If the south had won the civil war or even just held off the north...

Great Debates
61

The question which is entirely one-sided is not “Were there wrongs in the North as well as in the South?” but “Why did the South choose to secede?” And why the South chose to secede seems relevant to me in arguing what the South’s future course of action would have been if they had succeeded.

Well, I guess slave labor is an economic system, so “economic reasons” were certainly one reason why the South seceded. The South seceded to defend what the State of Mississippi declared to be “the greatest material interest of the world” and what the State of Georgia called “$3,000,000,000 of our property”. The secessionists did seem to believe there was a political and social element to their cause, though; the State of Texas speaks of the “equal civil and political rights” of “all white men”.

62

Well, let’s not overcompensate for the Confederate revisionists, though. Slavery was the primary, overriding cause of secession but it was not the only cause. The tariff issue was a genuine concern to Southerners. (Tariffs were put in place to protect Northern industry, which prevented the South from obtaining cheaper finished goods from overseas.)

Before you say that tariffs were a non-issue, please note the tariff plank in the 1860 Republican platform linked above.

In fact, I would argue that the tariff issue may be the issue which allowed the Planter class to bring non-slave-owning whites to their cause. If I’m a small-time Southern farmer with no slaves, I might not give a damn about the slavery issue, but I can see the injustice of the tariff, and how it affects me directly.

Again, I’m not trying to downplay the slavery question. It was primary, and by a long shot. But it was not the only issue.

63

There is nothing in the OP that asks about why the South seceded. More important might be just how the South might have won and when it would have won. I don’t see any way that it would have ended in a stalemate, which would add even more possibilities to the South’s future course. I was educated in the South and never heard any talk about what would have happened if the South had won. I did hear that things would have been better for the South, if Lincoln had lived longer. I therefore do not see a point in wondering “what if the South had won?”

Here is a link that says the war was caused by the cotton gin

Or this one that says it was the cotton industry

Spread of cotton click

Spread of slavery click

Another contribution was the textile industry

[Quote]
[ul][li]The FIRST time in the world that spinning and weaving were done in one operation under the same roof.[/li][li]The FIRST power loom to be used in the United States.[/ul][/li][/Quote]

which brought about its own labor problems.

Admittedly, slavery is intertwined into the causes of the Civil War. That fact is supported in this link, which IMHO adds yet another of the major causes, a struggle for power

I will close with this thought.

64

Back in middle or high school history, I had a very good teacher who explained the causes of the civil war in a very elegant way. Unfortunately, it was too long ago for me to remember.

I do remember, however, that there were about 10 issues that we almost went to civil war over - all relating to state vs federal powers. Because the civil war happened be the trigger that set off the war doesn’t mean that it was the cause. States rights were the underlying cause, slavery was just the issue that triggered it.

If we went to war over the bank of america issue, I doubt you’d say ‘the north was fighting for the bank of america!!!’.

But the idea of fighting for something Good and Just makes good propoganda, and that’s why propoganda has convinced people all these years that the civil war was about slavery. I mean - going to war to ensure that states were subservient to federal power isn’t as catchy as ‘we fought to free the slaves!!!’

65

Oh come on, SenorBeef.

MEBuckner has provided incontrovertible evidence from the people who made the decision to secede that the South left the Union primarily to preserve the institution of slavery. It wasn’t just a “trigger.” It was their central concern – the lynchpin (they believed) of their economic system.

Were there other issues? Sure. But none challenged the primacy of slavery.

Was “states’ rights” an ongoing concern? Yes. But never a serious threat to cause a war until the “right” in question was the right to preserve the system of slavery.

66
67

I feel that the emphasis placed on the abolition of slavery is way too high in terms of the civil war, the war wasnt about slavery it was about power pure and simple. Europe sat on the sidelines not for fear of appearing to prop up a regime that used slavery but because they didnt want to get involved in a protracted expensive war, if the south had appeared to take the upper hand then i think the british would have taken thier side, not in terms of men but in terms of supplying weapons and supplies, if this had happened at the outbreak of war then i believe that the outcome might have been significantly different.

