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A very interesting read indeed! Thank you, Samnell.
Question: I'm writing an alternate history campaign for an RPG, and I'm wondering: How feasible would it have been if, say, the British or some other power had gotten involved in the war by supporting the Confederates in order to make it last longer? Not necessarily fight in it, but rather help with resources and stuff like that.
My understanding of the US Civil War is rather superficial, but I'm of the impresion a big factor against the Confederates was how they ended up completely isolated from the rest of the world in economic and diplomatic manners.
Would something like that work to ensure the war would have extended further in time?
I'm going to exclude discussion of the Trent Affair here as that's a later and somewhat weird situation compared to the general question. By the time it erupted, British intervention was not really on the table. It opened the door to something again briefly, but in different circumstances.
Getting international recognition, particularly from the British, was the main way that the Confederacy expected to win the war after the first few battles. Before that, they expected to give the United States a bloody nose and go on their merry way. How likely this was is a bit controversial in the field. It's clear that the Southerners thought they had a really good chance, but less clear that the British agreed.
Much is rightly made of how the British relied on Confederate cotton, though we have petitions from textile workers declaring that they'd rather sit it out than support a government founded on slavery and the Confederacy generally revolted British public opinion. However, if it got to the point where the economy was really creaking and it looked like the United States could not win the war, then you have a chance for some kind of intervention. Prior to the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American military history, the British Cabinet had agreed that pending the outcome of the campaign (Lee had invaded the North.) they would discuss things. That's not a commitment, but it at least looked to them like something worth a serious talking about.
What form would British intervention have taken? A direct military invasion would probably be unlikely, but in the nineteenth century a concert of Great Powers could usually enforce their will on others. This is doubly true when dealing with an at best second-rate power like the United States.
A minimal intervention would have entailed recognizing the Confederacy and opening diplomatic relations. This would make the war into one of conquest and aggression by the United States. At the very least it would complicate enforcement of the blockade instituted around Southern ports. Thus blockade runners might be able to switch from taking cotton to trade for high-value luxury goods into something resembling normal trade. That would have greatly helped the Southern economy. Likely some foreign ships would try to use the ports too and interdicting them would cause an international incident that might spiral into an outright war.
Somewhat more vigorous: the British and French could probably force some kind of demand for a negotiated peace that preserved the Confederacy. Would the United States take kindly to that? No. But if the British moved an army or two to Canada, which they did in response to the Trent Affair, that's a different story. The Royal Navy also easily had the power to sink every stick of wood the Untied States could float, something Americans were very aware of.
However, while it's true that British mills fed on Southern cotton it's also true that British bellies fed on Yankee wheat. While wheat is not cotton and could be got elsewhere, the US supplied a whole lot of it to Britain. Going to war with your grocery store is going to have serious consequences and the British were well aware of that. Combine that with their loathing of slavery and you have a fairly strong force pushing against a vigorous intervention.
Say there's a mandated peace. I suspect in that event that it wouldn't be long before a new war erupted, so unless the Confederacy got some kind of thoroughgoing British protectorate, we're looking at Civil War 2 probably within twenty years of the end of the first.
Those are, however, all interventions with a mind to shorten or end the war. Making it go on longer would make things harder for both parties, but probably do worse for the Confederacy. Most of the war, from quite early on, was fought within the CSA's claimed borders. Even in 1862, you've got quite a lot of important territory lost. The CSA's largest port is taken in April. Earlier in the year, the United States gained control of the Confederacy's central rivers. That's quite a burden, even if the CSA could maintain a stalemate in Virginia indefinitely. Then you hit up on the problem that the CSA is not built to sustain a lengthy, modern war. They managed some pretty crazy logistics stunts, but that could not keep up forever. The CSA could not win a war of attrition, and knew it, so to the extent that grand strategy existed (this is controversial, since nobody ever came forward and offered one up) it was about carrying things on until the US gave up.
This was closest to happening, to the degree we can figure in an age before opinion polls, not at any of the conventional turning points but rather when the main United States army, the Army of the Potomac, and the main Confederate army, the Army of Northern Virginia, were locked in trench warfare around Petersburg* in southeastern Virginia in 1864. Horrific loss of life to no apparent gain tends to demoralize. But that's of course a domestic thing rather than a foreign intervention.
*You often hear this referred to as the Siege of Petersburg, but it's not a siege in the strictest sense. The armies engaged in something very much like early WWI's race to the sea where both sides tried to get around the other's flank, failed, and entrenched. Then tried again and tried for various breakthroughs. Petersburg had the rail hubs that connected the Confederate capital to the rest of the South. Lee could not abandon it without conceding Richmond, so locking him down at Petersburg denied him the ability to maneuver that he'd so often used to success in the past.
Huh.
Horrible, horrible thought - Lovecraft's views on race, which tended to be extreme even for the 1920's and 30's, might have been normal for the Civil War era US?
It's complicated. Lovecraft grew up and lived in what they call the nadir of race relations. That's a problematic name in a sense, as it implies slavery was better, but also justified to the degree that freelance campaigns of violence directed somewhat anarchically against the black population were unheard of, outside a few insurrection panics, during slavery. Unless you could slavery as such a campaign. I think that you absolutely should and that it's better understood as a kind of low-intensity warfare against black Americans, but that there are meaningful differences between what happened during slavery and what happened after even if both are similarly horrific and violent. There's a temptation to call it a lateral move, and I don't think that's fair, but I see where people who do so are coming from.
Lovecraft fancied himself a throwback, sometimes with justice, and my recollection of his stuff that I've read sounds a bit more 19th century racist than 20th century racist. He's very much writing in reaction to science, in the common vein of Anglo-American conservatism in the era that the scientific understanding of humanity was kind of a disaster because it was horrifyingly true. His racial ideas seem oriented around breeding, which is very nineteenth century. Before scientific racism took hold, a process that began in the 19th century and of course reached its greatest triumphs in the twentieth, races were often understood as a kind of breed. One had essential traits because they'd been bred in. People in an agricultural setting get this stuff intuitively. You breed your best horses and use the worst for glue, etc.
There are antecedents, of course. I'm not as educated as I'd like to be on the process and contemporary controversies about it, but I've read some very scientific racist arguments for white and black constituting separate species. These are arguments from anatomy, usually focused on smaller brain sizes but sometimes also brain vs peripheral nervous system densities (more peripheral nerves made you into a better laborer and dancer...and no I am not kidding about the last one) which reference respectable European authorities. If you've been bred to a smaller brain, then obviously you can't pull the same intellectual cart that a white dude could. However, in researching this I also came across papers arguing otherwise and that brain size was entirely a function of one's overall size rather than racially specified. The guy who was making the arguments from brain size (Samuel Cartwright) wrote after all of this and had enough education that he might have known of and ignored it (He's a bit shifty) but I don't know for a fact that he did. Ultimately, however, even he applies to long experience and Biblical teachings to justify slavery.
This is all fitting for Cartwright, since he's a pretty hands-on, practical guy. He was ultimately writing advice for overseers (more whipping) and explaining problems they faced in the course of their jobs. There are more sophisticated theorists, of whom I've seen Josiah Nott referenced the most. I'm not familiar with him except to know that he ended up being popular in a somewhat more highbrow audience.
Since I'm talking about racial theories here's an especially odd one: Cartwright got his medical education from Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia. Rush is one of the pioneers in occupational therapy, a totally respectable doctor in his time and antislavery by period standards. Rush believed that black people were actually white people with a kind of double-reverse leprosy that turned their skin all wrong, apparently basing this on stories he'd heard about blacks turning white. The general frame of that, if often sans the leprosy angle, is one you sometimes seem in early 20th century religious fringe publications. Usually the idea is that through prayer, black people can work off whatever sin gave them the pigmentation and return to their ancestral whiteness.
Edward L. Jackson - Governor of Indiana and member of the KKK, in 1925.
