to be released from the Union.
But still, seven states issued Ordinances of Secession prior to Lincoln’s inauguration and neither the Buchanan or Lincoln administrations made any effort to use force to stop the states from passing secession legislation. And despite the decision of the Cotton Seven states, troops were not called up to quell what was essentially a rebellion.
There is no way to tell how long Lincoln would have allowed for diplomatic discussions to resolve the issue. Congress was willing to consider additional legislation, and even passed a constitutional amendment, that would protect slavery hoping to convince the Cotton Seven that the disagreement between free labor and slave labor didn’t have to sever the Union.
Almost immediately after states issued their Ordinances of Secession, the Confederate states began to seize Federal property by force or threat of force. Fort Marion and the Pensacola Naval Yard in Florida were seized in January 1861, and Fort Pulaski in Georgia and the federal installation in San Antonio, Texas were both seized in February 1862. Cadets from The Citadel even fired on a civilian steamship hired by the United States government to resupply Fort Sumter with men and munitions. And still Lincoln bet on diplomacy.
It wasn’t until April, 1861 that the situation changed. After Major Robert Anderson moved his garrison of Federal troops from Fort Moultrie, located on Sullivan’s Island and vulnerable to attack from the landward side, to Fort Sumter in December 1860, he knew his supplies were going to run out in mid-April. Lincoln had a choice.
Lincoln could have either demanded the troops leave the fort in Charleston Harbor altogether or simply not attempt to resupply them. Lincoln had a duty as the President of the United States to protect his military and federal installations. His plan was simply to send a ship with supplies (not men or munitions) to keep the garrison fed. The naval ships sent as part of the convoy were only to intervene if the Confederates acted first.
Act they did. On April 12, 1861, the artillery in Charleston began a 34 hour barrage of Fort Sumter. Fort Sumter’s cannons were all facing the open water (since it was built to defend the Harbor from seagoing vessels). It wasn’t much of a battle. The American flag was lowered on April 13, 1861 as Anderson surrendered the fort.
It was now apparent that the Confederates were going to use force. Though the Confederates saw this as revolution, Lincoln saw it as armed rebellion. He had the Constitutional duty and authority to quash the rebellion and called up 75,000 volunteers to do so.
Part VI---What Does This NOT Mean?
We’ve seen that the spark was Fort Sumter. The Confederates themselves told us that the gun powder was slavery. That doesn’t mean that slavery was the reason everyone was fighting.
The Union did not initially fight for the abolition of slavery.
There were certainly abolitionists among the Union armed forces whose personal motivation for fighting was the abolition of slavery. Personal motivation of soldiers (privates or generals) are not the stuff of which government policy is made. The overriding political goal of the Federal government from the very beginning of the war was the restoration of the Union. Though he may have anticipated that the Civil War would result in the abolition of slavery, Abraham Lincoln believed that his Constitutional obligation was the protection of the Union alone. In September of 1862, a strategic victory at the Battle of Antietam (Battle of Sharpsburg) allowed Lincoln the opportunity to issue a carefully crafted Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves in states and areas in rebellion as a war power. After the Emancipation Proclamation’s effective date of January 1, 1863, the Federal government prosecuted the war to achieve two main goals: Union and Emancipation.
Confederates soldiers did not necessarily flock to the army to fight for slavery.
Some soldiers believed that they were fighting for their right to own slaves. Others joined to defend their homes from the invading Union army. There were some men who were bored at home and saw the war as a great adventure. Others joined to escape obligations both personal and financial in their lives. There were between 750,000 and 1 million Confederates that served during the course of the war and each one had a unique motivation.
Depending on how the question is asked, you could receive several legitimate answers to “What was the cause of the Civil War?” One of the best analogies I have heard likened the Civil War to an explosion. There was the underlying cause (the gun powder) and the ignition source (the spark).
Without one, the other doesn’t result in an explosion.
