Originally Posted by
SicEmBaylor
In the interest of full disclosure, I will preface my statements by acknowledging that I am a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and an absolute believer in the right of secession and justness of the southern cause. Having said that, let me just make the following points/contentions about the war and the politics that led to the outbreak of war.
1) Let's get this out of the way immediately: Slavery was, by far, the single most important and determining factor that led to the decision to secede by the southern states. There is absolutely no denying that. Slavery was the most important issue and formed the apex of the south's grievances with the north.
2)Slavery was a component of states' rights. Slavery was neither illegal nor did the United States Constitution ban its practice or enumerate a power to the Federal government to regulate the institution of slavery outside of regulating the interstate trafficking of slaves; therefore, slavery was quite clearly a state issue falling under the 10th Amendment.
3)Slavery was certainly not the only issue with which the south found cause for disagreement with the north and the Union. Northern industrialists and capitalists who long had the Whigs in their pocket also had their Republican successors in their pocket as well. Northern banking interests, capitalists, and industrialists were resentful of the fact that south could get by with using slave labor. The south had no industrial base to speak of, so the south would ship their raw products to factories in the north and factories in Great Britain and France to turn into finished products. In turn, the south favored free-trade agreements with those nations since they were having to pay an export tax to send their raw materials overseas and an import tax on the finished products. The north favored these tariffs which protected northern factories. So, imagine if you will, the southern reaction to northerners favoring the tariff while threatening the institution of slavery. The south saw this as a threat to their entire economy, their entire society, and as a means for the northern states to suppress the southern states. Likewise, midwestern farmers resented the competition with slave labor for the very same reasons.
4)States evolved from their colonial predecessors. Before we were a nation, colonies were formed by groups of individuals receiving a charter from the Crown to establish a colony in the New World under specific terms and conditions. They arose independently and were, under the terms of their charters, relatively free to govern their own affairs. The violation of the terms of these colonial charters was a contributing factor to the Revolution.
5)The United States is predicated upon the belief that a people have a right to choose their own government. We fought a Revolution justified with the declared reasoning that people, any people, have the right to abolish and/or sever ties with the existing government and reform/establish a new government of their own choosing. The colonies declared their independence as sovereign colonies organized under their colonial charters, and they affiliated themselves with one another for the purpose of separating from Great Britain. They then, as separate sovereign entities, joined together in national unity organized under the Articles of Confederation ceding only that sovereignty they wished to delegate to a central authority.
6)Weaknesses in the Articles of Confederation (namely issues arising from extraditing debtors across state lines) led the individual states to send delegates to convention to amend the Articles of Confederation; the decision was made to hold what became the Constitutional Convention concurrently with the Congress organized under the Articles of Confederation. We must be clear here -- the Congress, the government of the United States, did not call for or organized the Constitutional Convention. The individual states decided to do so independently, and they went to great lengths to keep their proceedings secret from the Congress leading to some interesting cloak-and-dagger incidents with the former trying to gain insight into the latter.
7)The individual states, at convention, wrote a new Constitution delegating only a small fraction of their sovereignty to the Federal state. The powers of this government were specific, limited, and clearly enumerated in: Articles I, Section 8 and Article II, Section 2 and 3, and Article III. The Constitution did not enumerate a power to the centralized government to regulate slavery; however, the Interstate Commerce Clause did give them authority to regulate the import of slaves and the interstate trafficking of slaves. The Constitution did not provide the central government with the authority to decide when a state may leave the union; therefore, under the 10th Amendment, that power is vested with the individual states. Furthermore, the right and sovereignty of the states was never questioned at the Constitutional Convention nor was there ever any discussion that entering the Constitutional compact meant individual states were forever bound to remain in that Union under the force of arms. Had most states known, at the time, that entering the compact meant no state could leave under the threat of coercion and violence by the Federal government -- it’s unlikely most (if not all) would have rejected the Constitution.
