Slavery was the immediate cause of the Civil War – Part Five
Throughout the 1850’s and 60’s the North continued its moral assault on the South, giving the South the persecution complex it harbours even today. Northern abolitionists and politicians incessantly employed Christian morality and Enlightenment thought as expressed in none other document than the Declaration of Independence to wage ideological war against the peculiar southern institution of slavery. To counter the North’s moral argument, southern leaders employed the argument that God and nature itself ordained that whites should enslave blacks.
Essentially, the north supported Jeffersonian philosophy and the south sought to nullify it. Indeed no lesser man than the Vice President of the Confederacy claimed, in direct conflict with Thomas Jefferson, that it was “nature’s great law” that blacks be enslaved by whites. He also claimed slavery was the cornerstone of the Confederacy.
The relation of the black to the white race, or the proper status of the coloured population among us, was a question now of vastly more importance than when the old [U.S.] Constitution was formed. The order of subordination was nature's great law; philosophy taught that order as the normal condition of the African amongst European races. Upon this recognized principle of a proper subordination, let it be called slavery or what not, our State institutions were formed and rested. The new [Southern] Confederation was entered into with this distinct understanding.
This principle of the subordination of the inferior to the superior was the "corner-stone" on which it was formed. I used this metaphor merely to illustrate the firm convictions of the framers of the new [Confederate] Constitution that this relation of the black to the white race, which existed in 1787, was not wrong in itself, either morally or politically; that it was in conformity to nature and best for both races. (Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens: His Diary kept when a prisoner at Fort Warren, New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1910., pp 172-174. Entry for 5 June 1866.)
As Stephens said, the question of African slavery was not of vast importance during the revolutionary period. The question of American slavery to England was at the helm. The question of African slavery was given to the America of the 1800’s. The north, due in large part to northern abolitionist sentiment, answered by siding with Jefferson, claiming that all men are by nature given the right to liberty. The south responded with the claim that nature had ordained blacks to perpetual servitude.
Southern leaders lobbied to spread slavery to all the American territories, to use slaves to mine for gold and other minerals. They also lobbied to purchase Cuba to extent their slave-owning power.
I want Cuba . . . I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason -- for the planting and spreading of slavery. (Speech by Albert Gallatin Brown, U.S. Senator from Mississippi, and found in James McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom”, p. 106.)
Despite what revisionists and southern spin-doctors have claimed after the fact of the war, before and during the Civil War, the south clearly did not see slavery as something to be eliminated. It saw slavery as something to be preserved and promoted.
(Continued…) |