68

This is what Hank Williams Jr. would have done:
http://www.countrygoldusa.com/if_the_south.asp

69

Oh for pity’s sake.

70

Just goes to show that debating about “What if the South had won?”, leads to a bunch of nonsense.

71

i don’t see what is incontrivertible about it. He provided quotes, and obviously knows a lot about history. However his own opinion flavors his objectivity. R.E. Lee did not fight for Slavery, he fought for Virginia. As did most other soldiers who were fighting for their home states (as another poster provided an excellent quote for earlier). The issues are much as they are today; fear of the tyrrany of the majority. The only thing that kept the Northern States from dictating to the South the terms by which they could live was the fact that a slave counted as 2/3 of a person in allocating House of Representatives seats. Without that boost, we would have been powerless in the Federal Govt. Remember this is less than one hundred years after this country was set up as a Union of States with a Constitution that specifically and intentionally limited the Federal powers over those states. That the Federal govt was usurping it’s power is the cause that led to war. Someone asked earlier why the South didn’t manufacture the goods themselves, and thats a great question. Unfortunately the answer is more like a chapter in a history book than a post on a message board. However if you really look you can find the answers.
I guess you Yankees had a different version of the War of Northern Agression taught in your schools than we did.

72

Actually I wasn’t nearly so militant on the subject until I learned the facts.

73

Yes, I guess you can find the answers and yes, I guess the causes of the war were taught differently that in your case.

I don’t know about any of the other Confederate states, but the political and economic leaders in South Carolina gave the following causes for secession in their ordnance of seccession of 1860.

This is taken from the book Main Problems in American History, Quint, Cantor and Albertson (Dorsey Press 1972, Homewood, IL) Those author’s source was: Frank Moore (ed), The Rebellion Record . . 11 vols. and Supplement (New York C. P. Putnam, 1861—63; D. Van Nostrand, 1864—68), Vol. 1, p.2.

"South CAROLINA DECLARATION OF

CAUSES OF SECESSION
DECEMBER 24, 1860

The people of the State of South Caro_lina in Convention assembled, On the 2nd clay of April, A.D. 1852, declare that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States by the Federal Govern_ment, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in their withdrawal from the Federal Union; but in deference to the opinions and wishes of the other Slave-holding States, she forbore at that time to exercise this right. Since that time these encroachments have continued to in_crease, and further forbearance ceases to be a virtue."

“And now the State of South Carolina having resumed her separate and equal place among nations, deems it due to her_self, to the remaining United States of America, and to the nations of the world, that she should declare the immediate causes which have led to this act.”

“We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been de_feated and the Government itself has been destructive of them the action of the nonslaveholding States. Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property es_tablished in fifteen of the States and recog_nized by the Constitition; they have denounced as sinful the institution of Slavery; they have permitted the open establish_ment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace of and eloin the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books, and pic_tures, to servile insurrection.”

“For twenty five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geo_graphical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to high high office of President of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to Slavery. He is to be intrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that ‘Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,’ and that the public mind must rest in the belief that Slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.”

“This sectional combination for the sub_version of the Constitution has been aided, in some of the States, by elevating to citizenship persons who, by the su_preme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hos_tile to the South, andi destructive of its peace and safety.”

“On the 4th of March next this party will take possession of tile Government. It has announced that the South shall be ex_cluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunal shall be made sec_tional, and that a war must be waged against Slavery until it shall cease through throughout the United States.”

“The guarantees of tile Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The Siaveholding States will no longer have the power of self government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have be_come their enemy. Sectional interest and animosity will deepen the irritation; and all hope of remedy is rendered vain, by the fact that the public opinion at the North has in_vested a great political error with the sanctions of a more erroneous religious belief.”

“We, therefore, the people of South Carolina, by our delegates in Convention assembled, appealing to tile Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America is dissolved, and that the State of South Carolina has resumed her Position among the nations of the world, as a sepa_rate and iuidependent state, with full
power to levy war, conclude peace, con_tract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all otiler acts and things which independent States may of right do.”