The easier, and less controversial, part of the analogy is the spark. On April 12, 1861, troops under the command of Pierre Gustav Toutant Beauregard fired a cannon from James Island in Charleston, South Carolina at the federal installation Fort Sumter and its garrison of United States troops. That shot began a 34 hour barrage that ignited the Civil War.
So, what was the explosive that laid dormant just waiting for the spark to change that potential energy into kinetic energy?
I realize that distilling down nearly a century of regional strife into one word is simplistic and that there were lots of aggravating actions that drove the country closer and closer to civil war over a period of decades. But, if you look deeper than the surface on every other cause that is credited to the Confederates as a motivation for the unilateral secession that caused the war, it always comes back to slavery.
Many people will take issue with this simple word. Such a small percentage of the Southern population actually owned slaves that it is unfathomable that poor white southerners would go to war for such a paltry reason, they say. They were fighting for their states’ rights and against an encroaching Federal government. Many of these people trust what they have been told by family, friends, heritage groups and people who are simply echoing what others have said, too.
To be fair, there was a time I too was told this by an educator I respected a great deal. I believed what they said because they had the formal education and were the “authority” on the subject. I wasn’t a particularly good history student at that time. Or maybe to be kinder to myself, I wasn’t really a mature historian at that time. I trusted what other people told me and considered neither their personal motives or their actual familiarity with the information they taught. It just so happened that the idea that a war was the result of states’ rights was both more palatable than the thought of people defending the indefensible act of human bondage and it aligned with my own personal view of the appropriate role of government. Logically, it made sense.
As I became less a history student and more a historian (amateur though I may be), I started meeting declarative statements differently. I demanded of others, “Prove it,” “Show me,” or “Sources, please.” When I did so of this particular question, too often the proof was either non-existent or it had what my favorite television lawyer, Jack McCoy, would generously label “a credibility problem”.
Contrary to what some people like to believe, this is neither a liberal belief nor revisionist history. Our understanding of history changes as new information is found. As long as something is supported by a documentary history, I am fine with that change in interpretation.
Ultimately, my understanding of history is based as much as it can be on Primary Sources. These are the kinds of evidence that Jack McCoy likes best—confessions, eye witness testimony, recordings (written in this case) from the people involved. Though Jack might call in an expert witness, the potential flaw is always that personal bias and misinterpretation of results may color their findings. And of course, hearsay testimony is excluded except in rare instances.
So, if you wanted to hear from the eye witnesses and the people who actually set the agenda and made the policy for the newly forming Confederacy, where would you go? Well, to the Primary Sources, of course! The Confederates left a long trail of official documentation, speeches and personal correspondence that outlined why they felt it was necessary to exercise their perceived states’ right to unilaterally sever a connection with the Union and why it was urgent to do so in late 1860-early 1861.
Can it really be revisionist history to listen to the very people who made these decisions and actually take them at their word? I certainly don’t think so.
Part II—The Confederate Cause in Their Own Words
The first official documents issued by the states that would create the Confederacy were the Ordinances of Secession issued by all of the seceding states (and unofficial governments in Kentucky and Missouri whose official governments sided with the Union). These documents were the official statements of the governments of the seceding states severing their ties with the Union.
These documents are short, and permeated with legal language and were documentation of the action, not the motivation thereof. Four of the seceding states—South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia and Texas—chose to issue a second document (called in most cases the Declaration of Causes….. and in Georgia’s case the Declaration of Secession). These documents followed the Founding Father’s example laid out in the Declaration of Independence by sharing exactly why they were taking the step of unilateral secession.
The Declarations of Causes are the State’s justification for their actions. They are declarations to not only the Federal government, but to other states and other nations about their motivations.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. (Mississippi Declaration of Causes that Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union)
Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.
On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States. (Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union)
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. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war.
