From a twenty-first century perspective, it is difficult to imagine that any American could make a defense of institutionalized slavery as it existed in the United States from before its inception, as an independent nation, until 1865. Looking back through history, it is easy for anyone living today to see that slavery was wrong and that there is no Biblical, humanitarian, or rational defense for its practice. People living today might easily make such a judgment because they do not have their entire lives and livelihoods dependent upon it and because it is easy for anyone to make judgments about the ills of others while completely ignoring one’s own transgressions. All of us need to be mindful of these two facts when considering the issue of slavery in America. That being the case, the South was wrong about slavery, but it was right about secession, and frequently these issues are conflated in the minds of modern Americans.
Too many people today believe that slavery was the primary or only cause of the Civil War, and while slavery played a part in the casus belli, it is disingenuous for anyone to claim it as the only, or even the main, cause. A closer look at original source documentation will reveal that the issue of slavery became a pretext to justify and mollify the armed invasion and subjugation of the South for political and economic gain. In attempting to understand the validity of this claim, one must understand: (1) the reason the southern states seceded; (2) the constitutionality of secession; and (3) Lincoln’s reason for calling up troops against the seceded states.
We begin by exploring the possible reasons for southern secession. Only four states out of the original seven, which seceded from the Union prior to Lincoln’s taking office, issued secession letters, and each of the letters claimed slavery as the reason for secession. Taken at face value, the fact that the majority of the seven original seceding states claimed slavery as their reason for secession is very damning evidence, yet there are extenuating circumstances that informed readers must understand prior to making a judgment.
First, without further evidence, it is incorrect for anyone to assume that the other three states, which seceded prior to Lincoln’s taking office, held to the same convictions as those that issued secession letters. Second, it is also completely unreasonable for anyone to think that the four states, which seceded after Lincoln called up troops on April 15, 1861, did so for any other reason than their disagreement with Lincoln’s actions in calling up forces against the other states. These two facts alone indicate that the majority of the states fighting for the South, seven out of eleven, possibly did so for reasons other than preserving slavery. Third, the secession letter claims do not make sense when compared against the legal and political facts of the time.
The secession letter claims are unconvincing when compared to the historical situation that they faced for the following four reasons. First, abolition of slavery in the then existing states had never been a likely legislative or administrative outcome until Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in the beginning of 1863, which he claimed he did as a war measure.[1] Pro-union historians have widely acknowledged that the impetus behind his proclamation was to dissuade England and France from intervening, politically and militarily, on the side of the South, which they were getting closer to doing at the time. Therefore, had it not been for the war and the imminent entrance of England and France on the side of the South, Lincoln would not have issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Had the southern states stayed in the union under the Lincoln administration they would have maintained their slaves as they had under all previous presidents.
Second, the US Constitution did not grant authority to the national government over the issue of slavery, therefore the national government did not have any authority to abolish slavery in the states where it existed. In his first inaugural address, President Lincoln said, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”[2] Lincoln’s authority over slavery in the Emancipation Proclamation was limited to a war measure and that is the reason he only freed slaves in southern held territory instead of freeing slaves everywhere in the United States. Lincoln simply did not have the constitutional authority to free slaves in states like Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, or Missouri which were slave states that were fighting on the Union side.
Third, the odious opinion of the Supreme Court in the 1857 Dred Scott case supported the constitutionality of slavery in the existing States. One of Chief Justice Taney’s more legitimate arguments in his controversial majority opinion is where he referenced two clauses from the US Constitution that support the constitutionality of slavery.[3] Those two clauses are in the US Constitution because members of the Constitutional Convention, to avoid further risk to the Constitution’s ratification, ultimately decided that it was better to have a union with slavery than no union at all. It was the obstinacy of delegates from only a few states, who held that any infringement on slavery was a constitutional deal breaker, which influenced the members of the Constitutional Convention to decide not to press the issue of slavery and instead tacitly accept slavery in America as it then existed. For the same reasons, they also decided to allow slavery to be a state issue vice a national one. Even still, the first of the two clauses Taney referenced was an attempt by the Constitutional Convention to move the nation towards emancipation by allowing for the abolition of the slave trade in America beginning in 1808, which President Jefferson enacted at the earliest opportunity.
Finally, the political debate, concerning slavery in America leading up to the 1860 Presidential election was whether new states would be “free” or “slave” and not if existing States could maintain their slave status or not.[4] Here again, the issue was not the welfare of Africans held in bondage, but representation in the US Senate. Beginning with the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the objective had always been to maintain an equal number of slave and non-slave state Senators in the US Senate. The debate in the 1860 Presidential election was more heated than before because of the Kansas Nebraska Act, which allowed states to choose if they would or would not allow slavery based on popular sovereignty. Representation in the US Senate was “up for grabs” via popular sovereignty and it had many northern states agitated at the prospect of the South controlling the US Senate. Slavery in existing states, therefore, was never an issue in the 1860 election.