Now, the document speaks of preserving the “property” of the south, but the property to be preserved was slaves. It speaks of encroaching on the “rights” of the south, but that right was the holding of slaves. I don’t see how it is possible to read this statement of causes and still claim that the civil war wasn’t about slavery - at least to the planter establishment of South Carolina.

74

There were four formal state “declarations of independence” that I am aware of (as opposed to the simple ordinances of secession adopted by each of the seceding states, which usually just said “We’re secedin’” in lawyerese, though some of these did mention slavery at least in passing.)

Here’s the complete text of the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union, quoted from above.

Here is Georgia’s secesssion declaration; sorry, no flowery title for this one:

Here’s the Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union:

And here is the Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union:

75

It could also be looked at as willing to preserve State’s rights to make the decisions about slavery. There was tension between the north and the south - and generally the State’s Rights types over those who advocated federal power.

I remember in high school going over 8 or 9 issues in detail which came very close to igniting a civil war. The underlying differences were there from the start. Unfortunately, it was too long ago to remember them specifically.

The issue was there all along, and it came to a boiling point several times - none of them were quite enough to cause some states to secede. Eventually, you come to slavery, and this issue WAS powerful enough for the states to split up.

It doesn’t mean that everything was peachy keen until the slavery issue came up, then all of the sudden, a huge rift was formed and we went to war. There was a conflict brewing between federal power advocates and state rights advocates since the birth of the country. Eventually, it became so divisive that some states decided to secede from the union to attempt to form a government that followed their own philosophy.

The union decided that letting them self govern wasn’t acceptable, and decided to wage a war of aggression to decide who was daddy after all. Federal power won.

The issue that finally caused the decisive split was slavery. But slavery was the straw that broke the camel’s back, not the source of the division. To say that slavery was the sole cause is simply to demonify the losing side - that they were merely trying to defend their own cruelty, rather than to acknowledge there was a bigger issue at stake.

I may very well be wrong, the civil war isn’t my strong point as far as knowledge goes. But to paint the picture that slavery was the root cause is to throw away all of the tension over unrelated issues since the founding of this country. It reeks of a case of winners writing the history books, and it seems much more reasonable that the south was fighting for it’s own right to self govern than for a right to have slaves.

76

Odd. I read that and got a completely different impression.

It strikes me that the document is stating that the federal government has been consistently violating the Constitution and disrespecting state rights for a long time, and it’s only gotten worse and worse. Slavery is mentioned as a key issue because it’s such a blatant violation of state’s rights. The president has essentially been elected on the platform of his willingness to violate the Constitution and state’s rights by forcing the states to do something they have no desire to do. The Federal government, Constitutionally, has no such power (as far as I’m aware), and while the issue specifically is over slavery, it could as easily be over scrambled eggs. If Lincoln declared a war on scrambled eggs and declared the Federal government would force states into banning scrambled eggs, it’s likely the southern states would recognize that, also, as a violation of the Constitution.

If you’d like, I’ll do a line-by-line reply/analysis to what was stated to support my view.

77

Btw, I’ve grown up in Ohio and was educated here. I have no emotional ties to the south. And all through school, I got the same “Lincoln was a God Among Men Who Could Do No Wrong” education that everyone else did.

Upon learning stuff from more independent sources, I concluded that it was a case of the central government suppressing local government illegally by force - but the winners write the history books.

78

From North Carolina

The above is not slavery, but it is a story that is happening in 2002. I for one hope that the people in the year 2140 don’t look back at us with tunnel vision and say that we liked making people live in these conditions and it had nothing to do with economics. If the government closed the borders to these workers, we’d all raise hell about it. We’d probably say “We need those workers” but what we’d be talking about was that there was no fruit and veggies in the super market, at a price that we could afford. This also isn’t a matter of something that happens just in the south, it is happening in California, Texas, Michigan and many other states.

