Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: miko2d on February 07, 2003, 02:49:43 PM
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I thought it would deseve a separate post rather than be buried in a france-bashing one. Seems to be a popular misconception among people.
Holden McGroin: the US civil war was sparked when South Carolina ceceded
Strictly speaking, the term "civil war" referes to fractions fighting for the control of the government of a country. That was hardly the case. Anyway,
South Carolina ceceded to keep the status-quo, i.e. to keep slavery.
You appear to have been misled. Southern slavery was not in danger form the North. Quite the opposite.
On March 2, 1861, the U.S. Senate passed a proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (which passed the House of Representatives on February 28) that would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with slavery in the Southern states. (See U.S. House of Representatives, 106th Congress, 2nd Session, The Constitution of the United States of America: Unratified Amendments, Document No. 106-214, presented by Congressman Henry Hyde (Washington, D.C. U.S. Government Printing Office, January 31, 2000). The proposed amendment read as follows:
ARTICLE THIRTEEN
No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.
Two days later, in his First Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln promised to support the amendment even though he believed that the Constitution already prohibited the federal government from interfering with Southern slavery. As he stated:
I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution . . . has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose, not to speak of particular amendments, so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable (emphasis added).
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it" -- Lincoln in a a letter to newspaperman Horace Greeley on August 22, 1862
"I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position." -- Lincoln in August 21, 1858 debate with Stephan Douglas
Holden, just out of curiocity, where did you get the info stating otherwise?
Regards,
miko
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Originally posted by miko2d
Strictly speaking, the term "civil war" referes to fractions fighting for the control of the government of a country. That was hardly the case. Anyway,
I realize that some call it still the "War for Southern Independence", but I thought that for at least the last 75 years or so, was all just tongue in cheek.
There are many a battlefield monuments and graveyard markers inscribed "Civil War" perhaps they are incorrect. We will also have to let Ken Burns know.
You appear to have been misled. Southern slavery was not in danger form the North. Quite the opposite.
On March 2, 1861, the U.S. Senate passed a proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.... {which was passed three months after the Dec 20 1860 secession of South Carolina, quickly followed by the secession of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. looks like the politicians were trying to lock the barn door after the horse got out.[HM]}
ARTICLE THIRTEEN
No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.
Two days later, in his First Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln promised to support the amendment even though he believed that the Constitution already prohibited the federal government from interfering with Southern slavery. As he stated:
I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution . . . has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, ....
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it" -- Lincoln in a a letter to newspaperman Horace Greeley on August 22, 1862
"I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position." -- Lincoln in August 21, 1858 debate with Stephan Douglas
Holden, just out of curiocity, where did you get the info stating otherwise?
No doubt Lincoln was as imperfect as the rest of us, and he was a pragmatist and tried to do what he thought he could do. He was limited by the politics and culture of his times, and one must endeavour to understand the various forces pushing historical figures to the decisions they made.
In the "house divided", Lincoln did say: (speaking of a then advocated policy of sort of a slavery detante')
"Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crises shall have been reached and passed. "A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South."
In an 1837 statement while a member of the Illinois legislature, "[T]he institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolitionist doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils."
"We must not call it wrong in the Free States, because it is not there, and we must not call it wrong in the Slave States because it is there; we must not call it wrong in politics because that is bringing morality into politics, and we must not call it wrong in the pulpit because that is bringing politics into religion; we must not bring it into the Tract Society or the other societies, because those are such unsuitable places, and there is no single place, according to you, where this wrong thing can properly be called wrong!"
"Them's fightin' words"
In 1860, this sort of rhetoric from a man who was the president-elect was what concerned the south enough to believe that the end of their plantation culture and economy was at hand. Whether they were correct in their assessments will never be known, but that is what they thought, and then they fired on the fort.
Jefferson tried to write the anti slavery language into the founding documents, only to have the motion tabled until 1860. The proposed amendment you refer to was after the insurrection was nearly four score and seven years in the making. Too little too late for the south to gain much confidence.
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Holden McGroin:
There are many a battlefield monuments and graveyard markers inscribed "Civil War" perhaps they are incorrect. We will also have to let Ken Burns know.
The labels are assigned by winners and historians, so the event is called "Civil War" but what it refers to may be quite different.
On March 2, 1861, the U.S. Senate passed a proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.... {which was passed three months after the Dec 20 1860 secession of South Carolina, quickly followed by the secession of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. looks like the politicians were trying to lock the barn door after the horse got out.[HM]}
Or maybe it looks like the secession had nothing to do with slavery but with northern mercantilism suffocating southern trade in favor of nothern textile and industrial manufacturers.
So the North kept 8 slave states to the South's 7...
