“FIVE MYTHS ABOUT WHY THE SOUTH SECEDED”

A REPLY TO JAMES LOEWEN

By Robert Perkins

Recently in the Washington Post, sociologist and author James W. Loewen published an article entitled, “Five Myths About Why the South Seceded.” The article is a good demonstration as to why sociologists shouldn’t attempt to write history. It is filled with misrepresentations and factual errors. Lets go through these now.

First, Loewen claims to expose the first so-called Myth, “The South seceded over states' rights.”

“Confederate states did claim the right to secede,” Loewen says, “but no state claimed to be seceding for that right.” However, Loewen ignores the fact that Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas all seceded in response to the demand of President Abraham Lincoln for troops with which to launch an invasion of the secessionist States and force them back into the Union. These States had previously rejected secession for themselves, but went to war to defend the right of other States to secede. So for these States, the right of secession was, in itself, clearly a “States’ Right” they considered important enough to secede over, and to fight over.

Loewen then argues that “In fact, Confederates opposed states' rights - that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery.” He then goes on to point out that South Carolina’s “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,” issued on December 24, 1860, notes "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery" and “protested that Northern states had failed to "fulfill their constitutional obligations" by interfering with the return of fugitive slaves to bondage.”

The problem with Loewen’s argument is that there is no States’ Right to violate the Constitution. And the Constitution, in Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, clearly states that “No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.” The Northern States, in “interfering with the return of slaves to bondage,” as Mr. Loewen puts it, were in clear violation of the Constitution as it existed at that time.

If the Northern States opposed having to return escaped slaves to their owners, there was a Constitutional remedy for that, namely the amendment process specified in the Constitution. It is interesting that no Northern State ever proposed, prior to the outbreak of war in 1860, an amendment to remove Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 from the Constitution. Rather than use the Constitutional remedy, they chose the illegal remedy of simply ignoring those parts of the Constitution they found repugnant.

Therefore, for Mr. Loewen to state that the Confederates opposed States’ Rights, based on the fact that they insisted on the return of their slaves as was GUARANTEED to them by the Constitution, is highly disingenuous. Sorry, but there was no “States’ Right” involved in this case, at least not on the Northern side of the issue.

Loewen then claims that “Slavery, not states' rights, birthed the Civil War,” and then goes on to say that “Other seceding States echoed South Carolina,” quoting the Secession Declaration issued by Mississippi on January 9, 1861, which stated, among other things, that "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth. . . . A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization."

In point of fact, the statement of Mississippi quoted by Loewen is not an “echo” of South Carolina’s, because South Carolina never said anything remotely like it in its own Declaration. South Carolina’s Declaration is basically a legalistic justification of the reasons why they felt they had the right to secede. It did not, even once, endorse slavery as an institution or express a desire to protect it. What it did say about slavery, in a nutshell, was...

1) The Constitution recognized the institution of slavery and guaranteed certain protections for it, and that the Northern States were in violation of the Constitution because they were not complying with Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 (the Fugitive Slave Clause).

2) The anti-slavery agitation in the North, and the activities of the anti-slavery societies located there, had disturbed the domestic tranquility of the slaveholding States. Neither the Northern States nor the Federal Government had done anything to stop this. And since the insurance of domestic tranquility was one of the stated purposes of the Constitution...stated in the Preamble...the Federal Government had failed in one of the primary purposes for which it had been established.

3) The victory of the Republican Party in the 1860 elections meant that not only would these conditions not be remedied, but would be exacerbated.

4) Therefore, since the North had violated the Constitution and subverted the purposes for which it was created, and since it had, by placing the Republican Party in power, demonstrated that it intended to go on violating and subverting it, and since their success in the recent election demonstrated that they had the power to do so over any objections the South might raise, South Carolina had been freed from her own obligation to be bound by the compact of the Constitution, and she was free to leave the Union, which she now opted to do.

That’s it…no endorsement of slavery, no declaration of intent to keep slavery forever, nothing remotely resembling the statement of Mississippi which Mr. Loewen quotes.