D. C. Stephenson is one of my favorites. He was the Grand Dragon of the Indiana KKK (early 1920's). He also kidnapped a woman, raped her and caused her death. The cause of death was a staph infection from numerous bite wounds. He was sentenced to life in prison, but later paroled.
While on parole, he skipped town. Sentenced to another 10 years, he was paroled after 5.
At the age of 70 he was accused of assaulting a young girl. He got off with a $300 fine.
The KKK actually saw a very large growth of influence in the early 20's (it declined after Stephenson's trial, which revealed lots of sex and alcoholism). They were major players in cities like Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia, though often in secret.
Harry Truman paid a $10 membership fee to the KKK in 1924 in an attempt to garner their endorsement. There's no evidence he was an active member though.
John Clinton Porter, mayor of Los Angeles in 1928 was once a member of the KKK.
(I excluded mentioning prominent southern politicians, to highlight that it wasn't something exclusive to the South)
Woodrow Wilson pushed for laws banning interracial marriage in Washington, DC. His administration was also responsible for segregating federal offices (they had been integrated prior to his presidency).
Birth of a Nation quotes Woodrow Wilson several times in it's characterization of Reconstruction.
IIRC, one of the Adamses of the Adams Family's job during the Civil War was to run around the docks of [I forget which English port] and point out all the battleships that were being built for the Confederacy and raising hell about them....
I don't know that any of the Adamses ever went personally down to the docks, but Charles Francis Adams was minister (we didn't do ambassadors yet) to the Court of St. James during the war.
The British generally let Confederate agents buy ships for commerce raiding and blockade running. Liverpool was both building the ships and home of the textile mills. The United States has a consul there, Thomas H. Dudley. He kept his ear to the ground, via informants, and so knew all that went on. I don't know that Adams boys served in that role, but Charles had at least one son with him in the UK.
So it's march, 1862. The first ship rolls off the line. Everyone knows what it's for because Dudley is telling them. British law forbade building and arming warships in the UK for a belligerent. So what's a guy to do? If you're James D. Bulloch, you have the ship sail to the Bahamas. Its guns follow in a separate ship. They're put together on the far end of the ocean. Before that, he also tried claiming that he was building a ship for an Italian merchant. He even had forged papers. This ship was the Florida, by the way.
Bulloch got away with it and went for another go. The Liverpool authorities were in the pocket of Big Slavery and happy to keep looking the other way or accept whatever pretense Bulloch offered when Dudley complained. But this was time number two and a bigger ship, the Alabama. Bulloch got word that the British were going to impound his ship, so he got clearance for a trial cruise. The ship did not come back, but instead ended up at the Azores where she met up with her guns and got to raiding.
Want some more wild stuff? I sense you do. Florida and Alabama worked out so well that Bulloch contracted with Laird for a pair of armored ships (usually called the Laird rams) with turrets for nine-inch guns and seven foot rams. The idea was that these guys would rip right through the wooden fleet, maybe even raid New York.
CF Adams was not into that and went ballistic with the Foreign Office. Bulloch gave the ships to a French company that allegedly bought them for the ruler of Egypt. Sure, why not? Nobody bought this except those who wanted to let the ships go anyway, of course. Bulloch had reason to hope, since in April of '63, a court found that the British could not seize ships based on the argument that they were clearly built as warships. They had to actually have guns.
Adams finally threatened that the US would take release of the rams as an act of war. He didn't know that the UK had opted to ignore the court and seize the rams anyway. Internal British correspondence suggests that they'd have liked to tell Adams to f~** off, but when his stuff got released to the public it made him a hero in the US.
(I excluded mentioning prominent southern politicians, to highlight that it wasn't something exclusive to the South)
As a matter of policy, the Second Klan preferred to avoid Confederate imagery. They prided themselves on being all-American rather than an explicitly sectional group. Thus you don't see Confederate flags in their march on Washington.
The Third Klan did otherwise, with the full support of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other white power groups of the age.
However, while it's true that British mills fed on Southern cotton it's also true that British bellies fed on Yankee wheat. While wheat is not cotton and could be got elsewhere, the US supplied a whole lot of it to Britain. Going to war with your grocery store is going to have serious consequences and the British were well aware of that. Combine that with their loathing of slavery and you have a fairly strong force pushing against a vigorous intervention.
Well aware of it. The Brits who were in charge by the time of the Civil War often had either grown up, or at the oldest had been young men entering politics, during their war against Napoleon. It was hard for them to forget the role that runaway bread prices ("Let them eat cake!") played in setting all that off.
I didn't mention Egypt in my list of new cotton lands opening, and for good reason. They took on some wartime production, but fell off the map again pretty quickly. India, Central Asia (Aral Sea and neighborhood), and China would provide more robust competition for the South over the next handful of decades. Especially after Suez.
Samnell, I can't recall where I heard these at first, so no sources but can you confirm/refute?
-Lincoln had a plan for repatriating black slaves to Africa.
-As a corollary to the above: free blacks sent to Liberia pre-Emancipation set up antebellum-style plantations and enslaved the natives on them.
-The Cherokee nation (not officially part of the US) kept slaves after the war.
-Lee's wife freed her slaves before the war while Grant's held onto hers until Emancipation.
-The worst race riot of the 19th century took place in New York City.
-The only black commissioned officers (and the first on American soil, though not fighting for the USA) during the war fought for the Confederacy in the Louisiana Native guard; being gens de coleur or mixed-race by modern standards, but enough to be considered just "black" outside Louisiana.
Also, this is tangential (17th century) but what are your thoughts on colonist Anthony Johnson? If Wikipedia is to be believed, he was a black freedman who sued to extend the contract of a black indentured servant for a lifetime, thus establishing legal precedent for lifetime ownership of a slave who had committed no crime, in contrast to the John Punch case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Johnson_(colonist)
I didn't mention Egypt in my list of new cotton lands opening, and for good reason. They took on some wartime production, but fell off the map again pretty quickly. India, Central Asia (Aral Sea and neighborhood), and China would provide more robust competition for the South over the next handful of decades. Especially after Suez.
I didn't know that Egyptian cotton fell off postwar. Now I do. Thank you. :)
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Samnell, I can't recall where I heard these at first, so no sources but can you confirm/refute?
It is in my nature. :)
-Lincoln had a plan for repatriating black slaves to Africa.
Not exactly. I've written a bit here before about the American Colonization Society, which is a fiendishly complicated group to understand. (There was also a Maryland Colonization Society, complete with its own little colony, which eventually went bust and folded into the latter.) Before the war, Lincoln and most other antislavery Americans supported the ACS in some capacity. In the political spectrum of the age, it was a middle of the road and establishment way to be antislavery. Especially before the late 1840s.
Abolitionists usually did not, hoping for some kind of biracial America not only free from slavery but also with at least limited equal rights for black men (and sometimes women). Lincoln, and most Americans, were never abolitionists. Just where one draws the line can be hazy, but the usual test is that abolitionists preferred an immediate end to slavery and antislavery Americans preferred gradual schemes. I mention this because without the distinction in mind, it's very difficult to understand the politics of the era.
The ACS had the plan to send slaves to Africa, which predated Lincoln's entry into politics. However, the ACS had a serious problem in achieving that aim in that most enslavers did not want to give up their valuable property to it and most free blacks had zero interest in going. The ACS might possibly have paid market price for slaves, but it lacked the cash to do so. (So did the United States, incidentally.) When it went asking Congress for money toward those ends it provoked a major proslavery freakout about this being the thin edge of the wedge for abolition.
-As a corollary to the above: free blacks sent to Liberia pre-Emancipation set up antebellum-style plantations and enslaved the natives on them.
Afraid I'm not very familiar with early Liberian politics. I know that in the early twentieth century the nation was dominated by US rubber interests who operated plantations there, and the descendants of American-born colonists formed an elite class, but not how they got from A to B.