Considering these facts, one should ask why four of the seceding states would claim the protection of slavery as their reason for secession when they were never under any threat of losing it had they not seceded. A logical explanation to this question is that the seceding states identified slavery as their motive to prevent Lincoln from invoking authority under the 1792 Militia Act.
If taxation in the form of tariffs[5] was their actual motive for secession, Lincoln would have historical precedent to use the Militia Act to quell what he could call a “tax rebellion”. The Militia Act gave the President of the United States power to quell insurrections without first having to go to Congress to gain approval to call forth the Militia.
President Washington used the Militia Act to suppress the tax revolt known as the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. In 1795 Congress amended the act to give more authority to the President and to omit its sunset clause. The second section of the amended act states in part:
And be it further enacted, That whenever the laws of the United States shall be opposed or the execution thereof obstructed, in any state, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the marshals by this act, the same being notified to the President of the United States, by an associate justice or the district judge, it shall be lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia of such state to suppress such combinations, and to cause the laws to be duly executed.
This portion of the act prescribes that the President of the United States has the lawful authority to call forth the state’s militia when notified by an associate justice, or a district judge, that the laws of the United States are being opposed or obstructed from being executed by “combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”
If the seceding states’ reason for secession was something other than an action which could be construed as opposition to the “execution of the laws of the United States,” as phrased in the Militia Act, then Lincoln would not have grounds to invoke the Militia Act against them. Since slavery was protected under the US Constitution in existing states, and the “Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises”[6] was granted to the United States by the US Constitution, it makes sense that the four states would claim slavery as the reason for separation instead of their opposition to tariffs.
Tariffs had long been a source of friction between the North and the South. South Carolina’s threat to secede from the union in 1832 was over the issue of tariffs, not slavery. Like the institution of slavery itself, under United States law the abuse of tariffs by the North was technically legal, but completely unjust.
In Andrew Jackson’s response to South Carolina’s November 1832 Ordinance of Nullification, which Jackson gave via a proclamation on December 10, 1832, he provided a cogent and constitutional argument against nullification, but his argument against secession, in that same proclamation, was neither cogent nor constitutional.[7] His proclamation was successful, nonetheless, because he threatened to use military force against South Carolina if they seceded over the issue of tariffs.
Lincoln, for his part, was a lifelong supporter of tariffs. He began his political career as Whig in the Whig Party, of which the Republican Party is its political heir, and high tariffs were a cornerstone of both of these parties. Prior to the Civil War, the Federal government collected ninety-percent of its revenue through tariffs. Tariffs effected the South much more than the North because the South did not have a very large manufacturing economy and it had to import most of its finished goods. For example, “Even before the Morrill tariff of 1860, because of their reliance on foreign manufactured goods, Southerners were paying more than half of all federal taxes, even though they had less than half the population of the North.”[8] The Morrill tariff, “which proposed raising the rate as much as 250 percent on some items,”[9] was the final straw in the South’s long struggle against tariffs. The 1860 Republican Party Platform foreshadowed the Morrill tariff in its twelfth plank, and the House of Representatives passed the Morrill tariff, in May of 1860, just five months prior to the November election. It was opposition to the Morrill tariff, therefore, that most likely troubled the South far more than Lincoln’s position on slavery, but they were not willing to tip their hand on that issue considering what happened to South Carolina in 1832. The southern states could very logically conclude that it was better to take the focus off of the tariff issue and place it on the constitutionally protected issue of slavery, which was not then viewed as morally reprehensible as it has become since then.
If this secession-letter theory is correct, then the alleged fears of the seceded states were realized on April 15, 1861 when President Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteers “in order to suppress said combinations, and to cause the laws to be duly executed.”[10] Evidence to support that Lincoln anchored his authority on the Militia Act is found in that the language of his proclamation mirrored the language in the act. Compare the verbiage of the Militia Act, “whenever the laws of the United States shall be opposed or the execution thereof obstructed,” with the verbiage of Lincoln’s proclamation, “WHEREAS the laws of the United States have been, for some time past, and now are opposed, and the execution thereof obstructed.” They are nearly identical. Further evidence to support that Lincoln anchored his authority on the Militia Act lies in that 75,000 volunteers was the limit that the Militia Act placed on a Presidential call to arms.