But what about other States? Does Mr. Loewen have a point there? Did any of them agree with Mississippi’s statement? Well, only five of the eventual eleven states of the Confederacy issued statements of their reasons for seceding. Of those five, only two...those of Mississippi and Texas...can be viewed as ringing endorsements of slavery and a possible desire to maintain the institution in perpetuity. The other three do talk about the conflict between the North and the South over slavery, in particular, the refusal of the Northern States to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act (which the South considered to be a prima facie violation of the Constitution which justified them in breaking the compact of the Union), and the agitation of Northern abolitionists which had recently led to the John Brown episode, as leading them to the decision to secede. To state that you wish to leave the Union to remove yourself from the continuing conflict over slavery is not the same as saying you wish to leave the Union to protect slavery. Given that the “conflict over slavery” had, just over a year previously, manifested itself in an attempt by Northern abolitionists to start a slave insurrection in the South…something which was widely believed to mean inevitable, indiscriminate massacres of white people in the South…they surely had reason to want to remove themselves from that conflict, without necessarily wanting to preserve slavery as an institution forever.

And slavery is not the only issue spoken of by the Southern Secession Declarations. Florida’s Declaration, for example, talks about the tariff issue as being a secondary cause for its decision to secede. Georgia's declaration argues (in a long-winded and bombastic way which obscures the meaning of the document and leads people like Mr. Loewen to misinterpret it) that the real issue was that Northern industrialists had been trying to take over the government for decades so as to enact their program of business subsidies, high tariffs, and internal improvements within the Northern States paid for with Southern tax dollars. Those industrialists had failed in their program and had made an alliance with the anti-slavery faction in the North, which allowed them to unite the North behind them and take over the government. Therefore, the real problem, in Georgia’s eyes, was not the slavery issue, but Northern industrialists and other business interests who were seeking to take control of the government, by any means, fair or foul, and use it to plunder the South for their own benefit.

So Loewen’s contention that the statement of Mississippi that “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery” was typical of the sentiments expressed by the other Southern States in their Secession Declarations is simply false. Those who try to reduce the causes of the Civil War down to a single issue…slavery…are often led astray and see only what they want to see in documents of the period. Loewen is one of these, and it shows.

Loewen then proceeds onto the second of his so-called “Myths,” namely that “Secession was about tariffs and taxes.” Loewen starts out by impugning the integrity of those who argue that tariffs were an issue in the coming of the Civil War, never a good sign if one is looking for an honest interpretation of historical events. “During the nadir of post-civil-war race relations,” he begins, “the terrible years after 1890 when town after town across the North became all-white “sundown towns” and state after state across the South prevented African Americans from voting, ‘anything but slavery’ explanations of the Civil War gained traction. To this day Confederate sympathizers successfully float this false claim, along with their preferred name for the conflict: the War Between the States.” He then goes on to claim, “These explanations are flatly wrong… Tariffs were not an issue in 1860, and Southern states said nothing about them. Why would they? Southerners had written the tariff of 1857, under which the nation was functioning. Its rates were lower than at any point since 1816.”

Every part of that statement is patently false. Let me demonstrate.

--As stated above, two of the Southern States, Florida and Georgia, did explicitly list, in their Secession Declarations, high tariffs among the reasons why they seceded. The others did not, but that does not mean that they did not consider the issue high on their list of priorities. After all, the Secession Declarations were attempts to explain why the Southern States felt they had the right to secede, and were legally justified in so doing. Collection of tariffs for the protection of industry was not illegal under the United States Constitution, and therefore would not have been seen as a possible legal justification for secession. Interestingly, however, one of the first things the Confederates did when they wrote their own Constitution was to ban protective tariffs. If they didn’t consider the issue important, they certainly hid that fact well.

--If tariffs weren’t an issue in 1860, then one wonders why Abe Lincoln based so much of his campaign around that issue? Why, for example, would Lincoln’s official campaign poster show he and his running mate, Hannibal Hamlin, above the campaign slogan, "Protection for Home Industry?" “Protection for Home Industry” is a euphemism for “High tariff rates to protect home industry from foreign competition.” Why, in a speech in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, would Lincoln announce that no other issue was as important as raising the tariff rate? Why would Lincoln make skillful use of his lifelong protectionist credentials to win the support of the Pennsylvania delegation at the Republican convention of 1860? Does Mr. Loewen honestly think that the Southern States weren’t aware of all these things?

Furthermore, Lincoln went on, following his election, demonstrating that raising the tariff was a top priority of his administration. He signed ten tariff-increasing bills while in office. In his First Inaugural Address, he threatened an invasion of those States which refused to collect the federal tariff, saying, “The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.” And, when he announced a naval blockade of Southern ports, the very first reason he gave for doing so was as follows: “Whereas an insurrection against the Government of the United States has broken out in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, and the laws of the United States for the collection of the revenue cannot be effectually executed therein…” The South was aware of all this, too, Mr. Loewen.

