Race and the South, Part II:
The Civil War Really was about Slavery

Editor’s Note: This essay, which will appear online in three parts, is from Samuel Francis, ed., Race and the American Prospect: Essays on the Racial Realities of Our Nation and Our Time (The Occidental Press, 2006), available for purchase here. Read part I here.

Contrary to the contentions of the neo-Confederates, race, i.e. slavery, was the primary cause of both secession and the ensuing war. States’ rights played a very secondary role at all in secession itself. A moment’s reflection should reveal the foolishness of the idea that issue of a state’s right to secede led to secession. If our ancestors seceded just to prove a point, that states’ rights gave them the right to secede, they would certainly have been foolish, trivial, self-destructive, and petty in the extreme.

Indeed, history reveals the uncomfortable fact that the South was quite happy with a strong central government and prepared to use that government’s powers so long as the government was the protector and defender of the institution of slavery. Right down to the collapse of the Union, Southerners, who had dominated the federal government until Lincoln’s election, had availed themselves of federal power to protect slavery.

Northern states, invoking doctrines of interposition and states’ rights, passed “personal liberty laws” to thwart the federal Fugitive Slave Law. These laws erected legal barriers to Southern slave owners trying to recover their runaway slaves, and to federal agents, employees, and officials who tried to implement the Fugitive Slave Law.

Southerners were rightly enraged at this Northern experiment in resisting federal power. Indeed, Southern anger at the refusal of the Northern states to comply with federal law figures prominently in the debates on secession in the crisis following Lincoln’s victory.

Thomas R. R. Cobb, younger brother of the famous Howell Cobb who was to serve in the Confederate Congress, gave his secessionist speech to the Georgia legislature on November 12, 1860. He condemned the personal liberty laws, the effort of Northern states, invoking states’ rights, to thwart the federal government’s Fugitive Slave Law.

Cobb went so far as to say, “so long as the ‘Personal Liberty Bills’ disgrace the Statute Books of these [the Northern] States, their electoral votes should not be counted in the Electoral College.”[1]

States’ rights and interposition were not to Southerners’ tastes when such doctrines were invoked to interfere with federal law supporting slavery. The Georgia act of secession noted disapprovingly the action of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, which had rendered a decision upholding the idea that the Wisconsin legislature could nullify the Fugitive Slave Act.

Nor were ideas of limited government and personal liberties any bar to the use of government power to support slavery and keep blacks down. In 1835 President Andrew Jackson proposed a federal ban prohibiting the mailing of abolitionist propaganda in the mails. Many Southern leaders embraced this idea. While the proposed law did not pass, in part because of Senator John C. Calhoun’s opposition on correct constitutional grounds, an understanding was reached that effectively accomplished the goal. Southern postmasters were allowed to refuse to deliver abolitionist materials to the addressees.[2]

Likewise, when the Confederate Constitutional Convention met, the resulting Confederate Constitution subordinated the rights of the states to issues involving slavery.

As Professor Don E. Fehrenbacher of Stanford University commented, “With Lincoln’s election the national government shifted from one which had enforced the rights of slave owners to one which would oppose those rights. Southerners came to the conclusion that they needed another national government.”[3]

While the new national government that Southerners created enshrined many principles of states’ rights, the issue of race (slavery) trumped philosophies of decentralized government. Thus, the Confederate Constitution guaranteed rights of slaveholders in the territories and effectively made it illegal for a state to abolish slavery by guaranteeing it “in any of the States or Territories” and prohibited the Confederate Congress from ever passing legislation “denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves.”[4]

Nor were the framers of the Confederate Constitution as squeamish in talking about slavery and the Negro as the Founding Fathers had been in Philadelphia in 1789, the term “negro slavery” being used repeatedly in contrast with the euphemisms employed in the US Constitution.

As Fehrenbacher (quoting historian Arthur Bestor) observed:

[T]he new Constitution was hardly dedicated to states rights. Instead, at least as far as the institution of slavery was concerned, “the Confederacy was a unitary, consolidated, national state, denying to each one of its allegedly sovereign members any sort of local autonomy with respect to this particular one among its domestic institutions.”[5]

All of this was, of course, completely in keeping with the sentiments and beliefs of white Southerners during and after the secession crisis, as exemplified in the famous speech of Vice President Alexander H. Stephens in Savannah shortly after the founding of the new Confederate government. Stephens praised the new constitution for having clarified “the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization” and stated that in contrast with the mistaken assertion of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea. Its foundations are laid. Its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”[6]

Stephens’ “corner-stone” speech is but the tip of a deadly iceberg for neo-Confederate Southerners that sinks their myth of an egalitarian, multicultural Confederacy. The most cursory research into the statements of Southern secessionists uncovers a plethora of “racist” remarks and positions that decisively confirms that the great motivating issue behind the decision to leave the Union was race.