To the modern reader it might appear to be an open and shut case that President Lincoln had authority, under the Militia Act, to use force to prevent secession by states that ratified the Constitution. This understanding would be accurate if the Constitution had forbidden the states from seceding from the union or if the states had violated a statute prohibiting them from seceding, but neither of these are the case. No such statute exists, and the Tenth Amendment, which was passed during the very first session of Congress in 1789, states 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.” This means that only powers specifically delegated to the United States in the Constitution belong to the national government, and that the states maintain all other powers not restricted from them by the Constitution. One can thoroughly search through the entire document and he will neither find where the Constitution delegates the power of secession to the United States nor prohibits it from the states. Therefore, secession is constitutional[11] and it does not fall within the jurisdiction of the Militia Act. The states had and still have a constitutional right to secede from the union, and it is unlawful for a President to militarily obstruct a state from exercising a constitutionally protected right. Based upon this information, legal logic demands that Lincoln could not loosely apply the Militia Act to a power reserved to the states under the Constitution. But he did, and two percent of America’s population perished in the aftermath of his decision.
The second part to understanding why slavery was not the fundamental cause of the war and economic and political gain were is to understand why Lincoln called for volunteers on April 15, 1861. First, we must acknowledge that never in all of human history has one group of people engaged in war for the altruistic benefit of another group of people, and the American Civil War was no exception.
Second, self-defense is a dubious claim on the part of the North, because before the advent of open hostilities the southern forces never organized themselves to invade or even to attack any of the non-seceding states. As evidenced by their declarations, and by their entirely defensive military posture, the seceded states only desired self-government, not national domination.
Third, the simplistic understanding that the South fired on Fort Sumter and therefore they were the aggressors is equivalent to believing that Poland was the aggressor against Nazi Germany in 1939. Lincoln’s sending an armed flotilla to Fort Sumter was a gross violation of the armistice negotiated, between the southern states and the national government under the Buchanan Administration, by both the Secretary of War and the Navy.[12]
The terms of the armistice, which is a temporary suspension of hostilities by agreement of the warring parties such as the one that ended the Korean Conflict, was that if the North did not attempt to resupply Fort Pickens, the South would not fire upon it. One may argue that this provision applied only to Fort Pickens and not the other forts still held by union forces in southern territory, but the implication was clear to all involved that any attempt to resupply the forts was an act of war meriting a hostile response. Lincoln’s cabinet confirmed this understanding in written responses to Lincoln’s March 15, 1861 cabinet query in which he asked, “Assuming it now to be possible to provision Fort Sumter, under all the circumstances is it wise to attempt it?”[13] Secretary Cameron, the head of the War Department, stated in his written response to Lincoln’s query:
The proposition presented by Mr. Fox [to resupply Fort Sumter]… would be entitled to my favorable consideration if, with all the light before me and in the face of so many distinguished military authorities on the other side, I did not believe that the attempt to carry it into effect would initiate a bloody and protracted conflict.[14]
Secretary Cameron’s response was typical of all the cabinet members with only one exception. They all understood that sending an armed flotilla to Fort Sumter would perpetrate a war and they told President Lincoln as much.
One must also keep in mind that the purpose of the forts was to protect the harbors and collect revenue from ships entering the harbor. Their purpose was not to menace the port cities by pointing guns at them from the forts, which the Federal forces did at each of the forts in the south that they controlled. After the states constitutionally seceded from the union, there was no longer any legal justification for the North to protect the southern ports or to collect revenue from ships entering the ports. Furthermore, the forts lay within the territory of the seceded states, so it was not unreasonable that the South attempted to negotiate with both of the Buchannan and Lincoln administrations to pay the Federal government for any improvements to the forts in exchange for their evacuation by Federal forces.
By flipping the paradigm, one should be able to see who the actual aggressor was in the Fort Sumter confrontation. Would the North have been the aggressor if the South had forces in a fort overlooking New York harbor in which they turned the guns in towards the city and then sent an armed flotilla to New York harbor to reinforce their position simply because New York had enacted a power protected by the US Constitution? The answer is no, and neither was South Carolina the aggressor at Fort Sumter. It was Lincoln who was the aggressor in respect to his involvement with any of the occupied forts in southern territorial waters. The South, in a very peaceful and cordial manner, had been re-supplying the Federal forces in the forts with fresh meats and vegetables daily until Lincoln sent the armed flotilla to Fort Sumter.
Just fifteen days after Lincoln issued his proclamation calling up troops to suppress the South he wrote a letter to the naval commander who led the armed flotilla to Fort Sumter, Captain Fox. In Lincoln’s letter to Captain Fox on May 1, 1861 he wrote, “You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort Sumter, even if it should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result.”[15] The only advance to the country’s cause that he would have derived out of the failure of the Fort Sumter resupply mission, as Lincoln would have perceived it, was the quasi authority Lincoln derived to invoke the Militia Act and the war that his actions provoked.