However, it would stand to reason. There were black enslavers in Haiti, who were usually themselves slaves from a few generations back, and also a few in the United States. Some of the American enslavers at least only enslaved loved ones who they could not legally free. If you buy your wife so she's not being exploited by some random guy, you are a slaveholder but it's very different from if you bought a dozen hands and set them to picking cotton. Both of these happened, but I understand there's some controversy about which was more prominent or even if it matters considering that black slaveholding in the US was so rare and free blacks lives were still governed by slave codes even if they themselves held human property.
-The Cherokee nation (not officially part of the US) kept slaves after the war.
The Cherokee nation was officially part of the US, but also recognized as sovereign. The treaties and legislation governing relations between the United States and First Nations are a frequently horrifying mess. As a practical matter, the United States usually treated indians as a kind of wards of the state who required special protection from the depredations of the white man, except when it signed off on and committed those depredations itself. You can get a feel for the status quo in the middle-1800s by skimming the Non-Intercourse Act of 1834.
The tribal government actually passed emancipation measures during the war, though. They initially went for the Confederacy, but then some pulled a West Virginia.
California had a kind of slavery directed against Indians which was pretty nasty, but to my understanding it was legally abolished before the war. There was also a fair bit of non-enforcement of the state's famous constitutional provisions against slavery.
-Lee's wife freed her slaves before the war while Grant's held onto hers until Emancipation.
I'll take Grant first. US Grant married into a slaveholding family. At some point, it appears that his wife's father let her use four of his slaves. (I'm unclear if this was contemporaneous with or in addition to Grant's tenure managing his father-in-law's farm and slaves.) This is not the same as her owning them and without legal ownership she could not emancipate them even if she wanted to. However, Grant himself bought a slave off his father-in-law. We know very little about this man, William Jones, except that Grant claimed to have bought him from his father-in-law and manumitted him in 1859. If you know anything about Grant's prewar life, then you know that he was not a rich or successful man. The slave might have been sold to him for a song or given as a gift. We don't know exactly when, but 1858 seems likely. Grant freed William at a time when he could probably have very much used the cash. Could this be more of Grant's poor business judgment? Maybe, but I don't think we should dismiss the fact that Grant chose to free a man who could have given him a lot of money if sold instead.
There's a more detailed take, complete with all the information we know about William Jones in its original document, here.
As for Lee's wife? She never emancipated anybody. Lee did, but only because he was required to. He inherited slaves from his father-in-law, with the provision that they could be retained for up to five years before freeing them. This was in 1857. Lee freed those slaves in 1862. You can do the math. In the interim, he was not an especially enlightened slaveholder. But then one would not expect a man committed to slavery's perpetuation into the indefinite future to be.
-The worst race riot of the 19th century took place in New York City.
That's the New York City Draft Riots. A mostly Irish mob in New York objected strenuously to being drafted to fight for what they perceived as the freedom of black Americans and chose to express this by murdering as many of them as could be found.
Was it the worst antebellum race riot? Maybe, maybe not. White Virginians murdered something on the order of two hundred people in reaction to Nat Turner's uprising, which beats the New York body count. Other panics over slave insurrection were similarly indiscriminate, though I don't remember the figures off the top of my head. The NYC riot might be the worst in terms of property damage (not counting property in lives) given it took place on Manhattan and not in Southeast Virginia, but I don't know for sure.
-The only black commissioned officers (and the first on American soil, though not fighting for the USA) during the war fought for the Confederacy in the Louisiana Native guard; being gens de coleur or mixed-race by modern standards, but enough to be considered just "black" outside Louisiana.
There were no black officers in the Civil War. The Louisiana Native Guard are an interesting case in that they were generally well-off biracial people who had a special status higher than that of slaves within Louisiana society. (This is a carryover from French colonial practice. Free men of color were numerous and united enough in Haiti to constitute a distinct party in the revolution.) They presented their services to the Confederacy, which promptly shat a brick. The Native Guards were part of the LA militia and accepted as such there, but not within the CSA's military. The Confederates wouldn't even let them guard POWs.
By the time the Native Guards were in any kind of position to fight United States troops, the state had revised its militia law to permit only whites in the body. Sometime thereafter, with the actual Confederate forces retreating from New Orleans, the Native Guards were ordered to defend the French Quarter. They were less than enthusiastic. Many, though not all, eventually signed up with the US Army and formed a unit going by the same name.
Quite a bit more detail here.
Also, this is tangential (17th century) but what are your thoughts on colonist Anthony Johnson? If Wikipedia is to be believed, he was a black freedman who sued to extend the contract of a black indentured servant for a lifetime, thus establishing legal precedent for lifetime ownership of a slave who had committed no crime, in contrast to the John Punch case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Johnson_(colonist)
The usual claim is that Anthony Johnson invented slavery as we know it in America. That native Americans had enslaved one another before that doesn't count, for some reason. Nor do the Spanish and Portuguese who were in on the act before Johnson, all the way up to bringing the slaves from Africa. Nor does it count the black slaves that first arrived in Virginia in 1619, who were treated as indentured servants by local law but were pretty clearly transported as slaves. Calling them indentured servants is misleading because white indentured servants at least semi-willingly, if often forced by economics, signed on for the job. All unfree labor is not equally horrific and so we should not blindly lump it all together. Jury duty isn't the same thing as having your children sold away or being raped at will, no matter what hysterics some immaculately white jackasses like to engage in.
As it happens, being an unwilling indentured servant is how Johnson got to Virginia. He did his time and got his freedom dues. Apparently he did well enough for himself as he bought three indentures in 1653. By this point, at least two men in Massachusetts (John Winthrop and Samuel Maverick) owned slaves. Indeed, both were on the scene by 1630. Winthrop approved of trading blacks to Indians in exchange for other goods as well as enslaving Indians. Still piling on Massachusetts, it passed the its first laws providing for slavery in 1641. They were also trading captured Indians down to the West Indies.
All of this is before Johnson wins his case in 1655 and gets one of his runaways indentured for life. So is John Punch's 1640 indenture for life sentence, which he got alongside two white indentured servants who got off with just four years' added time.
But what do I think of Anthony Johnson? I think he's a remarkable and moving, if also horrifying, example of how white supremacy did not yet rule in British North America but rather was actively instituted there in the course of the later 1600s. The fixed color line we know so well and seems so absolute was invented and so can be un-invented. He also provides a good case study into how racism actually works in practice, which I've written more about here.
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*knowledge drop*
There's a reason I asked you and not Wikipedia. Much obliged.
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*knowledge drop*There's a reason I asked you and not Wikipedia. Much obliged.
Aw yeah, Samnell is the best!
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It's the schooling I wish I'd gotten. Samnell's the cool prof, forget Google.
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I didn't forget about GreyWolfLord's post, but have had two issues delaying me. One is RL stuff. The other was trying to find a way to rewrite what I've already written on the subject without driving myself batty. I didn't plan to, and don't intend to start, making frequent references to how I've dealt with this or that on the blog. I tried to approach the argument from other angles, but one ends up covering the same material anyways and that was frustrating since I didn't write the stuff that long ago. (Also I'm a bit proud of that post.) So here's a short version with a link to the longer one:
Claim: It was States' Rights!
Answer: Misleading and evasive because:
1) States' rights are not actually an end in themselves, but rather a method by which actual ends are achieved. They don't real. Therefore: states' rights for what? And we're back to slavery again. (This is also true for the tariff.)
2) The South only ever cared about states' rights when they could protect slavery, and insisted upon firm national control when they did otherwise.
3) The South is not unique in this. Whomever lost the last election was always howling states' rights. I have examples of this at the blog and can share some more here if wanted, including the same states declaring for and against the same position quite explicitly depending on where they understand their interests as aligned.