The Presidential election of 1852 resulted in the total overthrow of the advocates of restriction and their party friends. Immediately after this result the anti-slavery portion of the defeated party resolved to unite all the elements in the North opposed to slavery and to stake their future political fortunes upon their hostility to slavery everywhere. This is the party to whom the people of the North have committed the Government. They raised their standard in 1856 and were barely defeated. They entered the Presidential contest again in 1860 and succeeded.
The prohibition of slavery in the Territories, hostility to it everywhere, the equality of the black and white races, disregard of all constitutional guarantees in its favor, were boldly proclaimed by its leaders and applauded by its followers.
With these principles on their banners and these utterances on their lips the majority of the people of the North demand that we shall receive them as our rulers.
The prohibition of slavery in the Territories is the cardinal principle of this organization. (Georgia Declaration of Secession)
In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.
For years past this abolition organization has been actively sowing the seeds of discord through the Union, and has rendered the federal congress the arena for spreading firebrands and hatred between the slave-holding and non-slave-holding States. (A Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union)
In February 1861, the seven states in the Deep South—South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas (aka the Cotton Seven)—met to create a Constitution for the newly minted Confederate States of America. In large part, it mirrored the Constitution of the United States of America. It does include language to restrict the power of central government (a line item veto and one six year term of the President), but it also restricts state’s right in a very significant way. It Constitutionally ensures that Confederate land will always recognize slavery and forbids states the opportunity to legislate or outlaw slavery within their own boarders (Article IV; Sec . 2 (3)).
In March 1861, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens gave a speech to a group in Savannah, Georgia about the differences between the United States Constitution and the Confederate States Constitution. He enumerates all of the changes and why they were important. The speech builds up to the most important difference between the two governing documents.
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. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split”...
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its 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. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. (Cornerstone Speech)
At this same time, while the fledgling Confederacy was creating its government and declaring its purpose, the new Confederate states began a campaign to convince the other 8 slave states to join the Confederate ranks. Confederate leaders knew that without the support of the more populous and industrious Upper South states (North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland and Delaware), the new Confederacy could die on the vine.
To make the case to the men deciding the fate of their respective states, the Confederate states appointed emissaries to speak with policy makers, legislators and at secession conventions. They sent letters and made speeches outlining their case for secession and why they believed it was imperative to take such a drastic and unprecedented action. The speeches and letters are meant to not only justify their own state’s actions, but to persuade others to join them. They are reflective of the secessionists’ motivations, but also instructive as to what the people of the secession movement believed would motivate others. To successfully persuade people, a speaker or writer will use the words and ideas most calculated to resonate with their audience.
There are many speeches and letters from the Secession Commissioners to state officials and state secession conventions. There was a repetitive theme among them, best represented by these Commissioners’ words:
What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery. This conviction, sir, was the main cause. It is true, sir, that the effect of this conviction was strengthened by a further conviction that such a separation would be the best remedy for the fugitive slave evil, and also the best, if not the only remedy, for the territorial evil. But, doubtless, if it had not been for the first conviction this step would never have been taken. (Georgia Secession Commissioner Henry Benning’s Speech to the Virginia Secession Convention)
To Your Excellency or so intelligent a body as the Legislature of Maryland it would be superfluous to enter into an elaborate statement of the policy and purposes of the party which, by the recent election, will soon have the control of the General Government. The bare fact that the party is sectional and hostile to the South is a full justification for the precautionary steps taken by Alabama to provide for the escape of her citizens from the peril and dishonor of submission to its rule. Superadded to the sectional hostility the fanaticism of a sentiment which has become a controlling political force, giving ascendancy in every Northern State, and the avowed purpose, as disclosed in party creeds, declarations of editors, and utterances of representative men, of securing the diminution of slavery in the States and placing it in the course of ultimate extinction, and the South would merit the punishment of the simple if she passed on and provided no security against the imminent danger. (Letter of JLM Curry of Alabama to Maryland Governor Hicks)
African Slavery has not only become one of the fixed domestic institutions of the Southern States, but forms an important element of their political power, and constitutes the most valuable species of their property-- worth, according to recent estimates, not less than four thousand millions of dollars; forming, in fact, the basis upon which rests the prosperity and wealth of most of these States, and supplying the commerce of the world with its richest freights, and furnishing the manufactories of two continents with the raw material, and their operatives with bread. It is upon this gigantic interest, this peculiar institution of the South, that the Northern States and their people have been waging an unrelenting and fanatical war for the last quarter of a century. An institution with which is bound up, not only the wealth and prosperity of the Southern people, but their very existence as a political community. (Letter of S.F. Hale, Commissioner of Alabama to the State of Kentucky, to Gov. Magoffin of Kentucky)
As early as the 10th of February, 1860, her Legislature had, with the general approbation of her people, adopted the following resolution:
"Resolved, That the election of a President of the United States by the votes of one section of the Union only, on the ground that there exists an irrepressible conflict between the two sections in reference to their respective systems of labor and with an avowed purpose of hostility to the institution of slavery, as it prevails in the Southern States, and as recognized in the compact of Union, would so threaten a destruction of the ends for which the Constitution was formed, as to justify the slaveholding States in taking council together for their separate protection and safety."
