In fact, in a 4-1 vote, the convention refused to
even consider adding other issues, such as the tariff!
One of delegates, Thomas Jefferson Withers, had
earlier written: "The true question for us
is, how shall we sustain African slavery in South Carolina from a series of annoying
attacks, attended by incidental consequences that I shrink from depicting, and finally
from utter abolition? That is the problem before us - the naked and true point."
So the members of Convention pretty clearly realized
that they weren't concerned about any issue other than their right to
maintain, buy, and sell human property -- African American slaves.
Virginia Senator Robert M.T. Hunter asked, in the
Confederate Congress, "If we didn't go to
war to save our slaves, what did we go to war for?"
Myth Conception 2: But South Carolina
democratically voted to secede from the Union -- so everyone supported the idea.
Actually, the Convention that voted to abolish the
Union in South Carolina was carefully picked by the legislature. Of the 169 delegates
almost all were slave holders -- and nearly half owned 50 or more slaves. This group
represented the elite of South Carolina's political and slave-holding class: five former
governors, 40 former state senators, 100 former state representatives, 12 clerics, and
many lawyers. This was no cross-section of South Carolina (remember that only 47% owned
slaves, only 9% of the slave owners held 50 or more slaves, and only about 4% of all of
South Carolina's families held 50 or more slaves). This group had a vested
interest in making sure that slavery continued unmolested.
In fact, when you look at all of the state
conventions you see a similar scenario. The Union was dissolved not by any popular vote,
but rather by 854 men (no women), all selected by their various state legislatures. And
157 (nearly a fifth) of these actually voted AGAINST secession. So the fate of the Union
-- and the fate of 9 million people -- was decided by fewer than 700 mostly middle or
upper class white males. And in Tennessee, where a popular vote did defeat secession, the
governor orchestrated the dissolution of the Union single handedly!
Myth Conception 3: The Civil War was really
about the Constitution -- about legal issues.
Perhaps more than anything else, this was a
smokescreen created by Southerners to make secession more palatable -- it was a device
they used to such an extent that even they probably began to believe it. But it is just a
myth.
If you read the congressional debates, or Southern
editorials, or the speeches of the leading fire brands you get no list of rights that were
endangered by the Union, except for one "right" -- that of owning other human
beings. No one was complaining that the federal government was interfering with
state taxation, or the building of roads, or internal commerce, or the development of
state militias, or external trade, or anything else. In fact, one historian, William C.
Davis, observes that, "states rights" wasn't really even used as a defense until
1865 -- when it was used by the builders of the "Lost Cause" to distance
themselves from what the Civil War was really all about -- slavery.
In fact, South Carolina's champion of state's rights,
John C. Calhoun, was quick to support a program of internal improvements that used
federal money to build roads and canals in the 1820s -- a scheme that was a far bigger
challenge to state's rights than anything previously seen. Earlier, in 1812, his fiery
nationalism pushed a declaration of war against Britain. It wasn't until late in life --
after several failed attempts to become president of the United States -- that he turned
away from his nationalistic stands and toward what many regard as a "fanatical
regionalism."
If the South was so concerned about Constitutional
rights, let's look at how the Confederacy dealt with constitutional issues on her own
soil. Freedom of the press was always tenuous -- beginning with the Secession convention
in Charleston. At that time Robert Barnacle Rhea advised the editor of the New York
Evening Post not to send a reporter: "No
agent or representative of the Evening Post would be safe in coming here . . . He would
come with his life in his hand, and would probably be hung." On April 14, 1861, even before President Lincoln called out
troops to suppress the rebellion, the Confederate States arrested a journalist, Lawrence
Matthews, for his reporting in Pensacola, Florida. And throughout the Civil War,
journalists were required to obtain travel passes. And the Confederacy's President,
Jefferson Davis, had no philosophical turmoil suspending the writ of habeas corpus and
jailing Southerners without specified cause. In fact, it was only 15 years after the Civil
War, when Jefferson began writing The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government,
that he began to construct the myth of constitutionalism.
Myth Conception 4: But the
Constitution was just a contract and Southerners had the right to break that contract.
There are actually few ways to unilaterally break a
contract. In December 1860 when South Carolina broke "the contract," the Union
had done nothing to interfere with slavery -- or any other right. Nor would anything
be done that interfered with "state's rights" for another two years. In
actuality, South Carolina left the Union out of a fear of future actions -- which any
lawyer will tell you is not an acceptable reason to break an agreement or contract!
Myth Conception 5: It still
couldn't have been about slavery -- look at all the yeoman farmers that fought for the
South.
That's true, yeoman farmers did fight for the South.
In fact, like most wars, the poor do the bulk of the fighting, and dying. But look at the
propaganda that urged them on -- that encouraged them to look at this fight for slavery as
their fight. The South Carolina elite had been organizing yeoman farmers into
local vigilant associations and minute man organizations during all of 1860 -- all in an
effort to win the hearts and minds of poor whites.
As early as 1858 the Charleston Mercury proclaimed: "the free white man here stands above and superior
belonging to the master ruling class . . . . He has every reason to make property secure
and to perpetuate justice and freedom amongst those of his class." By 1860 the Charleston Mercury was urging its readers to "inform every man (the nonslaveholder as well as the
slaveholder) of the deep and vital interests that are involved in our slavery
institutions" and readers were warned that they
must protect the "rights of freemen" against the "tampering thieves of
abolition."