4) South Carolina and the other rebelling states listed among the grievances justifying their secession the fact that Northern states had gotten into the states' rights closet and came out with nullification of the fugitive slave act. Tells you something, doesn't it?
Bonus content:
1) When not forced to deal with a Union containing free states, the Confederates wrote a constitution in many ways similar to the United States Constitution. However, it specifically and emphatically denied the power not just to the Confederate government but also to individual state governments to abolish slavery. It further mandated that slavery be instituted in any new territory gained by the confederacy. So much for local control!
2) Not really the question itself, but I could also go into a bit of the evolution of states' rights arguments and their significance as a proslavery strategy if someone wants. Suffice it to say that the standard narrative of a straight Virginia & Kentucky Resolutions to SC's nullification to secession is not quite so. However, states' rights arguments as developed in the early Democratic-Republican Party are deeply informed by the concerns of enslavers about the security of their property and that influence should not be overlooked even when it shares space with other grievances.
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Whomever lost the last election was always howling states' rights.
Sort of like how every Supreme Court decision someone agrees with is somehow an example of "strict Constitutionalism," whereas every decision they don't agree with is instead an example of "legislating from the bench."
This was noted earlier.
Whomever lost the last election was always howling states' rights.Sort of like how every Supreme Court decision someone agrees with is somehow an example of "strict Constitutionalism," whereas every decision they don't agree with is instead an example of "legislating from the bench."
It gets pretty blatant down in the details, which the elder Schlesinger clearly relished sharing a century back. I've got his main source of texts on the subject (it's free) but haven't yet dug in for my favorite hypocrisies. It's a document collection, so one doesn't really go to read it cover to cover unless one is just slightly more boring than I am. :)
"Fun" Fact. Did you know that Negros were not the only race enslaved in the United States?
California's chattel slaves were drawn from local American Indian tribes. One of the conditions of joining the Confederacy would be to keep them as slaves.
In the future US, Indians were enslaved before Africans. However, it turned out that they tended to run off and they could both blend in more easily and had local friends more likely to help them do so. Also enslaving them tended to irritate their buddies, who might come and burn your town down.
Of course, you could also get a tribe that didn't like its neighbors so much willing to sell them to you. South Carolina had Indian slaves taken from as far afield as the Mississippi for a while.
I also seem to recall that they died faster than Africans, although that may have just have been the Island Carib, Taino, and other Caribbean Arawak people and Columbus' brutal, basically genocidal, actions.
I don't know enough about Caribbean Indian slavery to comment on it specifically, but sugar cultivation on the islands was a prodigious consumer of lives.
However, I understand that the growing consensus among historians studying American Indians is pretty cold on the old idea that we killed most of them accidentally with disease rather than deliberately by a combination of direct violence, various engineered deprivations, and increased intensity and frequency of intertribal conflict due to European intervention and introduction of firearms.
Different treatment of enslaved Indians vs. enslaved Africans could come out of the perceived increased risk of Indians fleeing or rebelling compared to Africans. That kind of thing usually leads to a vicious cycle of brutality, something that enslavers knew very well but often declared themselves powerless to stop. In that context, it would stand to reason.
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"cold on" as in they don't think that any more?
I thought the evidence was pretty solid that disease had devastated the Native American population, often before direct contact with Europeans. Thus the perception of much of the continent as underpopulated, especially at the first settlement of the east coast.
Not that it at all excuses the deliberate extermination of the surviving populace of course.
Disease was certainly a factor, but my understanding is that the continental die-off thesis is pretty much a dead letter. Issue being that we would expect epidemics to spread somewhat consistently but that's not what we see in the signs of depopulation. The epidemic would have to be curiously slow and selective, taking centuries to cross the continent even where long-distance trade connected populations. An anthropologist described this hypothetical series of pandemics to me as slowest, but also most weirdly final and absolute diseases around. (Even when you have a big die-off, short of complete extinction, people tend to rebound fairly well.) So like no disease or group of diseases actually behaves.
By contrast, the evidence is somewhat better that a combination of direct killing and various dislocations did most of the work. There's a good summary of why they think so in this reddit post.
This is not really my field and I haven't read any dedicated work on it, but what I have seen pointing toward the new consensus is generally persuasive.
I remember seeing a History Channel documentary about a native tribe that was pressed into building a fort in the Carolinas during the Civil War, partly because the conditions were so bad that no actual slave owner was willing to risk his 'investment' by providing any labor.
I'm innately skeptical of anything on the History Channel and can't speak to that particular example, but I can think of one similar. The US Navy seized Galveston, TX fairly early in the war, then got kicked out for the rest of the war. When it looked like they were on their way back, there was a serious effort to fortify hampered by a labor shortage.
They had all of these slaves right there, but the enslavers proved very resistant to having them commandeered by the Confederate military. Part of this is just down to property in man being such a big deal and it should be considered in light of US contraband and then emancipation policy, but there were also serious fears that the army would mishandle and risk the slaves without regard for the money that the enslavers had sunk into them. That was something for the planters to do, not some random officer with an allegedly gray* uniform.
*Getting actual gray dye into the Confederacy was a bit of a problem. Most Confederate gray was probably more the shade of "khaki and covered with dirt."
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Either way, if the "American Exceptionalists" have their way, this and any other story which doesn't paint America as "exceptional" and blessed in virtue, will be whitewashed out of the educational system.
Indeed. I've read complaints from a teacher in Texas that he's required to teach American Exceptionalism, which forces him to do a combination of misleading kids and leaving out important facts because he doesn't want to get fired. That's what one has to call "working as designed."
IIRC the one in particular was about all the smaller conflicts that erupted after the Civil War, with the incident I mentioned being only one part, culminating with the leader of the natives basically stealing the price that had been put on his head.
If it's after the Civil War then there were no slaves around to do the work instead of Indians. :) Also not sure why it would be so urgent to get a fort build up shortly after the end of the war.
Still, if you remember a name or more precise location it's something I can look into. Period sources and conventional historiography alike tend to turn a blind eye to Indian persistence, which can make it very hard to track such things.
I remember seeing a History Channel documentary about a native tribe that was pressed into building a fort in the Carolinas during the Civil War, partly because the conditions were so bad that no actual slave owner was willing to risk his 'investment' by providing any labor.I'm innately skeptical of anything on the History Channel and can't speak to that particular example, but I can think of one similar. The US Navy seized Galveston, TX fairly early in the war, then got kicked out for the rest of the war. When it looked like they were on their way back, there was a serious effort to fortify hampered by a labor shortage.
They had all of these slaves right there, but the enslavers proved very resistant to having them commandeered by the Confederate military. Part of this is just down to property in man being such a big deal and it should be considered in light of US contraband and then emancipation policy, but there were also serious fears that the army would mishandle and risk the slaves without regard for the money that the enslavers had sunk into them. That was something for the planters to do, not some random officer with an allegedly gray* uniform.
*Getting actual gray dye into the Confederacy was a bit of a problem. Most Confederate gray was probably more the shade of "khaki and covered with dirt."
I keep hearing butterbur for color.
I didn't forget about GreyWolfLord's post, but have had two issues delaying me. One is RL stuff. The other was trying to find a way to rewrite what I've already written on the subject without driving myself batty. I didn't plan to, and don't intend to start, making frequent references to how I've dealt with this or that on the blog. I tried to approach the argument from other angles, but one ends up covering the same material anyways and that was frustrating since I didn't write the stuff that long ago. (Also I'm a bit proud of that post.) So here's a short version with a link to the longer one:
Claim: It was States' Rights!
Answer: Misleading and evasive because:
1) States' rights are not actually an end in themselves, but rather a method by which actual ends are achieved. They don't real. Therefore: states' rights for what? And we're back to slavery again. (This is also true for the tariff.)
2) The South only ever cared about states' rights when they could protect slavery, and insisted upon firm national control when they did otherwise.
