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OOOSlavery as the Cause of the War Between
the States
OOOby
Dr. Donald Livingston
Of all the myths taught to our children about the war between the states
none is more corrupt (and corrupting) than the claim that the war was
“about slavery”-- that the South seceded to protect slavery
and the North invaded to abolish it. Slavery was a national enormity and
not merely a southern problem. It was not the South but New England that,
in the seventeenth century, opened the slave trade with Africa and grew
rich selling slaves throughout the western hemisphere. The seed money
for the industrial revolution came from the slave trade and from financing
and shipping southern exports, largely produced by slave labor. By 1860
nearly three fourths of American exports were from the South. Hardly anyone
at this time, North or South, was prepared to integrate into society an
African population of 3.5 million, many of whom were only two generations
from tribal existence. Northern manumission laws were designed to rid
themselves of their African population. These laws freed not adults but
children, born after a certain date and upon reaching adulthood. Owners
were free to sell their slaves in the meantime. By 1860 less than one
per cent of Massachusetts was black. Many northerners thought that blacks
would eventually die off as most of the Indians had.
Lincoln’s state of Illinois prohibited the entrance of any free
blacks unless a bond of $1000 each could be raised. The constitutions
of Oregon and Indiana prohibited absolutely the entrance of any free blacks
and nullified any contracts made with them. No political party of any
significance in the North had proposed emancipation. Lincoln proposed
sending free blacks abroad. The abolitionists, a tiny and despised minority,
did urge emancipation, but their solution was peaceful secession of the
North from the South as the best way of ending slavery. By 1861 the South
had accomplished this goa1 for them. But worse, Congress, with Lincoln’s
approval, passed an amendment to the Constitution making it impossible
for the central government ever to interfere with slavery in the states
where it was legal. The amendment would have been ratified by the states
had the South stayed in the Union. Slavery could not possibly have been
better protected than it was by the northern-dominated Congress of 1861.
With the exception of Haiti, slavery was peacefully abolished everywhere
in the west by the 1880s. And it would have disappeared from the South
by then had it been allowed to secede as the abolitionists had urged.
The Confederate Constitution prohibited the slave trade and allowed for
the entrance of non-slave holding states. The Confederate cabinet agreed
to abolish slavery five years after the cessation of hostilities in exchange
for British and French recognition. Robert E. Lee believed in gradual
emancipation and freed the slaves he had inherited through marriage. He
and other Confederate leaders argued early on to arm blacks as the first
step in emancipation and integration. Slavery, like any other institution,
had evolved over time. Theologians were urging reforms, and in the border
states the institution was evolving into an apprenticeship system. Virginia,
North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas had voted to remain in the Union.
They reversed themselves only after Lincoln illegally raised troops from
the North to coerce the seceding states back into the Union.
It has been said that the scholars of the League of the South, in their
defense of secession, have not confronted the evils of slavery. We have
long since confronted them-- as have all southerners. What has not been
confronted (and what our nationalist historians guarantee will perhaps
never be confronted) is the evil of launching a war that left 1,500,000
killed, missing, and wounded merely to consolidate a northeastern industrial
empire. Lincoln was not able to win the war without finally directing
it against the civilian population. This shocked Europeans, as it broke
the code of civilized warfare that had been in place since the early eighteenth
century. In violating the Geneva Convention the Lincoln administration
became the first of the modem war criminals. To dignify this unexpected
ourbreak of barbarism as being “about slavery” is the deep lie
in the soul of the American liberal. Indeed it has almost become a part
of American self-identity. Until it is honestly faced Americans will remain
in a condition of spiritual and political adolescence.
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