No doubt Lincoln was as imperfect as the rest of us, and he was a pragmatist and tried to do what he thought he could do. He was limited by the politics and culture of his times, and one must endeavour to understand the various forces pushing historical figures to the decisions they made.
Does not look like he was constrained by anything. He denied the states their constitutional right to leave the union, closed newspapers, jailed thousands of political opponents without presenting charges, etc.
He preserved the Union geographically, that's true - but the free union of states as created earlier was gone.
In the "house divided", Lincoln did say: (speaking of a then advocated policy of sort of a slavery detante')
"... Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South."
Even if he really believed that slavery would persist in america for more than a couple of decades without major war, all the more reason for him to join the Nothern secessionists who proposed to split from the slave states - so that they would not have to return runaway southern slaves and expence of guarding them would immediately make slavery not cost effective. Or at least some of them said that. Most hated blacks too much and saw South as a source of black contamination. Some northern states had laws that forbade blacks - either slaves or free to enter the state.
miko
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Originally posted by miko2d
Or maybe it looks like the secession had nothing to do with slavery but with northern mercantilism suffocating southern trade in favor of nothern textile and industrial manufacturers.
So the North kept 8 slave states to the South's 7...
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Does not look like he was constrained by anything. He denied the states their constitutional right to leave the union, closed newspapers, jailed thousands of political opponents without presenting charges, etc.
He preserved the Union geographically, that's true - but the free union of states as created earlier was gone.
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Even if he {Lincoln} really believed that slavery would persist in america for more than a couple of decades without major war, all the more reason for him to join the Nothern secessionists who proposed to split from the slave states - so that they would not have to return runaway southern slaves and expence of guarding them would immediately make slavery not cost effective. Or at least some of them said that. Most hated blacks too much and saw South as a source of black contamination. Some northern states had laws that forbade blacks - either slaves or free to enter the state.
miko
The seven states grew to 11 just after Lincoln's inaguration.
Lincoln was constrained by the mores and attitudes of the day, such as valuing slaves as some fraction of the value of a white man. In Huckleberry Finn, Twain writes of Huck's realization that the runaway slave Jim missed his family. Huck never thought 'they' felt the same emotions white folks do. Huck laments that he was taught that helping slaves and having thoughts of the equality of the black man would damn him to the neather regions. Huck then decides that if that's the way it truly is, "I'll go to hell."
Lincoln grew up in this same culture, and it takes a long while for the collective conscious to realize the injustice. Not all parts of the body awaken simultaneously, and yet he said in a 1862 message to congress, "We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless."
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From the "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union"
"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 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."[/i]
The last quote shows that it wasn't really Lincoln's attitude toward the slavery issue, but the Confederacy's perception of it that caused seccesion, and then The Civil War. Even South Carolina thought it was about slavery.
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Thanks for pointing me to that document, Holden. I finally got to reading several versions of it document floating on the web - a bit different from each other, mostly abridged.
Taken by itself, that document indicates that slavery was a greater cause for seccesion - at least of South Carolina - than some believe. Combined with the fact that the Union took urgent measures including a special amendmant to the Constitution to reassure South that slavery would not be encroached upon, it may indicate that some people in the South Carolina were more preoccupied with slavery than reality warranted.
They do bring up valid constitutional and legal points, however.
Still, others believe that secession flowed from South Carolina’s refusal to collect the tariff protecting North industries and strangling southern trade. And from apprehension that if republicans werre willing to violate Constitution for one cause, they would do it for others - all valid concerns.
It may be usefull to remember that in those times the states were run pretty much as separate states with different cultures, etc, unlike now - so decisions by any single state must be judged in the context of that state (including internal anti-slavery movement) rather be bundled as "South". Virginia secceded under very different circumstances than SC or any other state.
History is a complex thing...
Anyway, I am the one who made that mistake in the first place when I refuted your specific remarks about South Carolina by reference to the whole South. Also, I neglected a less obvious point - clarified in your final lines - that slavery did not have to be really in danger in order for South Carolina to have such perception and act upon it. Hereby I concede this argument.
miko
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Miko the argument about trade and tariffs cannot be seperated from slavery when it comes to the south. The south did so much foreign trade and was both able and need to import so many foreign finished goods because of its slave agriculture economy. Some 60-70% of all US exports of the period were cotton, and we know who grew, picked and processed that cotton and where it came from.
If the south did not have such a slave economy, as opposed to the north's modern wage/industrial system there would be no tariff issues to speak of. So I dont think the economic and tariffs argument for secesion can be made as an attempt to downplay or minimize slavery as the root cause of the civil war.
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GRUNHERZ: If the south did not have such a slave economy, as opposed to the north's modern wage/industrial system there would be no tariff issues to speak of.