3) The South is not unique in this. Whomever lost the last election was always howling states' rights. I have examples of this at the blog and can share some more here if wanted, including the same states declaring for and against the same position quite explicitly depending on where they understand their interests as aligned.
4) South Carolina and the other rebelling states listed among the grievances justifying their secession the fact that Northern states had gotten into the states' rights closet and came out with nullification of the fugitive slave act. Tells you something, doesn't it?Bonus content:
1) When not forced to deal with a Union containing free states, the Confederates wrote a constitution in many ways similar to the United States Constitution. However, it specifically and emphatically denied the power not just to...
Once again, paying the Devils Advocate (to present the counter), since in fact I actually agree with Samnell.
The answer to the idea that the war was over Slavery instead of States Rights can be answered rather succinctly with Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. All of these were slave states. I will elaborate, but be patient as it comes to fruition later in my evidence.
However, in more light, we can see the focus of the Declarations of Secession do not actually focus on Slavery, but ON the particular matter of State Sovereignty (also recognized today as States Rights). In fact, the trigger and example is slavery, but the reasons, the power to do so, and the inherent ability and cause is that of State Sovereignty.
From the South Carolina Declaration...
And now the State of South Carolina having resumed her separate and equal place among nations, deems it due to herself, to the remaining United States of America, and to the nations of the world, that she should declare the immediate causes which have led to this act.
In the year 1765, that portion of the British Empire embracing Great Britain, undertook to make laws for the government of that portion composed of the thirteen American Colonies. A struggle for the right of self-government ensued, which resulted, on the 4th of July, 1776, in a Declaration, by the Colonies, “that they are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; and that, as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do.”
......By this Constitution, certain duties were imposed upon the several States, and the exercise of certain of their powers was restrained, which necessarily implied their continued existence as sovereign States. But, to remove all doubt, an amendment was added, which declared that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people. On 23d May, 1788, South Carolina, by a Convention of her people, passed an Ordinance assenting to this Constitution, and afterwards altered her own Constitution, to conform herself to the obligations she had undertaken.
..........
We hold that the Government thus established is subject to the two great principles asserted in the Declaration of Independence; and we hold further, that the mode of its formation subjects it to a third fundamental principle, namely: the law of compact. We maintain that in every compact between two or more parties the obligation is mutual; that the failure of one of the contracting parties, to perform a material part of the agreement, entirely releases the obligation of the other; and that where no arbiter is provided, each party is remitted to his own judgment to determine the fact of failure, with all its consequences.
..................
This sectional combination for the subversion 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 peace and safety.
On the 4th 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.
The Guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.
The Rights of State Sovereignty is mentioned just as much if not more than Slavery, and in fact, when paired with Slavery is in many ways seen as the political impetus in regards to their view of why they should be allowed to make their own decisions without Federal disregard of certain rights and allocations as per the Constitution of the US (which of course included the 3/5ths as part of it.
Also, in reference, with slavery, it was not only about the political power of the Non-slave states with which they were obtaining, but also that of another political power. As per the Constitution, these slaves were only allowed 3/5 of a vote and were not considered citizens.
The Slavery states believed that the Non-Slave States were pushing anti-slavery laws for another reason, to garner political power from those freed slaves. AS they were slaves still (as per the property assured as noted above in another post) property, they could not be freed by the Northern States. By freeing them, the Northern states tried to make them citizens, which allowed the former slaves to vote, which thereby gave the North a new 100% voting citizen, as opposed to the 3/5 of a vote that the Southern Owner should get by lay of the Constitution (or at least how the south interpreted it).
The Declaration includes a LOT about slavery, but it's major item of contention is that of the Sovereignty of the State. It uses this as well in it's reason WHY it is allowed to dissolve it's 'contract' with the Union. The Sovereignty of the State is the core of the issue of the document, not slavery.
Slavery can be seen as the trigger, and is used as a primary excuse for what has triggered the usage of the States Rights, but it is not specifically Slavery which is at the core of WHY and HOW they can leave the Union.
It's because they felt that the State holds powers over the Federal Government, which is what even allows them to separate in the first place.
Now we bring in the other slave states that DID NOT secede from the Union. IF it was merely a slavery issue, these states would have also found reason to secede...instead it was seen as a States Rights issue. First, if they decided that they wished to Secede, could they. Did the states even have the RIGHT to do this. Second, were the injunctions of the Federal Government so intrusive at all levels to require this secession. In the Slave States that did not secede there was serious debate, and yet slavery was NOT the reason given to secede or not secede.
Furthermore, in the South, only around 10% of the population OWNED slaves. IF it was purely over slavery, then only around 10% were concerned...this discounts the reasons for the OTHER 90% (or majority) of the South. In Kentucky, a state that did NOT secede, this presents an even more clear understanding of how it could deal with States Rights vs. that of slavery. Here we have a state which is not as reliant upon slave crops (or crops that utilized slavery to grow) as other states in the deep south, however, unlike that 10% of the population...some areas had up to 50% slave ownership. Much of this can be seen from the perspective that these were more house slaves, or slaves that were not used in agriculture, but in every day activities.
If it were truly about slavery, you'd imagine a population that would be more intensely affected by the loss of slaves would have chosen to secede. In fact, during the Civil War it is thought that almost 75% of these slaves escaped or left and gained freedom. If any state had a reason to secede due to Slavery, Kentucky should have been one!
However, in debates one can see that it was not merely over the idea of slavery, that slavery was not necessarily the impetus of WHY or the reasons HOW they could leave the Union. Slavery was the example of the Abuses of the Federal Government in not following the Constitution of the Land, and hence utilized as the example as well as the trigger for why they felt they needed to leave, but the reasoning given were that of the Sovereignty of the State.
Next we see Texas. This is a state that declared it could leave the Union at any time, as it self was originally a separate nation, and was still a separate nation instead of a state (a claim many still hold in Texas, but was invalidated due to the civil War). This is an even stronger declaration in regards to why it was allowed to leave the Union. Once again, we could see Texas stating the rights of the State, and furthermore, that this property is NOT slaves per se, but ALL property (as in that which Texas claims...to the 'pacific' which is a thing which Texas distinctly did not attain.
Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated States to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility [sic] and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery--the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits--a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and other slave-holding States of the confederacy. Those ties have been strengthened by association. But what has been the course of the government of the United States, and of the people and authorities of the non-slave-holding States, since our connection with them?The controlling majority of the Federal Government, under various pretences and disguises, has so administered the same as to exclude the citizens of the Southern States, unless under odious and unconstitutional restrictions, from all the immense territory owned in common by all the States on the Pacific Ocean, for the avowed purpose of acquiring sufficient power in the common government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her sister slave-holding States.
By the disloyalty of the Northern States and their citizens and the imbecility of the Federal Government, infamous combinations of incendiaries and outlaws have been permitted in those States and the common territory of Kansas to trample upon the federal laws, to war upon the lives and property of Southern citizens in that territory, and finally, by violence and mob law, to usurp the possession of the same as exclusively the property of the Northern States
Now the Texas declaration touches HEAVILY upon the slavery issue, but even MORE heavily upon the RACE issue (to a degree which quoting that portion MIGHT be highly offensive to some here) and relies in part more heavily on the racial discrimination as a major portion of it's decision...but the power of that decision relies upon the idea that it's status as a separate nation and state give it the power to do so.
If no other example stands, the best one is Lincoln himself. He accepted the secession declarations at face value. He does not say that this is a matter over slavery...and to guarantee the rights and freedom of the slaves, but as a matter of unification. The war was NOT started over slavery, as per Lincoln, it was because the States decided they had the power (State Soveriegnty...or States Rights) to secede. Hence the Civil War was started, NOT over Slavery, but as Lincoln would put it, to preserve the Union.
The argument then wasn't actually about Slavery, but whether the states themselves had the power and the right TO secede. Slavery is a cover which people use to disguise the fact that it actually was over whether the states had the power to secede...not over slavery itself.