Yeoman farmers were reminded that in property rights
-- such as the right to own African slaves -- lay their claim to masterhood and all of its
prerogatives. One fire-eater went to great lengths to explain what emancipation of slaves
would mean to "the non-slaveholding portion of our citizens," observing that
yeoman would then have no rights that weren't also conferred on slaves. "In no country in the world does the poor white man
whether slaveholder of non-slaveholder occupy so enviable a position as in the
slaveholding states of the South."
Poor whites were told, "The poor man has as much at stake [in slavery] as he
who is possessed of hundreds of negroes. . . . He has his all at stake" including his person, his wife, his children. "These two races [white and "negro"] cannot
live together on terms of equality."
Yeoman farmers were told that if they didn't fight to
support slavery their worlds who tumble down around them and they would be no better than
slaves. After a while, when the issue of slavery became more divisive, Southern leaders
turned to the idea of "sacred civil liberties" in order to justify the
dissolution of the Union.
Myth Conception 6:
But slaves were more than property, they were part of the owner's family.
This
is just another smoke screen, trying to make it seem inconceivable that the Civil War was
fought over slavery. But listen to what a few Southerners had to say: Alexander H.
Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy, in 1861, wrote that the cornerstone of
the Confederacy "rests upon the great truth
that the negro is not equal to the white man." The
Confederacy's president, Jefferson Davis, was even more blunt: "We recognize the negro as God and God's Book and God's
Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him -- our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude
. . . You cannot transform the negro into anything one-tenth as useful or as good as
what slavery enables them to be."
Myth Conception 7:
African slaves in South supported the Confederacy.
In some cases they did. But it's pretty clear that
the South never trusted African Americans. Confederate States Attorney P.H. Aylett
remarked, "It is a matter of notoriety in
the section of the Confederacy where raids are frequent that the guides of the enemy are
nearly always free negroes and slaves." And
Confederate Secretary of War James A. Seddon rejected a request to allow free blacks in
Culpeper County, Va. to cut and haul wood, saying, "The free negroes are not such faithful friends I fear
as to make them reliable in a County so likely to be visited by the enemy."
Even more telling is that in all of the identified
records, never was an African American prisoner in the Confederacy identified as a
"Union man," as so many whites were. It seems that they were all assumed
to be Union supporters and there was no point in making this notation. As one modern
historian, Mark E. Neely, Jr. has noted, "Confederate authorities surely knew that
almost no African American, free or slave, was genuinely loyal to the Confederacy."
Myth Conception 8: It
wasn't a "civil war," it was a "war between the states."
This is one of the most frivolous myth conceptions. A
few try to claim that this is a misnomer on two accounts. First, they tell us that a
"civil war" is a war between two opposing groups fighting for control of the
same nation -- and that the South fought only for control of itself (and its nearly 4
million slaves). Second, they tell us that the war wasn't between citizens of the
same country, but between two opposing countries.
This only demonstrates a basic misunderstanding of
definitions. Dictionaries tell us that a "civil war" is "a war between
opposing groups of citizens of the same country" or something similar. They say
nothing about them fighting for control of the same country. One historian cuts to the
heart of the matter, explaining that a civil war is simply a conflict "in which
citizens fight among themselves." And that is certainly what happened in America
between 1861 and 1865.
But what about this claim that Southerners weren't
part of the same country -- that the Confederacy was a separate nation? Virtually everyone
defines nationhood as consisting of three things: (1) setting up and maintaining a civil
government, (2) protecting territorial integrity, and (3) being recognized as a nation by
other countries. Of these three elements, the Confederacy achieved -- at best -- only the
first and even the civil government barely functioned. The Confederacy lost territory
almost from the outset. And as for international recognition -- not a single nation
granted formal diplomatic relations or exchanged ambassadors.
At best, then, the Confederacy was an
organized insurrection or separatist movement -- and the rebellion was a civil war.
Myth Conception 9: Slaves
were valuable and had to be well treated.
This myth conception is singularly insulting, since
it implies that slavery is ok, as long as slaves are treated well. And it implies that as
long as slave owners weren't "Simon Legares" then bondage might even have been
good for the slaves! Just as importantly, however, it demonstrates extraordinary ignorance
concerning the conditions of slavery that prevailed in the 18th and 19th centuries.
For example, Carolina rice fields have been described
as charnel houses for African-American slaves. Malaria and enteric diseases killed off the
low country slaves at rates which are today almost unbelievable. Based on the best
plantation accounts it is clear that while about one out of every three slave
children on Carolina cotton plantations died before reaching the age of 16, nearly two of
every three African-American children on rice plantations failed to reach their sixteenth
birthday and over a third of all slave children died before their first birthday.
This macabre record of slave death has been traced to
two primary factors -- one was malaria, the other was the infants' feebleness at birth,
probably the result of the mothers' own chronic malaria and their general exhaustion from
rice cultivation during pregnancy.
However valuable slaves might have been,
they were commodities and were used as such. They were valuable -- but only for what they
could produce and for the wealth that they would generate for their owners.
Confederacies "exist
wherever the future is feared, the present is based on false premises, and the past is
viewed with nostalgia." -- Henry Hobhouse
Chicora Foundation, Inc., PO Box 8664,
Columbia, SC, USA, 29202, 803-787-6910 
This
one is almost (but not really) true. In South Carolina, for example, only about 47% of the
families owned African American slaves on the eve of the Civil War. So in that sense
"most" didn't -- but that tells only part of the story. What did Southerners
themselves say about the cause of the Civil War? The South Carolina Secession Convention
adopted the Declaration of Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of
South Carolina, written by Christopher G. Memminger of Charleston. In this document
the secession of South Carolina from the Union was rested squarely on two factors: