by Kit
Since this is week was the 150th Anniversary of the Surrender at Appomatox I figured I should do a post expounding on why the South was wrong to secede. Now, with
National Review being firmly pro-Lincoln this is not a controversial task but anti-Lincolnism and pro-Confederacy ideas still rear their heads from time to time, especially in an era of federal over-reach.
So here, in probably my longest post for this site so far, I state just why I believe the South was wrong.
Secession is Illegal
This is often the heart of the pro-Confederate arguments. The argument goes as follows: America was founded in an act of secession since the colonies did secede from Britain. Indeed, they claim, secession is a right enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution.
First, by declaring independence from Great Britain the colonists were committing Treason, which was punishable (like many crimes at the time) by death. The act of seceding from Great Britain was as illegal as if we had tried to send an assassin to London to shoot George III. It is a fact that just about every single movie, book, and documentary about the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution seems to recognize from 1776 to History Channel’s The Revolution to Bruckheimer’s National Treasure where Nicholas Cage listed the various penalties the Signers faced for putting their signature to that document.
he Founding Fathers seemed to recognize this when Ben Franklin said, “We must all hang together or we will all hang separately.”
Democracy requires some level of authority. The national government of any nation must have some right in maintaining its sovereignty over the lands within its borders. If any part of the country, any town, province, municipality or state, can remove itself from the authority of the parent government you have anarchy. States can use the threat of secession as a form of extortion to stop laws from being passed or to ensure laws favorable to them are passed. Something which the South had been doing for several decades prior to the Civil War —successfully.
As for its legality, I would only point out that the US Constitution, though it never mentions secession, grants Congress the right to “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions” and it states that “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” It also defines Treason as “levying war against [the United States].” So, we have at least two instances of the Constitution granting the federal government the right to suppress attempts to overthrow its authority.
What further definition does one have of “rebellion” and “insurrection” than a group of states (1) declaring themselves independent, (2) seizing federal military installations and armories, and (3) firing on those installations that refuse to comply? If that is not insurrection then the word has no meaning.
Imagine if California seceded and Jerry Brown sent the National Guard, or some military force he raised, to seize the various military bases along the West Coast? How would you expect the federal government to react? Sit by, idly or sent the rest of the military in to bring California back into the fold? (stop laughing)
Right of Secession vs. Right of Revolution
That brings us to the basic difference between the revolutionaries of 1776 and the secessionists of 1860; the Right of Revolution vs. the Right of Secession. As, Harry V. Jaffa points out that the Right of Revolution is articulated in the Declaration of Independence. It is summed up in the vast part of the document’s second paragraph:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” LINK
In sum: Individuals are created equal with “certain unalienable Rights” that governments must exist to secure and protect and when a government repeatedly acts to deprive the people of those rights then they have a right, a “duty,” to overthrow the government and replace it with a better one.
It makes no claim of a legal right to overthrow the government or to declare independence enshrined somewhere in the laws of Great Britain. Instead, it claims a moral right, one outside of the written law, based instead in the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” James Madison, who has president would send troops to Pennsylvania to enforce a Supreme Court ruling, himself recognized this difference in a letter to Daniel Webster on Mr. Webster’s speech against nullification, i.e., a state’s right to nullify, or declare itself exempt from, federal laws at will; when “the claim to secede at will,” and “the right of seceding from intolerable oppression,” pointing out that “The former answers itself, being a violation, without cause, of a faith solemnly pledged. The latter is another name only for revolution, about which there is no theoretic controversy.” LINK
Thus, since the act of secession is illegal, the question comes down to whether or not the motivations and reasons behind the act are right. It is not enough to say they were “well-meaning”. We must ask whether there had been a “long train of abuses and usurpations” by the government they were rebelling against or their actions were motivated by “light and transient causes.”
The South fought for Slavery AND its Extension
Many like to point to the various actions of Lincoln’s administration, the suspension of habeas corpus in Maryland, the burning of Atlanta, and the raising of armies; all actions that occurred after the first couple of states had seceded and begun seizing federal installations. That is, after the war had already begun to kick into gear. Therefore, we must look to events that occurred prior to secession to see if the South was on the right side, especially the event that triggered the first wave of secessions; the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency.
When one looks at the election one does not see, as today, two big parties with a couple of minor parties, such as the Libertarians or Greens, that never attract any large numbers of votes. You see, starting with the biggest vote getter; Lincoln for the Republicans, Breckinridge for the Southern Democratic Party, John Bell for the Constitutional Union Party, and Stephen A. Douglas for the Democratic Party. The reason is what happened at the Democratic convention and the answer as to why the South seceded. And this is where it gets lengthy.
The primary issue of the election of 1860 was not the existence of slavery in the Southern states but the existence of slavery in the territories. Just about everyone in the North except for a slew of abolitionists thought the federal government had no right to abolish slavery where it existed or even wanted it abolished. Indeed a number did not want it abolished in the South for fear of freed black slaves moving north to take their jobs and rape their women (I never said the North wasn’t racist). But they did oppose the extension of slavery. Abolitionists, concentrated mainly in places like Boston, opposed it for obvious reasons, and the Free Soilers, concentrated more in the Mid-West, opposed it largely on the grounds that black slaves would soak up available jobs for whites and massive plantations (Big Plantation) would push out white farmers. The Southerners wanted it extended to the territories because it would allow slavery to extend.