Slavery was a major factor in these decision, and a major factor to create this issue, but at the heart slavery itself was not in contention (as even the Union had slavery still and had slave states, if it were the issue, these states would have surely seceded along with the other slave states).
Instead, it was a matter of money and power, money and power that led to the question of whether a state had the power to make it's decisions in violation of Federal law...with that decision being the right to secede...or whether Federal law over ruled the states law. It was this enforcement of Federal law (with the view that the states did NOT have the Sovereignty nor right to secede) which was distinctly stated and was enforced that was the actual issue of the Civil War.
Your analysis of Kentucky is incomplete, simplistic and lacks any details of actual events in the state.
Your analysis of Kentucky is incomplete, simplistic and lacks any details of actual events in the state.
drop some truth on us, iron.
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Just wanted to comment on this:
Furthermore, in the South, only around 10% of the population OWNED slaves. IF it was purely over slavery, then only around 10% were concerned...
These sorts of arguments ignore that the slave owners were generally the upper class that ran the Southern states and got to decide on Southern policy.
In short, the people actually in charge of the South were the ones that owned the slaves.
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Which is a point GreyWolfLord has made in his self-appointed role as devil's advocate in concert with Samnell's eloquence. In part I suspect due to the adage of 'learn from history lest ye be doomed to repeat it'.
Failing to understand, however repugnant, the historical/antebellum Southern perspective in this matter can be seen right now on the campaign trail in the U.S., among other places.
Understanding is a far cry from embracing.
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Your analysis of Kentucky is incomplete, simplistic and lacks any details of actual events in the state.drop some truth on us, iron.
Kentucky was home to numerous abolition and antislavery newspapers and periodicals.
Importation of slaves was restricted in 1815 and latter banned in 1833. Of any slave state, Kentucky had the strictest laws concerning slavery.
Numerous Baptist denominations within the state preached either antislavery or abolition.
In 1849 antislavery proponents were confident enough of their position that they convened the third constitutional convention in hopes to prohibit slavery in the state altogether. Pro-slavery groups rallied and managed to take over the convention though, creating one of the most pro-slavery state constitutions in the country.
Abolitionism definitely lost a lot of ground during the 1850's, but while the state was largely pro-slavery by the time of the Civil War, the legislature was also pro-Union. The governor was sympathetic to the Confederacy, but the legislature had a veto-proof majority that opposed him. Unionists held 76 (out of 100) seats in the house and 27 (out of 38) seats in the senate.
Instead the state adopted a neutral stance. Both the Union and Confederacy avoided sending troops to or through the state to avoid pushing them to the other side. That is until faulty reports led a Confederate general to think that Union troops were already in the state.
While many men went to both sides to volunteer, Kentucky never officially organized any units. Multiple times Confederate generals assumed that volunteers from Kentucky would rise up and join them, but it never happened en masse. Kentuckians joined the Union army at a rate roughly 20:3 over the Confederacy, though most of the men who went to cavalry units joined the Confederacy.
Edit: To add, traditionally Kentucky had a lot of ties with Virginia and North Carolina, many of it's settlers came from those states. By the 1850's though, railroad connections were increasing and linking Kentucky to states in the North. Many people who emigrated from Kentucky went North, creating many family ties that were newer and pointed to the Union.
The fact that slavery existed in Kentucky, perhaps was even common, does not make it the single defining factor as to the state's allegiance in the war.
The state always had a problem with runaway slaves, largely due to the physical location of the state. Free states were just a river's swim away.
TLDR: Kentucky was both pro-Union and pro-slavery.
Which is a point GreyWolfLord has made in his self-appointed role as devil's advocate in concert with Samnell's eloquence. In part I suspect due to the adage of 'learn from history lest ye be doomed to repeat it'.
Failing to understand, however repugnant, the historical/antebellum Southern perspective in this matter can be seen right now on the campaign trail in the U.S., among other places.
Understanding is a far cry from embracing.
This was probably why West Virginia (as well as Western North Carolina) dropped out of being the poor men to die in a rich man's war.
I wonder if there were any, at all, Southern businesses that employed uneducated and possibly unskilled freemen. Doubtful that it was at any kind of living wage if at all - as we see in the postwar robber-baron era, many Northern business concerns didn't prove to be any more forward-thinking or humanitarian than slave plantations.
Something else to look at, the Crittenden Compromise came from Kentucky Senator John J. Crittenden.
Which is a point GreyWolfLord has made in his self-appointed role as devil's advocate in concert with Samnell's eloquence. In part I suspect due to the adage of 'learn from history lest ye be doomed to repeat it'.
Failing to understand, however repugnant, the historical/antebellum Southern perspective in this matter can be seen right now on the campaign trail in the U.S., among other places.
Understanding is a far cry from embracing.
Very much so. I spend a lot of my time getting into the heads of slaveholders. (I do antislavery Americans too, but I find them a bit less interesting.) It's important to give them a somewhat sympathetic reading, or you might as well not bother. But one can go too far that way too and end up carrying water for them. Historians have done it before. It's very easy to get attached to some corpse or another and let it have a nibble of the old gray matter. :) Laypeople often aren't even trying to do otherwise.
I have mixed feelings about the whole devil's advocacy thing. I've seen more than a few self-appointed contrarians who were clearly advocating for their genuine beliefs rather than out of some obscure sense of fairness. But I don't mind that GWL is here posting the arguments. They're quite bad arguments that essentially throw up rhetorical smokescreens for and diversions from slavery, which I'm pretty sure he knows.
They're also not really representative of antebellum Southern perspectives. Nobody in the South decided that the war was over states rights until they'd lost the thing. State sovereignty was just the method du jour to defend slavery in what they increasingly understood as a hostile Union. States' rights qua states' rights are the characteristic argument not of the antebellum, but rather the post-bellum white South. Foundational Lost Cause stuff. You see them in the histories written by "victors" like Jefferson Davis (CSA president), Jubal Early (Confederate general), and Alexander Stephens (Confederate VP). Confederate and antebellum rhetoric is much clearer about states rights being a tool with which to defend slavery, if occasionally one which sounds somewhat purer and more "national" (which was of course a reason for the appeal) and nothing more.
Of course even were it different, one still needs to look into how and why white southerners became so enamored of states' rights, apparently to a degree hitherto unknown in the North. (Not really, we know they didn't care one iota about states' rights. But for the sake of bending over backwards to make an argument.) then we're left hunting for the central thing that separated the sections: slavery. Slavery made the South the South, both as we recognize it now (notice we don't include California or Hawaii, but do include rather middle-of-the-coast Virginia) and as it was consistently understood in the nineteenth century: the South was the slave states. When a slave state looked like it might not be as consistently proslavery as the others, its status as a southern state was doubted. (This happened most often with barely-enslaved Delaware in the late antebellum.) When Kansas looked like it would go to slavery, the proslavery newspapers cheered that it was joining the section. They also appealed to the wider South for help securing Kansas to slavery on the grounds that they fought for the future of the whole section, not just their own. Rhetoric like that was standard. Restrictions on slavery were always taken as an insult to the South's honor and depriving it of its equal place in the nation.
In a culture where slavery is the central fact of life, the dominant system not just of labor and production, but also a political and moral order, one can safely wager two cheeks and come out with four that native political ideologies would be designed with slavery's protection as an intended, if often unacknowledged, component. This is John Ashworth's argument about the ideology of the antebellum Democratic party and its antecedents back to Jefferson:
Nevertheless these doctrines gave special protection to slavery in the South, and this was no random effect. They comprised a creed that was at once democratic (for adult white males) and functionally proslavery.This wasn't an explicit argument of the party's national mainstream, but each of their key doctrines afforded shelter to slavery and to slaveholders. Thus limited government and state's rights, if strictly adhered to, removed the threat to slavery from Washington and as a consequence from any potentially hostile northern majority that might be formed. The insistence upon individual autonomy in the moral sphere allowed Democrats to demand that individual white males be allowed to decide whether or not they should own black slaves without any legal coercion from government. The Democratic doctrine that all should be left undisturbed by government in the enjoyment of the fruits of their labour was invaluable to slaveholders, since, as we have seen, it ignored the existence of the slave and simultaneously removed from view the inequalities generated by slaveholding.