--Loewen’s states that the 1857 tariff rate, which was the lowest tariff of the entire nineteenth century, was in effect in 1860, and that this somehow proves that the tariff issue wasn’t important for Southerners during that period. This is nothing short of a blatant lie.

While it is true that the 1857 tariff rate was indeed in effect during 1860, Loewen conspicuously fails to mention that the notorious Morrill Tariff, which more than doubled the average tariff rate from 15% to 32.6%, had been passed by the Northern-dominated House of Representatives during the 1859-1860 session of Congress and was fully endorsed by then-candidate Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, it was quite literally the cornerstone of the Republican economic policy. At the time, the tariff accounted for at least 90 percent of all federal tax revenues. The Morrill Tariff therefore represented a more than doubling of the rate of federal taxation! Thirty-three Republican Senators following the 1860 Election meant a near-Republican-majority in the Senate, which then consisted of 68 members. Since many Northern Democratic Senators also supported high tariffs, the South knew that the Morrill Tariff was virtually assured of passage during the 1861 session. Yet Loewen doesn’t mention the Morrill Tariff at all in his essay. Why is that, Mr. Loewen?

Loewen then moves onto his third “Myth,“ that “Most white Southerners didn't own slaves, so they wouldn't secede for slavery.” He begins by admitting that most white Southern families owned no slaves. However, he says, “two ideological factors caused most Southern whites, including those who were not slave-owners, to defend slavery. First, Americans are wondrous optimists, looking to the upper class and expecting to join it someday. In 1860, many subsistence farmers aspired to become large slave-owners. So poor white Southerners supported slavery then, just as many low-income people support the extension of George W. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy now.”

There may be some truth to that argument. However, there is little direct evidence for it, and Mr. Loewen presents none. It is interesting that historian James McPherson, hardly a neo-Confederate source, in his book For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, clearly demonstrates that relatively few Confederate soldiers during the war fought to preserve slavery. Some did, of course, but they were the minority. If the vast majority of Southern non-slaveholding-whites really aspired to become slave owners, as Loewen clearly implies without directly stating it to be true, one would have thought that such sentiment would have been far more common than it was.

“Second and more important,” Loewen continues, “belief in white supremacy provided a rationale for slavery.” He then quotes an 18^th century French political theorist, Baron de Montesquieu, to prove his point, without offering any other evidence.

An 18^th Century Frenchman? Really? One would think he would at least cherry-pick out of Alex Stephens’ Cornerstone Speech, like everyone else does. Maybe he’s just lazy, but it does call into question the depth of his knowledge on this subject…and why sociologists shouldn’t pontificate outside their specialty.

However that may be, this argument is one of the few which Loewen makes that does have a certain amount of validity to it. Certainly Southerners of the mid-nineteenth century were white supremacists, and certainly that belief made it easier for them to hold black men as slaves. Virtually every other white person in the world at that time held similar beliefs. They were by no means unusual at that period of history. Indeed, since we’re using Frenchmen to prove our points here, why not point out that Alexis de Tocqueville thought that such attitudes were far more prevalent in the North than in the South? But does a belief in white supremacy automatically translate into a desire on the part of the South to secede from the Union?

Loewen does not, beyond merely asserting that such was the case, provide any proof of a connection between that belief and the decision of the Southern States to secede from the Union. Certainly Alexander H. Stephens thought there was such a connection, and there were others who agreed. But it is just as clear that others did not. Jefferson Davis, in his First Inaugural Address, for example, mentioned slavery not at all. And only two of the eleven states which eventually formed the Confederacy (namely Mississippi and Texas) ever stated, in justifying their action of secession, that a belief in white supremacy played any part in their motivation for secession (and before anyone chimes in with “Well of course they wouldn’t do that,” please remember that these were people who, in general, were white supremacists and unashamed of it).

Loewen then moves onto his next “Myth,” and indeed, the only one which really IS a myth, namely that “Abraham Lincoln went to war to end slavery.” He starts out well enough, pointing out that many Americans think that since abolition occurred as a result of the Civil War, abolition was, in fact, the Union’s goal. He then points out that Lincoln himself declared otherwise. Preservation of the Union, declared Lincoln, was his goal in going to war, not the abolition of slavery.

So far, so good.