This was the ground taken, gentlemen, not only by Mississippi, but by other slaveholding States, in view of the then threatened purpose, of a party founded upon the idea of unrelenting and eternal hostility to the institution of slavery, to take possession of the power of the Government and use it to our destruction. It cannot, therefore, be pretended that the Northern people did not have ample warning of the disastrous and fatal consequences that would follow the success of that party in the election, and impartial history will emblazon it to future generations, that it was their folly, their recklessness and their ambition, not ours, which shattered into pieces this great confederated Government, and destroyed this great temple of constitutional liberty which their ancestors and ours erected, in the hope that their descendants might together worship beneath its roof as long as time should last. (Speech of Mississippi Secession Commissioner Fulton Anderson to the Virginia Convention)
This, gentlemen, brings me directly to the causes which I desire to lay before you. For fully thirty years or more, the people of the Northern States have assailed the institution of African slavery. They have assailed African slavery in every form in which, by our contiguity of territory and our political alliance with them, they have been permitted to approach it.
During that period of thirty years, large masses of their people have associated themselves together for the purpose of abolishing the institution of African slavery, and means, the most fearful were suggested to the subject race-rising and murdering their masters being the charities of those means. In pursuance of this idea, their representatives in the federal government have endeavored by all the means that they could bring to bear, so to shape the legislation as almost to limit, to restrict, to restrain the slaveholding States from any political interest in the accretion of the government. So that as my distinguished colleague [Judge Benning], stated to you on yesterday, the decree goes forth that there are to be no more slave States admitted into the Union.
Secondly, then, in pursuance of the same purpose that I have indicated, a large majority of the States of the Confederation have refused to carry out those provisions of the Constitution which are absolutely necessary to the existence of the slave States, and many of them have stringent laws to prevent the execution of those provisions; and eight of these States have made it criminal, even in their citizens to execute these provisions of the Constitution of the United States, which, by the progress of the government, have become now necessary to the protection of an industry which furnishes to the commerce of the Republic $250,000,000 per annum, and on which the very existence of twelve millions of people depends. In not one of these seventeen States can a citizen of one of the fifteen States claim his main property, and in many of them the persons of the citizens of these States have been violated, and in numerous cases the violence has resulted in murder.
Third. The citizens of not less than five of our confederates of the North have invaded the territory of their confederates of the slaveholding States, and proclaimed the intention of abolishing slavery by the annihilation of the slaveholders; and two of these States have refused to surrender the convicted felons to the demand of the invaded States; and one of these-one of the most influential-one, perhaps, recognized as the representative of what is called American sentiment and civilization, has, in its highest solemn form, approved of that invasion; and numbers of people, scattered throughout the whole extent of these seventeen States, have made votive offerings to the memory of the invaders.