8)Regarding the grievances of the southern states that led to secession, they are absolutely irrelevant to the question of whether a state *can* secede regardless of whether one believes in the reasons or the wisdom of the decision. The most fundamental foundational principle in this nation is that a people have the right to abolish existing political ties and form a new government of their own choosing. It was the view of the southern states that remaining in the Union was no longer the best way to secure the future for its citizen; therefore, they exercised their absolute and fundamental sovereign right to exit the Union they themselves created and freely entered into. The Constitution is, if nothing else, a contract between states. The terms of that contract, in the southern view, were breached which led to secession.
9)No person in American history could ever or has ever suggested that the goal of the Confederate states was to destroy the American Union via force of arms or otherwise. There was no intention of invading or making war upon the Union states. Every southerner and every Confederate politician made it clear their desire was to leave peacefully and be left alone. Leaving the Union, contrary to both period northern rhetoric and contemporary orthodoxy, did not equate to destroying the Union. The Union would have been smaller, to be sure, but those northern states desiring to remain in that compact were perfectly free to do so.
10)When a sovereign state left the union, it became an independent political entity free to remain independent or enter a new compact among other independent and sovereign political entities. Any United States troops or possessions sitting on sovereign territory without the permission of the sovereign host state did so both illegally and as a passive-aggressive act of war. The reinforcement of those garrisons was an act of war. The calling of troops to invade and ‘quell’ the rebellion was an act of war. The Lincoln Administration did all three. The southern states may have fired the first shots, but the war was most certainly started and sparked by the Lincoln Administration’s failure to peacefully evacuate its troops from sovereign southern territory.
11)Lincoln made it clear time and time again that the purpose of the war was to preserve the existing Union. The calling of troops was done so with the war-goal of preserving the Union. Very few in the Union went to war with the intention of freeing the slaves, and some states may have revolted or even seceded if that had been a war aim of the Lincoln administration. The triggering cause of secession may have been slavery, but the Union did not go to war over the issue of slavery; the Union went to war over the issue of secession.
12)The myth that the Union was full of anti-slavery zealots with modern notions of racial harmony and that the Union army was on an anti-slavery crusade is pure revisionist history and an absolute myth. The north were as racists as most people believe the southern states to be. After the war, northern factory workers resented the influx of former slaves taking their jobs. Conditions in northern factories were as bad, if not worse, than conditions on a southern plantation. Furthermore, the housing and care of the average northern factory worker was below the conditions and standards of the average slave quarters. Lincoln himself, on numerous occasions, spoke words that would be equated with the absolute worst sort of white supremacist in contemporary times.
13)The result of the War Between the States on the United States Constitution was absolutely disastrous. The sovereign states delegated only a limited amount of their sovereignty to the national state and reserved all other rights and privileges unto itself. The Constitution was a beautifully crafted and brilliantly balanced document that ensured every power had a check, every branch had a check, and the power between state and Federal was checked. The Federal government was seen from the very beginning as an institution crafted by the states in which the states could jointly govern. This is evident when one looks at Congress. The House of Representatives were the directly-elected representatives of the people; Senators represented the interests of the states as whole political entities and were elected by the various state legislatures. Thus, the Congress balanced the interests of the people with the interests of the states. The President was tasked with executing the will of the people and of the states as expressed by the actions of Congress. The War Between the States destroyed this balance by placing the Federal government in a position of supreme centralized power over the states and by the illegal and unconstitutional ratification of the 14th Amendment. It laid the foundation for the increasing and encroaching power of the centralized Federal government for the next 150 years -- a situation we still, to this day, struggle with. It’s a situation that even liberals and progressives should lament. The individual states were intended to be laboratories of social change. Instead, we have an incredibly large and very diverse population governed by a single centralized authority with ‘one size fits all’ law. Our states never relinquished the power over the domestic affairs of its citizenry to the centralized states -- it was taken from them by Lincoln as a result of the War Between the States. Several northern governors recognized this and the potential consequences as early as the first shots.
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