But of course, Loewen doesn’t end there. He states, “Lincoln's own anti-slavery sentiment was widely known at the time. In the same letter, he went on: ‘I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.’ A month later, Lincoln combined official duty and private wish in his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.”

First of all, the “personal wish that all men everywhere could be free” is hardly a ringing denunciation of slavery or a statement of altruism toward the slaves, especially in light of other statements which Lincoln made both before and during his Presidency which indicated that he was, himself, a firm believer in white supremacy, and didn’t believe that white and black people could live in peace together if black people were free. Lincoln’s solution to that problem was deportation of free blacks to Liberia, Haiti, or Central America…places where, given the atrocious conditions in those regions, an influx of several million former slaves would have certainly meant a massive death rate among the deportees. They certainly would have been out of sight and out of mind, but would they really have been better off? That’s doubtful.

And Loewen’s mention of the Emancipation Proclamation as proof of Lincoln’s desire to end slavery is simply laughable. The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free a single slave. It only applied to slaves over which Lincoln had no control…even slaves in areas of the Confederate States (such as parts of Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia) which had been occupied by Union troops were exempt from it…and slaves in the United States itself (funny how everyone forgets about them while focusing on those held by the Confederacy) were not freed until the passage of the 13^th Amendment in December 1865, nearly eight months after the war ended. If Lincoln really was tormented by a desire to end slavery, it seems like he could have actually, you know, freed some slaves. He didn’t.

Loewen then proceeds to his fifth and final “Myth,” namely that “The South couldn't have made it long as a slave society.”

Loewen points out that “Slavery was hardly on its last legs in 1860. That year, the South produced almost 75 percent of all U.S. exports. Slaves were worth more than all the manufacturing companies and railroads in the nation.”

Okay, so far, so good. That much is accurate.

Then Loewen continues, “No elite class in history has ever given up such an immense interest voluntarily.” The millions of slaves formerly held by the British Empire might disagree with that statement. Or the millions of slaves which would be freed by Brazil in the 1880s. 

Then Loewen takes a detour into fantasy territory. “Moreover,” he says, “Confederates eyed territorial expansion into Mexico and Cuba. Short of war, who would have stopped them - or forced them to abandon slavery?”

It is true that the Confederates did intrigue in Northern Mexico during the war, seeking the separation of some of the northern Mexican states from that country. But there was a reason for that which would not apply to expansion elsewhere. The acquisition of the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora would have given the Confederacy a Pacific coast and access to Asian trade markets. The port of Guaymas, in Sonora, was and is one of the finest natural harbors in the world. Confederate control of that harbor would have been highly advantageous to the Confederacy.

But if Mr. Loewen is going to claim that the Confederacy had some grand plan to conquer territory beyond the very limited ambitions detailed above, it would behoove him to cite actual Confederate statements and plans made during the Civil War. There is little to no evidence that the Confederacy actually had any plans to expand elsewhere in Latin America, other than in northern Mexico as stated above. There wouldn’t have been a reason for that, and here’s why.

It is true that many Southern politicians in the antebellum period favored expansion into Latin America for the purpose of spreading slavery. The South, in the antebellum period, was vitally concerned to maintain the balance in the U.S. Congress between the number of free states and the number of slave states. As the Northern population grew much faster than did that of the South, the House of Representatives was dominated early on by the North. Therefore, the South sought to ensure that the balance between free and slave states in the Senate was maintained so as to prevent total Northern domination of Congress.

With the admission of California as a free state as a result of the compromise of 1850, the balance in the Senate was tipped in favor of the North. Therefore, during the 1850s, we see Southern politicians advocating all sorts of things to restore the balance. That’s why they supported, for example, the abandonment of the Missouri Compromise and the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which stated that the issue of slavery in the territories would be settled on the basis of popular sovereignty. And that’s also why they supported the acquisition of new territory, south of the border, which would be reserved for slavery.

However, an independent Confederacy would not need to be concerned about the composition of the United States Congress anymore. The entire reason why expansion was sought by Southern politicians in the 1850s would have simply disappeared by virtue of the fact of Confederate independence.

So please, Mr. Loewen, if you’re going to make such assertions, let’s see some facts to back them up.