Fourth. The most populous, and by far, the most potent of our late confederates, has for years proclaimed, through the federal legislature and by her own sovereign act, that the conflict between slavery and non-slavery is a conflict for life and death. Now, there is the calm, oft-reiterated decree of a State containing three millions of people, conducting four-fifths of the commerce of the Republic, with additional millions diffused through the whole of these 17 States. And many of these States themselves have decreed that the institution of slavery is an offence to God, and, therefore, they are bound by the most sacred attributes which belong to human nature, to exterminate it. They have declared, in their most solemn form, that the institution of slavery, as it exists in the States of their political confederates, is an offence to their social institutions, and, therefore, that it should be exterminated. Finally, acting upon the impulse of their duties of self-protection and self-preservation, majorities, large majorities throughout the whole of these 17 States have placed the executive power of the Federal Government in the hands of those who are bound by the most sacred obligations, by their obligations to God, by their obligations to the social institutions of man, by their obligations of self-protection and self-preservation, to place the system of slavery as it exists in the Southern States upon a course of certain and final extinction. Twenty millions of people, having in their hands one of the strongest Governments on earth, and impelled by a perfect recognition of the most powerful obligations which fall upon man, have declared that the vital interests of eight millions of people shall be exterminated. In other words, the decree, the result of this cumulation which I have endeavored to show you, was inaugurated on the 6th of November last, so far as the institution of slavery is concerned, in the confederates of the Northern non-slaveholding States. That decree is annihilation, and you can make nothing shorter of it. (South Carolina Secession Commissioner Speech of John Preston to the Virginia Convention)
The direct evidence from the Confederate Founders themselves claims that their motivation for establishing a new nation was to protect their right to own slaves. All other motives either derived from slavery or were not significant enough to prompt unilateral secession.
Part III—All Those Other Things
The war was about secession.
Lincoln should have allowed the Confederates to take Fort Sumter.
The Confederates did nothing to warrant Lincoln’s call for troops, which was really the aggressive act that started the war.
The Southern slave states believed they were asserting their states’ rights to secede from what they considered a voluntary union. This decision was controversial at the time and had been addressed by Andrew Jackson during his presidency. Jackson, a slaveholder from Tennessee, responded to an 1832 threat by South Carolina to nullify unfavorable tariffs. Though the tariffs had been passed by the Federal government, South Carolina believed it retained its sovereignty separate from the Union and refused to implement the tariff. In response to the Nullification Crisis, Jackson laid out the case that states no longer retained their sovereignty to act independent in opposition to the Federal government.
The States severally have not retained their entire sovereignty. It has been shown that in becoming parts of a nation, not members of a league, they surrendered many of their essential parts of sovereignty. The right to make treaties, declare war, levy taxes, exercise exclusive judicial and legislative powers, were all functions of sovereign power. The States, then, for all these important purposes, were no longer sovereign. The allegiance of their citizens was transferred in the first instance to the government of the United States; they became American citizens, and owed obedience to the Constitution of the United States, and to laws made in conformity with the powers vested in Congress. This last position has not been, and cannot be, denied… it has been shown that in this sense the States are not sovereign, and that even if they were, and the national Constitution had been formed by compact, there would be no right in any one State to exonerate itself from the obligation...
...But the dictates of a high duty oblige me solemnly to announce that you cannot succeed. The laws of the United States must be executed. I have no discretionary power on the subject-my duty is emphatically pronounced in the Constitution. Those who told you that you might peaceably prevent their execution, deceived you-they could not have been deceived themselves. They know that a forcible opposition could alone prevent the execution of the laws, and they know that such opposition must be repelled. Their object is disunion, but be not deceived by names; disunion, by armed force, is TREASON. Are you really ready to incur its guilt?