Race was also a major consideration for the president of the Confederacy and one of its major theoreticians, Jefferson Davis. In May 1860, well before the secession crisis began, Davis introduced in the US Senate a series of seven resolutions expressing principles he regarded as essential for the preservation of the Union. While the first cited the vital importance of states’ rights, the second insisted:

That negro slavery, as it exists in fifteen states of this Union, composes an important portion of their domestic institutions, inherited from their ancestors, and existing at the adoption of the Constitution, by which it is recognized as constituting an important element in the apportionment of power among the states, and that no change of opinion or feeling on the part of the non-slaveholding states of the Union, in relation to this institution, can justify them, or their citizens, in open or covert attacks thereon, with a view to its overthrow; and that all such attacks are in manifest violation of the mutual and solemn pledge to protect and defend each other given by the states respectively on entering into the constitutional compact which formed the Union, and are a manifest breach of faith, and a violation of the most solemn obligations.

When Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, Davis issued his own response to it, which he later reprinted in his defense of the Confederacy:

We may well leave it to the instinct of that common humanity, which a beneficent Creator has implanted in the breasts of our fellow‑men of all countries, to pass judgment on a measure by which several millions of human beings of an inferior race—peaceful, contented laborers in their sphere—are doomed to extermination, while at the same time they are encouraged to a general assassination of their masters by the insidious recommendation “to abstain from violence, unless in necessary self‑defense.”[7]

Davis expanded on his views of Negroes as “an inferior race” in discussing Lincoln’s policy of arming black soldiers in the Union army:

Let the reader pause for a moment and look calmly at the facts presented in this statement. The forefathers of these negro soldiers were gathered from the torrid plains and malarial swamps of inhospitable Africa. Generally they were born the slaves of barbarian masters, untaught in all the useful arts and occupations, reared in heathen darkness, they were transferred to shores enlightened by the rays of Christianity. There, put to servitude, they were trained in the gentle arts of peace and order and civilization; they increased from a few unprofitable savages to millions of efficient Christian laborers. Their servile instincts rendered them contented with their lot, and their patient toil blessed the land of their abode with unmeasured riches.[8]

The views of the major leaders of the Confederacy—Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Alexander H. Stephens—on race and slavery are therefore perfectly clear.

Shall we glance at a sampling of additional passages from the acts and ordinances of secession themselves, a small sampling, but more than sufficient to lay to rest any credibility of the neo-Confederate “multiracialism and magnolias” myth of Southern history?

South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession focuses its attention on the failure of the Northern states to adhere to their constitutional obligation to protect property in slaves), quoting Article IV of the U. S. Constitution, which required non-slaveholding states to return slaves to their owners.

Georgia, the fourth state to secede, imitated the framers of the Declaration of Independence in enumerating the grievances that had impelled the delegates to vote for secession. The very first grievance is stated as follows: “For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.” The statement continues in the next paragraph to explicitly condemn “. . . Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa . . .” because “. . . they have enacted laws which either nullify the acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them” [emphasis added]. This is about as clear a repudiation of the states’ rights doctrine of nullification as one could imagine. Surely it tells us all we need to know to judge the relative weight of racial concerns as opposed to sentiments of decentralized government motivating the state of Georgia to leave the Union.

The Act of Secession of Texas starts out: “Whereas, the recent developments in Federal affairs make it evident that the power of the Federal Government is sought to be made a weapon with which to strike down the interests and property of the people of Texas, and her sister slave-holding States . . . .” It goes on to condemn the North for (among many other things): “proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color—a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law.”

The Secession Act concludes on the following note: “in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator . . . while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.”

After the formation of the new Confederate government, the Deep South states sent spokesmen to Virginia and other Middle and Upper South states to urge them to follow their example and leave the Union. In the speeches and statements made by these spokesmen (called “commissioners” by the states that dispatched them) the issues of race and slavery appear over and over again; there is scarcely a peep about tariffs or other issues.

Commissioners from Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina spoke to an immense crowd gathered at Mechanics’ Institute Hall in Richmond, Virginia, to speak on behalf of their respective states and to induce Virginia to secede.

What did they say?

Speaking for Mississippi, Fulton Anderson warned the Virginians that the Republican Party was “founded upon the idea of unrelenting and eternal hostility to the institution of slavery.” The Lincoln government sought “the ultimate extinction of slavery, and the degradation of the Southern people.” Northerners were committed to “a holy crusade for our benefit in seeking the destruction of that institution [slavery] which…lies at the very foundation of our social and political fabric.”[9]

Henry L. Benning, for Georgia: “By the time the North shall have attained the power, the black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand that?” Benning warned that the abolitionists and their program of freeing the slaves and granting them rights would lead to a result in which “We will be completely exterminated, and the land will be left in the possession of the blacks, and then it will go back to a wilderness and become another Africa or St. Domingo.”[10]

Finally, John Smith Preston for South Carolina implored Virginians to secede by telling them, “For fully thirty years or more, the people of the Northern States have assailed the institution of African slavery.” He cited the example of John Brown to show correctly enough that the abolitionist fanatics were working to abolish slavery by killing the slaveholders. “There could be no doubt that the conflict between slavery and non-slavery is a conflict for life and death.” Lincoln’s election he considered to be a decree of annihilation for the white people of the South.[11]

Surely it would appear to any reasonable mind that the quotations and facts set out above conclusively refute the improbable notion that the Confederacy was not supportive of explicit racial consciousness and solidarity in the sense that it believed in and was deeply committed to the preservation of the white race, its dominance, and its civilization in the South.