Then Loewen states, “To claim that slavery would have ended of its own accord by the mid-20th century is impossible to disprove but difficult to accept. In 1860, slavery was growing more entrenched in the South. Unpaid labor makes for big profits, and the Southern elite was growing ever richer. Freeing slaves was becoming more and more difficult for their owners, as was the position of free blacks in the United States, North as well as South. For the foreseeable future, slavery looked secure. Perhaps a civil war was required to end it.”

If you look at the situation in 1860 in isolation, that is a perfectly reasonable argument. But Loewen ignores the fact that economic realities were going to change over the next few decades which would render slavery into an unviable institution. Let’s look at that scenario for a moment.

Historically, the entry of new producers of cotton into the market, along with overproduction in the American South, both of which were already happening before the Civil War, coupled with a drop in demand, caused a severe glut in the cotton market during the 1890s which drove the prices down to a tiny fraction of what they had been. The other prime contenders for the use of slave labor, namely tobacco and sugar production, can’t thrive in the areas where cotton does best, and therefore there was a rash of bankruptcies among large landowners across the South as a result. We can expect that something similar would happen to the cotton kings of the Confederacy during that same period, causing the large plantations to be broken up.

Historically, the lands were sold off, at pennies on the dollar, to small farmers. We can assume that both land and slaves would be “dumped” in this way during such a crisis in an independent Confederacy. However, unlike a plantation owner, a small farmer cannot produce, on his own property and with his own labor, everything a slave needs to live. Plus now, the small farmers will have mortgages they have to pay on the land and slaves they bought up from the bankrupt large landowners. Slavery doesn’t do a small farmer nearly as much good as it did a large landowner, who could and did produce everything his slaves needed to live right there on the plantation. The small farmer has a larger cash outflow, per slave, than the large plantation owner did, for that reason.

And then the other shoe will drop…the Mexican Boll Weevil, which entered Texas in 1892 and had spread across the South, cutting cotton yields by more than half, by the 1920s. Now, the small farmers can’t produce enough cotton to pay for their mortgages. The value of slaves plummets and they become a liability instead of an asset. Rather than continue to feed, clothe, and house the slaves, the small farmers begin to set them free, seeing that as the only solution to their dilemma. Eventually, the number of freed slaves in the Confederacy skyrockets, and within a few years, there are very few slaves left. Attitudes toward slavery change, and State after State abolishes slavery. By the end of the 1930s, or even earlier, it is completely gone.

And that’s just one possible scenario.

Some will argue that the slaves could simply have been moved into manufacturing. However, the only place in history where slave labor has been successfully used in a manufacturing setting on a large scale is Nazi Germany, and the Nazis succeeded because they used Jews and other prisoners whom they didn’t pay for, they didn’t, quite frankly, care whether their slaves lived or died, and didn’t expend much in the way of resources to keep them alive. Indeed, the object of Nazi slavery was really the death of the slave, with whatever industrial production they gained being a side bonus. Such a situation could not prevail in an independent Confederacy, where slaves would have to be bought and paid for, and then supported and kept in good health in order to maximize production. Plantation owners were able to do this by producing everything…food, clothing, housing…needed by the slave, right on the plantation, using the labor of the slaves themselves. Factory owners would have to purchase just about everything on a cash basis. That’s why Northern factory owners preferred to hire cheap immigrant labor rather than keep slaves.

It is an idle endeavor to speculate about what might have been. We can truly never know, for certain, how things might have turned out. But there is at least as much reason, and probably more, to think that slavery could have been ended peacefully, than there is to think otherwise.

Mr. Loewen concludes by saying, “As we commemorate the sesquicentennial of that war, let us take pride this time — as we did not during the centennial — that secession on slavery’s behalf failed.”

The Civil War was totally unnecessary to end slavery, even if the North decided it didn't want to wait for slavery to die out naturally.  The Union, by itself, spent almost two-and-a-half billion dollars fighting the Civil War.  That amount of money could have purchased and set free every slave in America, with an average payout of almost $600 each (some slaves were worth more, obviously, but a great many were worth less). Combined with what the Confederacy spent, there would have been plenty of money to buy them all at the current market value, which in 1860 totalled about four billion dollars for all the slaves combined. Furthermore, the Civil War and its aftermath of Reconstruction led to over one hundred years of racial hatred, lynchings, and segregation which afflicted our great country after the Civil War and which continue to poison race relations in this country to the present day. That’s nothing to take pride in, Mr. Loewen, and might well have been avoided if the Confederacy had won its independence and slavery had been allowed the chance to die out peacefully. 

But the Union won, and we’ll never know, will we?