The question still remains, why did not Lincoln just negotiate with the southern delegation and accept a peaceful transfer of power of the forts? Why did he, instead, send an armed flotilla to Fort Sumter knowing full well that it would start a war? Those who still hold to slavery being the cause of the war must understand that Lincoln claimed in his correspondence to Horace Greeley, on August 22, 1862, approximately a year and four months after the start of the war and just one month prior to his introducing the Emancipation Proclamation, that, “If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them.”[16] Lincoln’s meaning is that neither the preservation nor abolition of slavery was his purpose for the war. It was, instead, to restore the union under his authority and it was for that reason that he provoked armed conflict and eventually issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Lincoln’s claim in the Greeley letter is consistent with his proclamation calling for volunteers, in which he said that he called up troops to “preserve the union”. Throughout his correspondence during the war and up to his assassination, Lincoln was clear and consistent that his overarching goal was preserving the union and all actions he took he did so to achieve that one goal.
Preserving the Union, as Lincoln defined it, without any other reason to do so, is a matter of sentiment that is not worth risking the lives of hundreds of thousands of American citizens. A prudent president would have exhausted every means to peacefully resolve the differences, with the seceding states, before resorting to a military solution, and he only would have resorted to a military solution if there was an imminent threat of invasion or a breach of statute law, which merited a military response, that could not be corrected in any other way. None of which happened or existed. So there must have been a more compelling reason than just “preserving the union” as it had existed in 1860. Lincoln provided that reason in his first inaugural address in which he succinctly stated, “The power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts.”[17] In this short quote, one can see that the only viable reason “to hold, occupy, and possess property and places belonging to the government” as Lincoln stated was to “collect the duties and imposts”. Lincoln may have been many things, but he was not a fool. For his own political survival he understood that he could not allow the seven seceding states, which were all coastal states and accounted for the majority of the Federal revenue, to declare independence and walk away from the union. His only choice, for his political survival, was to instigate a war and make it look like the South was the aggressor, and that is what he did.[18]
Had President Lincoln taken the United States to war to end the practice of slavery and had his war come after exhausting every other means of peacefully bringing that evil to an end, then everyone should be sympathetic to his cause. But that is not what happened, and that is not what Lincoln did, and history and his own words testify to this fact.
Lincoln only issued the Emancipation Proclamation when he was losing the war and he had nearly no other options left to keep England and France from intervening on the side of the South. Via the Emancipation Proclamation slavery became the pretext for the war, but not the cause of it. Slavery was an irritating factor between the North and the South, but it was not the reason Lincoln called up troops that fateful day in April 1861. Is it a mere coincidence that the modern day Internal Revenue Service demands payment of taxes by April 15th every year? That is the same day that Lincoln called up 75,000 volunteers “to cause the laws to be duly executed,” by which he meant to collect the duties and imposts, and what we now call taxes. The South was wrong about slavery, but it was right about secession.
[1] Encyclopedia Britannica, The Annals of America, vol. 9, 1858 – 1865, The Crisis of Union (Chicago: Britannica, 1976), 398. In the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln declared it “as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing the said rebellion.”
[2] Britannica, The Annals of America, vol. 9, Abraham Lincoln: First Inaugural Address, 238.
[3] US Constitution, Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 and Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3.
[4] Republican Party Platform of 1860, May 17, 1860, accessed July 18, 2017. http://cprr.org/Museum/Ephemera/Republican_Platform_1860.html. See points four, seven, and eight.
[5] For many decades the North had been using revenue, collected in the South, to improve northern infrastructure, such as canals and railroads, in order to economically compete against the southern economy.
[6] US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 1.
[7] Matt Shipley, “The Case Against Secession,” American Founding Principles Blog, November 2, 2013, accessed July 7, 2017, http://americanfoundingprinciples.com/the-case-against-secession/#more-388.
[8] Thomas J. DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003), 240.
[9] DiLorenzo, 127.
[10] Abraham Lincoln, Monday, April 15, 1861 (Proclamation on State Militia), accessed July 24, 2017, http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mal&fileName=mal1/090/0907400/malpage.db&recNum=0.
[11] Matt Shipley, “Can States Constitutionally Seceded from the United States?” American Founding Principles Blog, November 19, 2012, accessed July 7, 2017, http://americanfoundingprinciples.com/can-states-constitutionally-secede-from-the-united-states/#more-120. “The Case Against Secession,” American Founding Principles Blog, November 2, 2013, accessed July 7, 2017, http://americanfoundingprinciples.com/the-case-against-secession/#more-388.
[12] John Shipley Tilley, Lincoln Takes Command: How Lincoln Got the War He Wanted (Nashville: Bill Coats, 1991), 23.
[13] Tilley, 170.
[14] Tilley, 171.
[15] Tilley, 267.
[16] Britannica, The Annals of America, vol. 9, Abraham Lincoln: Saving the Union, 348.
[17] Britannica, vol. 9, Abraham Lincoln: First Inaugural Address, 252.
[18] Tilley, 267. Quoted above.