The result was that the Jeffersonian tradition operated not directly or explicitly to promote slavery but rather to disable antislavery. Slavery was an unrecognised or invisible underpinning, an unacknowledged condition of Jeffersonian and Democratic thought. In consequence, the northerner who had no interest in slavery but who accepted this creed was likely to end by defending southerners' rights to hold their slaves, unmolested by the federal government and unchallenged by abolitionism. Such at any rate was the situation until the advent of the territorial question in the 1840s.
In other words, Southern interest in and development of states' rights theory arose directly from Southern interest in the perpetuation of slavery. Thus it's no mystery that they're only interested in the idea when it suits the defense of slavery and eagerly supported remarkable intrusions against states (right down to demanding the mail be censored and the suppression of abolitionist groups therein) throughout the antebellum.
Just wanted to comment on this:
Furthermore, in the South, only around 10% of the population OWNED slaves. IF it was purely over slavery, then only around 10% were concerned...These sorts of arguments ignore that the slave owners were generally the upper class that ran the Southern states and got to decide on Southern policy.
In short, the people actually in charge of the South were the ones that owned the slaves.
But.. but.. we're a democracy! Of course we always rule for the benefit of the majority and would NEVER trick them into doing anything against their own interests...
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One thing I want to pull out here. (There will be more, but this is what I feel like writing about right now. :) )
Instead, it was a matter of money and power, money and power that led to the question of whether a state had the power to make it's decisions in violation of Federal law...with that decision being the right to secede...or whether Federal law over ruled the states law. It was this enforcement of Federal law (with the view that the states did NOT have the Sovereignty nor right to secede) which was distinctly stated and was enforced that was the actual issue of the Civil War.
What federal law is Lincoln supposed to have enforced on South Carolina over its objections and thus justified its secession? And to what end? I ask because SC attempted its rebellion until December 20, 1860. Lincoln did not take office until March 4, 1861.
Furthermore, this line of argument assumes it's clear that some kind of right of secession existed in the antebellum United States. That is by no means clear and was intensely controversial at the time, with Disunion being treated more as a calamity one must avoid than a practical step one must take until quite late in the antebellum. (Arguably, right up to December of '60.) If secession is not legal, then it is rebellion and the survival of the government in itself fully explains the effort to suppress it. States that allow rebellion cease to be states.
This is something that antebellum Americans, including some white Southerners, knew very well. If states really were superior to the federal government, able to ignore its laws at will, then the federal government was meaningless and wholly impotent to carry out even its most basic functions. If one party could bolt over no greater travesty than losing an election fair and square (and that's what the Lower South did, essentially) then any state could do it at any time. Every state thus gains an absolute veto and the Union becomes Poland, wiped off the map. So would pass what they imagined as the world's last, best hope for freedom in a dark age of monarchical tyranny.
The question of what law ought to prevail was, in fact, an open and shut case. They decided it at Philadelphia when wigs and knee-breeches were still in fashion. No one contested that, least of all the antebellum South. We hear from them no raging protests when Roger Taney informed the state of Wisconsin that it had no power to nullify the fugitive slave law, to list just one example.
IIRC, not a specific law per se, rather that of Federal law being the 'law of the land' over all of the States, regardless of the States' wishes to the contrary.
Didn't South Carolina's secession come about in part due to the Republican candidate winning the election?
Regarding the Constitutionality of secession, the document itself is silent. States can be admitted, ergo, states can secede. The Declaration of Independence has within the grounds for secession, given that the U.S. is a voluntary union of sovereign states. IIRC, North Carolina voted two or three times against joining the Union before they finally signed on.
"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."
So long as secession was peaceable and did not deny the then-currently-citizens of the U.S. those rights, say by way of promptly granted dual citizenship, Uncle Sam would be obligated to let them go. Now, that doesn't mean that Uncle Sam doesn't get to take their toys - the new nation doesn't inherit anything but the real property. If Uncle Sam so chose, they have full claim to their personal property - which is everything upon the Federal civilian and military facilities within the borders of the new nation/State.
Regarding the Constitutionality of secession, the document itself is silent. States can be admitted, ergo, states can secede.
There's a few problems with that.
If states can be admitted with the approval of congress, they would need to be kicked out with the approval of congress.
There's a procedure for admiting states. If states could leave shouldn't there be a procedure for that as well?
The Declaration of Independence has within the grounds for secession, given that the U.S. is a voluntary union of sovereign states. IIRC, North Carolina voted two or three times against joining the Union before they finally signed on.
The declaration of independance is a government behind the constitution. It was formed by the second? continental congress under John Hanson, our first president. The constitution replaced that, so the declaration has some ideals in it, its not remotely legally binding anymore.
"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."
We need the freedom to keep slavery!
(this sentiment was noted more than once in england...)
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Claim: It's not about slavery because four slave states didn't secede!
Answer: Misleading oversimplification. It's true that Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri did not secede. Well, it's kind of true. Kentucky and Missouri both had rump governments composed of a few state officials (in both cases including the governor) who declared their secession and were admitted to the Confederacy. However, the main thrust of the argument is the assumption that if the war was over slavery, then all the slave states must go for slavery.
This would only work if one thinks human motivation perfectly monistic. That underlies a lot of neo-Confederate arguments. People chose loyalty to a state or section, therefore they must always have had that loyalty. However, out in the real world people do change their loyalties over time and routinely hold many. The famous, and misleading, example is none other than Robert E. Lee, who we are told in popular memory opposed slavery (he did not, despite his most famous biographer's notorious lying on the subject) but chose to place his loyalty to his state over his other loyalties to the nation and to his alleged antislavery principles. As long as loyalties do not appear in conflict, one has no need to pick between them. When one does, one reveals one's paramount loyalties.
I said all of that so I could say this. Here are the percents of population enslaved in each, as of 1860:
Delaware: 1.60%
Maryland: 12.69%
Kentucky: 19.51%
Missouri: 9.72%
By comparison, here are the Lower South states in order of secession ordinance:
South Carolina: 57.18%
Mississippi: 55.18%
Florida: 43.97%
Alabama: 45.12%
Georgia: 43.72%
Louisiana: 46.85%
Texas: 30.22%
The sectional average percent of population enslaved was 32.10%, to give you an idea. Only Texas comes in below and Texas was one of the two states in the late antebellum seeing a lot of plantation expansion into uncultivated lands yet. It did still happen in other places, but Texas and Arkansas were slavery's then-current frontiers. Anyway, you might notice a pattern. The states that seceded after Sumter have generally intermediate percentages enslaved, though Arkansas (the frontier, again) does come in lower than Texas at 25.52%.
Try to put yourself in the shoes of an average white guy in the antebellum South. In most of these states, at least a third of the population and more often half hates the crap out of you. You can pretend otherwise, but everyone can hear the screams when someone gets whipped. I submit that one needn't hold slaves personally in order to consider racial control an overriding concern in such circumstances.
Conversely, in the border states slavery is by no means much of a big deal. In Delaware, the overwhelming majority of black people are free. In Maryland, half are. In both cases they make up small parts of the population, generally concentrated in particular areas and leaving the rest of the state virtually free. (This pattern is broadly true in most slave states, but the relative balance of white and black belt population, and to some degree, political power, is the key. The interactions are very complicated. There are cases of clear slaveholder dominance, but also cases of white cooperation.) In this environment, slavery seems far more marginal, unimportant, and distant.
However, there is another issue in play.
