Slavery was the immediate cause of the Civil War – Part Four
When we study the movers and shakers of the pre-war south, we discover that the American Civil War was certainly fought over slavery, though slavery was not the only cause of the war. As we have seen, the north and south had bickered over trade issues for many years prior to the war, and those disagreements most certainly poisoned the waters between the two regions. But by 1850 the slavery issue dominated the political centers of our nation. Slavery was the final straw in the disagreements between north and south. It was not simply a major point of contention in the war, but the main point of contention. The issue had captured national political thought so firmly as to have caused open brawls in the U.S. senate, with one senator literally beating another senseless.
Before that same senate, four years after the beating incident, Jefferson Davis, the later President of the Confederacy, would defend slavery thusly—
Negro slavery exists in the South, and by the existence of negro slavery, the white man is raised to the dignity of a freeman and an equal. Nowhere else will you find every white man superior to menial service. Nowhere else will you find every white man recognized so far as an equal as never to be excluded from any man's house or any man's table. Your own [white] menial [in the north] who blacks your boots, drives your carriage, who wears your livery, and is your own in every sense of the word, is not your equal; and such is society wherever negro slavery is not the substratum on which the white race is elevated to its true dignity. We [Southerners], however, have no theory to press upon you; we leave you to such institutions as you may prefer; but when you assail ours, we come to the vindication of our institutions by showing you that all your phrases are false; that we are the freemen. With us, and with us alone, as I believe, the white man attains to his true dignity in the Government…. (Senate Chamber, U.S. Capitol, February 29, 1860)
In that same speech Jefferson Davis continued his defense.
The condition of slavery with us is, in a word, Mr. President, nothing but the form of civil government instituted for a class of people not fit to govern themselves. It is exactly what in every State exists in some form or other. It is just that kind of control which is extended in every northern State over its convicts, its lunatics, its minors, its apprentices. It is but a form of civil government for those who by their nature are not fit to govern themselves. We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race of men by the Creator, and from the cradle to the grave, our Government, as a civil institution, marks that inferiority. (my emphasis) In their subject and dependent state, they are not the objects of cruelty as they would be if left to the commission of crime, for which they should be incarcerated in penitentiaries and work-houses, and put under hired overseers, having no interest in them and no relation to them, no affiliation, growing out of the associations of childhood and the tender care of age. (Speech before the U.S. Senate, February 29, 1860)
After becoming President of the Confederacy, Davis would flatly state the cause of secession-- the protection of slavery, the system whereby whites might prosper and where the savage black might be converted into docile laborers.
In moral and social condition [blacks] had been elevated from brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers, and supplied not only with bodily comforts but with careful religious instruction. Under the supervision of a superior race their labor had been so directed as not only to allow a gradual and marked amelioration of their own condition, but to convert hundreds of thousands of square miles of wilderness into cultivated lands covered with a prosperous people…. With interests of such overwhelming magnitude imperiled, the people of the Southern States were driven by the conduct of the North to the adoption of some course of action to avert the danger with which they were openly menaced. With this view the Legislatures of the several States invited the people to select delegates to conventions to be held for the purpose of determining for themselves what measures were best adapted to meet so alarming a crisis in their history. (First Message to the Confederate Congress, April 29, 1861)
Davis was by no means the only southern leader defending slavery. Very many southern politicians argued the moral correctness of slavery. Lawrence Keitt, South Carolina congressman, in a speech given to the United States House on January 25, 1860 made the following statement, now found in the “Congressional Globe”:
African slavery is the corner-stone of the industrial, social, and political fabric of the South; and whatever wars against it, wars against her very existence. Strike down the institution of African slavery and you reduce the South to depopulation and barbarism."… "The anti-slavery party contends that slavery is wrong in itself, and the Government is a consolidated national democracy. We of the South contend that slavery is right, and that this is a confederate Republic of sovereign States."
And James Hammond, South Carolina congressman to the House, claimed
…the moment this House undertakes to legislate upon [slavery], it dissolves the Union. Should it be my fortune to have a seat upon this floor, I will abandon it the instant the first decisive step is taken looking towards legislation of this subject. I will go home to preach, and if I can, practice, disunion, and civil war, if needs be. A revolution must ensue, and this republic sink in blood. (James Hammond, South Carolina congressman to the House. Found in William Miller’s, “Arguing About Slavery”).
Clearly slavery was no mere peripheral issue leading up to the Civil War. It was the main issue that sparked the conflagration.
(Continued…) |
