Genesis of the American Civil War
The historical event that looms largest in American public consciousness
is the Civil War. One-hundred thirty-nine years after the first shot was
fired, its genesis is still fiercely debated and its symbols heralded and
protested. And no wonder: the event transformed the American regime from a
federalist system based on freedom to a centralized state that circumscribed
liberty in the name of public order. The cataclysmic event massacred a
generation of young men, burned and looted the Southern states, set a
precedent for executive dictatorship, and transformed the American military
from a citizen-based defense corps into a global military power that
can’t resist intervention.
And yet, if you listen to the media on the subject, you might think that the
entire issue of the Civil War comes down to race and slavery. If you favor
Confederate symbols, it means you are a white person unsympathetic to the
plight of blacks in America. If you favor abolishing Confederate History
Month and taking down the flag, you are an enlightened thinker willing to
bury the past so we can look forward to a bright future under progressive
leadership. The debate rarely goes beyond these simplistic slogans.
And yet this take on the event is wildly ahistorical. It takes Northern war
propaganda at face value without considering that the South had solid legal,
moral, and economic reasons for secession which had nothing to do with
slavery.
Even the name "Civil War" is misleading, since the war wasn’t about
two sides fighting to run the central government as in the English or Roman
civil wars. The South attempted a peaceful secession from federal control, an
ambition no different from the original American plea for independence from
Britain.
But why would the South want to secede? If the original American ideal of
federalism and constitutionalism had survived to 1860, the South would not
have needed to. But one issue loomed larger than any other in that year as in
the previous three decades: the Northern tariff. It was imposed to benefit
Northern industrial interests by subsidizing their production through public
works. But it had the effect of forcing the South to pay more for
manufactured goods and disproportionately taxing it to support the central
government. It also injured the South’s trading relations with other
parts of the world.
In effect, the South was being looted to pay for the North’s early
version of industrial policy. The battle over the tariff began in 1828, with
the "tariff of abomination." Thirty year later, with the South paying 87
percent of federal tariff revenue while having their livelihoods threatened
by protectionist legislation, it become impossible for the two regions to be
governed under the same regime. The South as a region was being reduced to a
slave status, with the federal government as its master.
But why 1860? Lincoln promised not to interfere with slavery, but he did
pledge to "collect the duties and imposts": he was the leading advocate of
the tariff and public works policy, which is why his election prompted the
South to secede. In pro-Lincoln newspapers, the phrase "free trade" was
invoked as the equivalent of industrial suicide. Why fire on Ft. Sumter? It
was a customs house, and when the North attempted to strengthen it, the South
knew that its purpose was to collect taxes, as newspapers and politicians
said at the time.
To gain an understanding of the Southern mission, look no further than the
Confederate Constitution. It is a duplicate of the original Constitution,
with several improvements. It guarantees free trade, restricts legislative
power in crucial ways, abolishes public works, and attempts to rein in the
executive. No, it didn’t abolish slavery but neither did the original
Constitution (in fact, the original protected property rights in
slaves).
Before the war, Lincoln himself had pledged to leave slavery intact, to
enforce the fugitive slaves laws, and to support an amendment that would
forever guarantee slavery where it then existed. Neither did he lift a finger
to repeal the anti-Negro laws that besotted all Northern states, Illinois in
particular. Recall that the underground railroad ended, not in New York or
Boston-since dropping off blacks in those states would have been
restricted-but in Canada! The Confederate Constitution did, however, make
possible the gradual elimination of slavery, a process that would have been
made easier had the North not so severely restricted the movements of former
slaves.
Now, you won’t read this version of events in any conventional history
text, particularly not those approved for use in public high schools. You are
not likely to hear about it in the college classroom either, where the single
issue of slavery overwhelms any critical thinking. Again and again we are
told what Polybius called "an idle, unprofitable tale" instead of the truth,
and we are expected to swallow it uncritically. So where can you go to
discover that the conventional story is sheer nonsense?
The last ten years have brought us a flurry of great books that look beneath
the surface. There is John Denson’s "The Costs of War" (1998), Jeffrey
Rodgers Hummel’s "Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men" (1996),
David Gordon’s "Secession, State, and Liberty" (1998), Marshall de
Rosa’s "The Confederate Constitution" (1991), or, from a more popular
standpoint, James and Walter Kennedy’s "Was Jefferson Davis Right?"
(1998).
But if we were to recommend one work-based on originality, brevity, depth,
and sheer rhetorical power-it would be Charles Adams’s time bomb of a
book, "When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern
Secession" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). In a mere 242 pages, he shows
that almost everything we thought we knew about the war between the states is
wrong.
Adams believes that both Northern and Southern leaders were lying when they
invoked slavery as a reason for secession and for the war. Northerners were
seeking a moral pretext for an aggressive war, while Southern leaders were
seeking a threat more concrete than the Northern tariff to justify a drive to
political independence. This was rhetoric designed for mass consumption .
Adams amasses an amazing amount of evidence-including remarkable editorial
cartoons and political speeches-to support his thesis that the war was really
about government revenue.
Consider this little tidbit from the pro-Lincoln New York Evening Post,
March 2, 1861 edition:
"That either the revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the
rebel states, or the port must be closed to importations from abroad, is
generally admitted. If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are
substantially repealed; the sources which supply our treasury will be dried
up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; the nation will become
bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe. There will be nothing to
furnish means of subsistence to the army; nothing to keep our navy afloat;
nothing to pay the salaries of public officers; the present order of things
must come to a dead stop.
"What, then, is left for our government? Shall we let the seceding states
repeal the revenue laws for the whole Union in this manner? Or will the
government choose to consider all foreign commerce destined for those ports
where we have no custom-houses and no collectors as contraband, and stop it,
when offering to enter the collection districts from which our authorities
have been expelled?"
This is not an isolated case. British newspapers, whether favoring the North
or South, said the same thing: the feds invaded the South to collect revenue.
Indeed, when Karl Marx said the following, he was merely stating what
everyone who followed events closely knew: "The war between the North and the
South is a tariff war. The war is further, not for any principle, does not
touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for
sovereignty."
Marx was only wrong on one point: the war was about principle at one level.
It was about the principle of self-determination and the right not to be
taxed to support an alien regime. Another way of putting this is that the war
was about freedom, and the South was on the same side as the original
American revolutionaries.
Interesting, isn’t it, that today, those who favor banning Confederate
symbols and continue to demonize an entire people’s history also tend
to be partisans of the federal government in all its present political
struggles? Not much has changed in 139 years. Adams’s book goes a long
way toward telling the truth about this event, for anyone who cares to look
at the facts.
Disclaimer
posted by Chazzsongs at
12:08 PM