Claim: Only 10% of Southerners owned slaves. The rest had no interest in slavery!
Answer: The first part is technically correct but misleading. The second doesn’t follow.
The 10% figure is sort of from the census. Slaveholders range from 0.65% of the white population (Delaware) to 9.16% (South Carolina, of course.) The average across the south is 5.17%. Taking just the Lower South (Cotton/Gulf states) the average is 7.03%. That’s tiny, right?
To explain why it’s not, I need to explain how the census was taken. A dude would walk up to your house on census day. He’d open up a big ledger with a preprinted form inside and start filling it out, head of household first. By 1860, he’d want the names of every white person living in the house, their sex, and age. He’d also want age, sex, and number for any non-white people as well as to class them as black or “mulatto” and slave or free. Free blacks would also have their names taken down. Slaves would not.
A household, called a family on the forms of the time, included everyone who lived on the property. Not just the legal owner, but also all the kids, relatives, white employees, slaves, etc. So imagine a slave labor camp on a hot summer day. There’s a staggering number of slaves around, but few enslavers live alone. They’ve got a wife, kids, relatives, and so forth living with them. These people don’t usually own slaves separately in a way we could see in the census data (We could see it in estate documents or inventories.) but they clearly benefit from the labor of the slaves that the man of the house (usually) owned. They’re not technically slaveholders, but they have as much investment in those slaves as the person who holds legal title does. Yet the census will only count one of them as a slaveholder.
What’s a better metric? The household count. It’s still not perfect. Really big enslavers usually had camps in multiple states and shuffled slaves between them regularly, so there’s a slight bias to double-count them, but only a minority of enslavers had so many as to do this. (However, they also controlled a majority of the enslaved people. Look at it just from the white POV and you’ll end up thinking slaves can’t have had it too bad since most only owned a few, but if you do the math it turns out the majority of people enslaved were owned by people who owned a lot of other people.)
What do the household numbers say? I have to make one other caution here. Short of having the census microdata (individual scanned pages of entries) on hand I can’t sort out the small number of black slaveholders. They aren’t numerous enough to really sway things, but do introduce a small bit of wiggle. The math itself is pretty simple. The census has total households and we can divide by the number of slaveholders, since the census would not generally resolve down to multiple slaveholders in a single household. We come out with a % of white families holding slaves:
South Carolina: 45.53%
Mississippi: 49.10%
Florida: 34.14%
Alabama: 34.92%
Georgia: 37.38%
Louisiana: 29.49%
Texas: 28.49%
Set aside the technicality and look at these numbers. That’s a lot of people, quite a bit more than the canonical 10%. As a practical matter, these people are all slaveholders. In the Lower South as a whole, 37.01% are. Upper South (generally slave-exporting states, bolted after Sumter) 24.58%. Border states? 12.87%. You can see the pattern. That doesn’t mean that the Upper South and Border States didn’t have heavily enslaved areas, but heavily enslaved in Missouri meant like 30% of a county’s population. In South Carolina it meant 85-95%.
Note that this does not include, as neo-Confederates sometimes claim, extended families of dozen-times removed cousins who live on the far side of the Moon. A family in census terms is a household, people who live together on the same property. Far more whites would have connections through more distant relatives who they might be personally close to and on good terms with, but you can’t sort out that from the census data.
Then we have more peripheral slaveholders. I think the household slaveholding makes a fair bit of intuitive sense, but a significant number of people actually rented or were loaned slaves from others. How many and when can be very hard to track, since this was often done by verbal agreement, but it was common enough to alarm some proslavery writers. They feared that by hiring slaves out you both made them seem a bit more like free whites in that they might get some kind of wage (even if the owner took most or all of it) and the whole business facilitated free-roaming black people. That seemed downright abolitionist.
Through slave rental and loaning, people who show up on the census as not holding slaves and not living in slaveholding families could still enjoy the proceeds of slave labor and participate in slave management in a direct, personal way. They could do the same if they could score a job as an overseer, where they would have personal charge of someone else’s slaves on an ongoing basis. Overseers got looked down on a bit, but the job was a great way for you to start down the road to owning your own slave labor camp and looking down on your own overseer.
But wait, there’s more! If you want to do well in the South, you don’t have a lot of options. By far the easiest way to make money was to plant a cash crop. Of course farmers don’t get rich by planting the same small field over and over again. They do it by getting more land than they had and growing more stuff for more money. That requires more hands. White labor demands pay, which can be a serious issue in cash-strapped areas. (Even well-off enslavers could be cotton and slave rich but cash poor.) Furthermore wage labor is looked down upon so any whites you hire will probably want out. They probably have their own dreams about making it big, which might involve a trip to points west where land is cheaper. And even the white labor you can get will not accept treatment like a slave must endure, which in the long run is going to make it less efficient. (Torture of slaves increased crop yields.) So your best option is to get some slaves. If you can’t afford them outright, then you might enter into a renting arrangement with a local enslaver, or he might buy a slave sort of on your behalf and let you use the slave until you can sell a crop or two to make good.
Want more? There’s more. Through infrequently enforced, every slave state had at least for a period of time a slave patrol. This would be like a local militia company, where able-bodied white men were expected to serve some time. Their job? Go around the area looking for slaves out without passes, evidence of slave conspiracies, and so forth. If they found such a thing, or thought they did, they were obligated to intervene and see to it. Usually with violence. So we have still more people involved personally with managing slaves and consequently more inclined to rationalize and accept the business than they might otherwise be.
And there’s still more. You know those slave patrols? Those are just a semi-formal to formal enforcement arm of the slave codes that empowered every white to do the same and authorized “correction” up to and including whipping. You could legally whip someone else’s slave if you caught him or her doing something you fancied suspicious. Most anybody, especially in highly-enslaved areas, could experience the pleasure of slaveholding at least in limited ways.
This is all, of course, before you get into the real ideological stuff about how blacks “need” slavery and how their revolts would cause a race war that destroyed everyone. It’s even before the real social capital that even the poorest white man in the South could expect by dint of his skin. For some, it was clearly all they had. For others, it might not go over as well as the enslavers hoped but they still had a dramatic example of the nigh-infinite gulf between their rights as a free white man and a slave. It was a real thing, felt and seen day to day and really did, if not to the degree that large enslavers would have liked, unite the white south as a single class. We call it Herrenvolk Democracy: by making others slaves, the floor and mudsills beneath them, they elevated themselves.
Not everyone went along, of course. We see resistance by whites in less enslaved areas, even to some degree in South Carolina, but we should not take this resistance as a static thing. Whites who loathed the planters because their presence would bring in blacks to the neighborhood would unite with them against “outsiders” who seemed bent on racial armageddon or, in some cases worse, placing the black man above the white. Hostility to things like internal improvements should be understood in this light. Build roads and the enslavers will come with their slaves, so better keep the roads and enslavers both out.
Where does slaveholding end and the opposite begin? Nowhere in particular. It's a continuum that actually extends well into the North. Who do you think owned the ships that moved the cotton?
I wonder if there were any, at all, Southern businesses that employed uneducated and possibly unskilled freemen. Doubtful that it was at any kind of living wage if at all - as we see in the postwar robber-baron era, many Northern business concerns didn't prove to be any more forward-thinking or humanitarian than slave plantations.
Not a lot. The poor, yeoman farmer of the white South did a lot of his farming for subsistence. He might grow a bale of cotton or some other stable on the side, but most of his production is about getting by. Things would be better in more urban areas and around ports, but the South had relatively few of those.
The North wasn't that different. In both cases, that yeoman probably did a fair bit of actual interaction with the market economy, far more than the fables would have us believe, but he wasn't as exposed to market fluctuations as others since his operation was small enough to turtle up and rely on subsistence for a few years.
I keep hearing butterbur for color.
Butternut was the preferred term at the time. I skipped it because it doesn't mean anything to most of us and it's pretty close to khaki.