?? We have no slavery now but plenty of tariffs.
How do you know there would not have been tariff issues if the cotton were produced by sweatshop rather than slave labor or by cotton-gathering machinery that was invented just a few years later and made slave labor obsolete just like cotton-cleaning machinery made it viable earlier? I do not know for sure if the tariffs on cotton were dropped after slavery was abolished but I would bet a small sum that they stayed in force. Care to do some research and enlighten us?
Could it be that tariffs on cotton were not intended to choke off the slave labor-based economy of the South but to direct cheap slave-produced cotton to the textile manufacturers in the North and deny it to competitors in England and France.
If such tariffs were really intended to punish slavery, they would have been directly in violation to the Constitution rather than just unfair to the cotton-producing states.
Slavery was not the only constitutional issue driving the states apart. There was more than one seccesionist movement in the South and even secessionist movement(s) within the Southern Confederacy itself due to the constitutional issues.
There were several secessionist movements in the North prior to 1860 having little or nothing at all to do with slavery.
Was slavery involved? Sure. Was it a root cause? Probably, or may be not. Aristotle lists four categories of causes plus there are more concepts often referred to as "causes", like "excuses". Depending on which one of them do you mean by "root", if any, will determine if I agree with you.
It's hard to argue in general when most history details are obscure and the whole language is set to fit one point of view. Like you calling the event "Civil War" and linking slavery to it.
First, were there more than one fraction fighting for the control of a central government? No. So it was not a civil war but an international one.
Second, even if slavery were the cause of seccesion by all states that secceeded, it absolutely does not follow that a war - civil or otherwise had to start as a reaction to the seccession or that annexation had to follow the war, etc.
That is why I do not believe the further argument here will be productive. I may even be agreeing with you but for likely attributing different meanings to the same words.
Even Lincoln claimed thet slavery was not a cause of the war - which does not refure your statement in the least because he might have ment some other kind of a cause.
My argument with Holden was very specifically about his statement what "sparked" the seccession by one state - South Carolina, what served as an excuse or pretext, not what was real or "root" cause, etc. He presented a very convincing statement right from the "horse's mouth". I learned something.
miko
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The slaves were the backbone ( literally ) of the cotton industry. You cant seperate cotton from slavery. So you cannot pose a "what if there was no slavery" - because there obviously was until after the civil war. No pipe dreams please, lets deal with reality. :)
The high tariffs were an issue because the south had no real industrial base like the north and thus they needed to import foreign finished goods - of course they did not like paying the higher prices. The tariffs were of course import duties on foreign products. One could also say the south was opposed to the high tarifs because they have impacts on free trade both ways with possible tariff retaliation by foreigners on the souths cotton exports. Initally the tariffs were meant to protect the infant industries of the north, which is a perfectly reasonable and well known protectionist argument, but around 1828 the south introduced an even higher tariff structure before congress in some bizzare attempt to spite the north, it didnt work and they got stuck with a 65% or so tariff on most foreign goods - boo hoo hoo for them it was their own damn fault.
But again we must come to the fact that south was in this position because of its slave agriculture economy.
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You cant seperate cotton from slavery.
It was never my intention but surely I can in in some respects. It got separated. Was cotton produced in the South after slavery was abolished and machines introduced? Certainly. Did tariffs go away? No. Did southern people still want to secceede? Sure. Some still do. Would they have restored slavery if they could? I don't know, but certainly not for gathering cotton. Machines did it better.
I can certainly separate slavery from the war. If South abandoned slavery and succeeded, what do you think Lincoln would do? Let them? Read his letters.
The tariffs were of course import duties on foreign products.
Of course not. Or at least not those I was talking about here. Tariffs were export duties on cotton and import duties on textile goods produced from cotton abroad. South had no problem buying cheap industrial equipment from the North like the rest of the North did. South had problem with not having money to buy anything because it could not sell its products at a good price to the foreigners. Maybe if they could get more money and buy more industrial products and got industrialised and developed quicker, slavery would have gotten obsolete before it led to war. All societies abandoned slavery once they got developed and industrialised - usually without bloodshed.
must come to the fact that south was in this position because of its slave agriculture economy
It was in North's interests to keep South underdeveloped and relying on slavery as a supplier of cotton. It only became a problem to the North when such slave South threatened to leave them. It was north that built the cotton-cleaning machines that were the main reason for increase in slavery in 1800s. It was North that gladly bought slave-produced cotton. So we must come to the fact that South could have been in the position of slave agriculture economy because of the North policies among other things.
And you are still referring to the South as one monolithic unit - which was not even close to truth. After seccession, even after Fort Sumpter, there were more slave states in the North than in the South.
miko