That is not to say that this was settled law. However, if the southern states wished to dissolve their bond with the federal government and the other states, other methods besides unilateral secession were available to them. They did not choose to litigate their grievances in court despite the fact that, at the time of the Secession Winter of 1860-61 the Supreme Court was made up of 7 justices who had ruled against Dred Scott in his landmark case to be free from bondage after living in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory for four years. Nor did they seek a Constitutional Amendment that would explicitly grant states the right to secede from the Union. And neither did they petition their fellow states to be released from the Union.
But still, seven states issued Ordinances of Secession prior to Lincoln’s inauguration and neither the Buchanan or Lincoln administrations made any effort to use force to stop the states from passing secession legislation. And despite the decision of the Cotton Seven states, troops were not called up to quell what was essentially a rebellion.
There is no way to tell how long Lincoln would have allowed for diplomatic discussions to resolve the issue. Congress was willing to consider additional legislation, and even passed a constitutional amendment, that would protect slavery hoping to convince the Cotton Seven that the disagreement between free labor and slave labor didn’t have to sever the Union.
Almost immediately after states issued their Ordinances of Secession, the Confederate states began to seize Federal property by force or threat of force. Fort Marion and the Pensacola Naval Yard in Florida were seized in January 1861, and Fort Pulaski in Georgia and the federal installation in San Antonio, Texas were both seized in February 1862. Cadets from The Citadel even fired on a civilian steamship hired by the United States government to resupply Fort Sumter with men and munitions. And still Lincoln bet on diplomacy.
It wasn’t until April, 1861 that the situation changed. After Major Robert Anderson moved his garrison of Federal troops from Fort Moultrie, located on Sullivan’s Island and vulnerable to attack from the landward side, to Fort Sumter in December 1860, he knew his supplies were going to run out in mid-April. Lincoln had a choice.
Lincoln could have either demanded the troops leave the fort in Charleston Harbor altogether or simply not attempt to resupply them. Lincoln had a duty as the President of the United States to protect his military and federal installations. His plan was simply to send a ship with supplies (not men or munitions) to keep the garrison fed. The naval ships sent as part of the convoy were only to intervene if the Confederates acted first.
Act they did. On April 12, 1861, the artillery in Charleston began a 34 hour barrage of Fort Sumter. Fort Sumter’s cannons were all facing the open water (since it was built to defend the Harbor from seagoing vessels). It wasn’t much of a battle. The American flag was lowered on April 13, 1861 as Anderson surrendered the fort.
It was now apparent that the Confederates were going to use force. Though the Confederates saw this as revolution, Lincoln saw it as armed rebellion. He had the Constitutional duty and authority to quash the rebellion and called up 75,000 volunteers to do so.
Part VI---What Does This NOT Mean?
We’ve seen that the spark was Fort Sumter. The Confederates themselves told us that the gun powder was slavery. That doesn’t mean that slavery was the reason everyone was fighting.
The Union did not initially fight for the abolition of slavery.
There were certainly abolitionists among the Union armed forces whose personal motivation for fighting was the abolition of slavery. Personal motivation of soldiers (privates or generals) are not the stuff of which government policy is made. The overriding political goal of the Federal government from the very beginning of the war was the restoration of the Union. Though he may have anticipated that the Civil War would result in the abolition of slavery, Abraham Lincoln believed that his Constitutional obligation was the protection of the Union alone. In September of 1862, a strategic victory at the Battle of Antietam (Battle of Sharpsburg) allowed Lincoln the opportunity to issue a carefully crafted Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves in states and areas in rebellion as a war power. After the Emancipation Proclamation’s effective date of January 1, 1863, the Federal government prosecuted the war to achieve two main goals: Union and Emancipation.
Confederates soldiers did not necessarily flock to the army to fight for slavery.
Some soldiers believed that they were fighting for their right to own slaves. Others joined to defend their homes from the invading Union army. There were some men who were bored at home and saw the war as a great adventure. Others joined to escape obligations both personal and financial in their lives. There were between 750,000 and 1 million Confederates that served during the course of the war and each one had a unique motivation.