By the 1850s the country had slowly but uncomfortably settled on Popular Sovereignty; letting the territories themselves decide. However, In the recent Dred Scott decision the Supreme Court had ruled that Congress had no power to bar slavery in the territories, thus making Dred Scott a slave, and, further, it did not have the power to grant the territories the right to deprive slave owners of their right to property. Though this last part was non-binding as it had nothing to do with the case itself, it was clearly setting the stage for any future rulings should the issue of Popular Sovereignty come before the court.
The Republican Party, representing Free Soilers and Abolitionists on the slavery issue, flatly opposed extending slavery to the territories and Lincoln pledged he would treat the Dred Scott decision as unconstitutional. The Democrats, however, were more divided on the issue. The Northern Democrats, under Douglas, supported a platform of keeping Popular Sovereignty but the Southern Democrats wanted a Democrat platform that would protect slavery in the territories. An impasse was reached and the Southerners bolted and formed their own party, the Southern Democrats.
Thus the showdown of 1860:Lincoln running on a halting of slavery’s expansion won most of the North and the Southern Democrat’s Beckinridge, running on the aforementioned platform of a de facto extension of slavery to all of the territories won most of the South and Maryland with Bell’s Constitutional Union Party winning Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and the Democratic Party’s Douglas winning only Missouri.
Several Southern states had threatened secession if Lincoln won the election and, starting with South Carolina, did just that. Seven of them seceded before Lincoln had even reached the Presidency. Many people claim economic issues such as the tariff were the cause of the South’s secession. But a simple reading of South Carolina’s declaration reveals that the word “tariff” does not appear once but the word “slavery appears 6 times and the word “slaves” appears 5 times and cites “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” and then spends the next several paragraphs citing attempts by the Northern states to thwart the Fugitive Slave Act and says “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.”
We can go further, Vice President Alexander Stephens made his “Cornerstone” speech in March of 1861. He discussed how the Founding Fathers saw slavery as a moral wrong but one “they knew not how to deal with” but felt it would eventually fade away and, therefore, founded the United States upon the assumption of “the equality of the races.” The Confederate States, Stephens argues, is built on a different idea (emphasis mine):
“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.” LINK
For State’s Rights and the Tariff, indeed. So the question comes back, did the South have the Right of Revolution? Was it worth it for the South to start a war, and they did start it by seizing federal installations, over the right to extend the enslavement of human beings into the territories, even if those who lived there opposed it? Did they have the right to secede because an election did not go their way?
Conclusion
There is where I must end things. I am already well past 2,000 words and I think it best to wrap it up. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of the methods and strategies Lincoln used to end the Civil War from the suspension of habeas corpus in Maryland to the burning of Atlanta. There are also many legitimate criticisms that can be leveled at some of the strategies America and the CIA employed in the Cold War against the Soviet Union and International Communism, but that does not mean America was not right to oppose the Soviet Union, nor does it mean Lincoln was not in the right to oppose secession and slavery.
The South was fighting for slavery and they were willing to fight not only to preserve it but to extend its practice at the very least from the Atlantic to the Pacific. A practice that was truly abhorrent in its very nature; it proclaimed an inequality of men under the law and gave the right of one man to own another human being. As the film Amazing Grace put it, slavery said “you belong not to God but to a man.”
The Civil War, along with smashing slavery and secession, it firmly established something else; the idea that America is a country of the Middle-Class. You see, before the Civil War some in the South were promoting the idea of the “Mudsill Theory,” an idea that proclaimed a need for a lower-class to work so that the upper classes can do the job of thinking for civilization, LINK, a quasi-feudal notion. Lincoln described it as follows:
“By some it is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital -- that nobody labors, unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow, by the use of that capital, induces him to do it. Having assumed this, they proceed to consider whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent; or buy them, and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far they naturally conclude that all laborers are necessarily either hired laborers, or slaves. They further assume that whoever is once a hired laborer, is fatally fixed in that condition for life; and thence again that his condition is as bad as, or worse than that of a slave.”
Translation: Civilization requires great men of capital to put the little men to work as labor and thus it requires little men to work in perpetuity for the great men. Lincoln called this nonsense, pointing out that:
”Even in all our slave States, except South Carolina, a majority of the whole people of all colors, are neither slaves nor masters. In these Free States, a large majority are neither hirers or hired. Men, with their families -- wives, sons and daughters -- work for themselves, on their farms, in their houses and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand, nor of hirelings or slaves on the other. It is not forgotten that a considerable number of persons mingle their own labor with capital; that is, labor with their own hands, and also buy slaves or hire freemen to labor for them; but this is only a mixed, and not a distinct class. No principle stated is disturbed by the existence of this mixed class.”
Trans: Most people are neither workers. A truth that Marxists can never comprehend.
He goes further, bringing up the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” view of America:
“The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor -- the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all -- gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.”
And on that note, I really do end things. Have a great weekend.
Sources
—Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson
—Harry V. Jaffa’s writings and speeches on the Civil War. I will point you to his debate with anti-Lincolnite Thomas DiLorenzo, here: LINK and his interviews with Peter Robinson here and here.
—PBS’ documentary series The Abolitionists for the story about Angelina Grimké
—The various writings cited above; the Declaration of Independence, James Madison’s letter to Webster, and the Cornerstone Speech.
—I also used wikpedia as an occasional source. So, sue me.
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