At the time the cotton gin was invented and Lowell stated his mill in Massachusetts there was only one place to grow cotton and that was in the south. Cotton was a crop that took 10 to 20 workers for a 10-acre field. So you had the technology to gin it, the technology to use it, the place to grow it, so where were the field hands to pick it going to come from? The south was sparsely populated and the people in the Northeast that wanted a new life had a place to go: the Ohio Valley and beyond. Slavery had been outlawed in many of the Northeast states, but only recently and many of the men who were investing in the textile mills were using money that they had made in the slave trade. Ideally, everyone would have said “Well, we’ll just have to keep wearing these clothes that can’t be washed and forget the whole idea.” Realistically, there was a vacuum that needed to be filled and it was filled with slave labor. The mills in the Northeast didn’t need to use slave labor, since they had a supply of young women to fill their needs.

After the civil war things did not really improve much since it still took the same amount of labor to pick the cotton. Cotton mills moved to the south but they created mill towns that exploited their labor force, that was mainly white. Those mill towns were still operating when my family moved to Atlanta in the late 1940’s. I went to school with the children from Scottdale Mills. I now have neighbors and friends that tell of how they picked cotton when they were young. You don’t hear the term so much today, but back then it was King Cotton and it was an unforgiving master. Today, the mills have all moved overseas and last week I watched as a local farmer by himself picked more than twenty acres in about 3 hours with a cotton picker There was a period when the labor was getting scarce and the cotton picker had just started being used. That was in the 70’s, which will forever be remembered for polyester.

I am not claiming that slavery wasn’t a terrible thing, I’m only saying that it was more complicated than “they didn’t want to lose their slaves and they went to war to keep them.”

As to the OP and “What if the south had won”, I have a theory which has to do with the Confederate States of America. To me the name tells you what would happen, since a confederacy had already been tried and failed. That time there was a group of men that were able to unite the states under a tried and proven leader, George Washington. Jefferson Davis was not such a leader.

and there was no group like Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin, et al to support a leader. The states would have most likely split apart and then been put back together in the Union. It may have taken a little longer, but probably wouldn’t have been much different from what happened under reconstruction in real history.

I was taught that slavery was something whose time had come and the leaders in the south just could not give it up. It was a horrible system that required a horrible war to bring about its end. What is called Southern Revisionism wasn’t something I was very much exposed to in school.

David Simmons asked about why industry didn’t develop sooner in the south. That’s a story I’ll leave for someone else to start a thread about. I will say that it wasn’t because the south was settled by slave owners.

79

States are made up by people. I don’t think states have rights, the people in them do. So you are saying that the rights of the slave owning people were superior to the rights of the people who were held as slaves?

But the issue was human slavery and not scrambled eggs so let’s just put that red herring aside.

Are you really arguing here at the beginning of the 21[sup]st[/sup] century, that the minority of the people in South Carolina who owned slaves should have been able to keep their slaves, and relocate with them to a free state in the west if they wanted to, on the grounds that a person should be able to freely transport his property wherever desired?

80

**

You’re right. States have powers. Bad choice of language on my part.

It’s not an issue of who’s rights were superior. The Federal government was overstepping it’s Constitutional bounds to try to enforce the States to do things that the Federal government wanted them to do. It was illegal and contrary to the ideals of all who believed in a Federal Republic with a limited federal government and strong state governments.

In response to this illegal (by the Constitution) usurption of power, many states seceded from the Union.

**

I’m trying to say that the actual issue that the federal government tried to illegallly force the states to comply with is irrelevant. It could be slavery, it could be scrambled eggs. The fact was that the federal government was illegally trying to force states to comply with something in violation of the Constitution.

Because the Union won, the fact that it was over slavery became a big issue, because it was a wonderful propoganda piece. It’s much better to fight for freeing the slaves from those evil southerrners than to illegally usurp power and wreck the ideals of a Federal Republic.

Where did I make that argument? I’m just trying to figure out where you interpreted that from - when you tell me, I’ll probably be able to answer that question.