Do you have any sources on this? I’d like to read about it. I’ve most often read that small farmers benefited from slavery by being able to rent slaves from big slaveowners. And many smaller farms had a slave or two, as well (here are a couple sets of numbers on percentages of households owning slaves). Moreover, small poor farmers aspired to slave-owning, big-plantation lifestyle. That was what success was in their culture. They didn’t want big plantations gone - they wanted to attain them (rather like the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” rhetoric). And opening up new territories/land to slavery would mean they’d have a better shot at that life one day.
Also, they would have had to complete for jobs with free black men, and I doubt they’d have wanted that (as previously mentioned, poor white people (at least certain immigrants) certainly didn’t want that, and thus wanted the black people to stay down south. I can’t imagine poor white southerners were any more eager for it.
There was a lot of talk all throughout the 1800s of sending all of the blacks back to Africa (or just “somewhere else” even if the folks advocating it weren’t sure exactly where that somewhere would be). It wasn’t just that the lower Southern whites didn’t want to compete with free blacks, but there was also a fear of revolution if the blacks were ever freed. Most southerners, rich or poor, were afraid of what would happen if the blacks were freed and remained in the U.S.
Lincoln himself originally favored a plan to send the Blacks elsewhere. Eventually he realized that there was no practical way to make this work and he backed away from it.
The comparison I like to make is to the American Revolution. The “cause” of that war was the rebellion of the colonies against Great Britain.
The colonists had a number of grievances against England, including taxation without representation. But ultimately the issue was whether the colonies could unilaterally separate themselves from Great Britain. In the end, it turned out they could.
In the Civil War, the cause of the war was the rebellion of Southern states.
The states had a number of grievances against the North, including the election of Abraham Lincoln, who got approximately zero votes from the South. They feared, that despite promising otherwise, Lincoln wanted to, and would find a way to, end slavery in the South. But ultimately the issue is whether the South could unilaterally separate itself from the North. In the end, it turned out they couldn’t.
The problem is you making it sound like industrialists were actively plotting to destroy plantation agriculture. Which was not the case. Industrialists didn’t see plantation owners as competitors; they saw other industrialists as competitors. Their attitude towards plantation owners was essentially the same disinterest they had towards abolitionists or farmers.
Plantation owners wanted to believe they were the victims of a vast conspiracy because it gave them justification for their economic troubles. But the reality is that their problems were self-inflicted. Plantation owners made bad financial decisions in the nineteenth century and they suffered for it.
The tariff, for example, was not an anti-southern plot. It was just a normal fact of life. Governments required revenue and this was before the era of income taxes and sales taxes. Tariffs on imported goods was the way governments financed themselves (note that the Confederate government enacted a tariff as soon as it came into existence). And the fact that revenue was the reason for tariffs dictated what you put tariffs on. The United States didn’t import agricultural products so there was no point in having a tariff on them. What the United States imported was industrial products from Europe so that’s what got taxed. And that tax created an opportunity in America; it meant that there would be a wider market for domestically manufactured industrial goods. Investors saw this opportunity and jumped on it. And there was no reason southerners couldn’t have done this; they could have build up an industrial economy in the south and made a big profit doing so. They simply chose to stick with agriculture even when better opportunities were present.
It has been demonstrated that small farm-holders were much less enthusiastic about the Confederacy. Most Confederate states had substantial areas of pro-Union sentiment. The Appalachians were a stronghold of Union sympathy in particular. It wasn’t universal, of course, and small farmers in areas with important plantations tended to be fairly pro-Confederate and pro-slavery. Small farm-holders in general were apparently less likely to volunteer.
Battle Cry of Freedom does have a small section of the issue.
At the risk of being jumped on here, for hijacking or just idiocy, I am curious about something my history professor said:
“Any time you hear someone talking about ‘states’ rights,’ what they mean is making someone else a second class citizen.” Or words to that general effect. If someone is shouting about states’ rights, they are shouting that they want to have the right to treat someone else badly. He gave some specific examples, beyond the Civil War, but naturally I don’t remember them now.
In the same semester, I had an English professor adamantly declare that most of the Southerners during that time were angry that the North was trying to control them, and that the majority of boys in the War (Southern side, anyway) were just concerned about states’ rights.
Too true; the thing is, they left because they were outvoted (not because they had no votes/representation, and they had the 3/5ths compromise which totally gave them too big a say for their free population, anyway). And as for Lincoln getting no votes from the South…they refused to put his name on the ballot in 10 southern states. Not that he would have won the region, anyway, but it’s not exactly honest to say he wasn’t getting votes in those area when they don’t put his name on the ballot.
Basically, the South said “we didn’t win and get our way, so we’re leaving.” And while the South certainly had a reason to feel increasingly marginalized (growing population in the Industrial North meant the South was losing power), it’s not like they’d always been downtrodden and oppressed, or anything. I think something like 11 of the 15 presidents before Lincoln had owned slaves. I think 8 were from states that ultimately seceded. The South really dominated politics for a while, but change happens, and it happened to the Unites States. Demographics changed, industry and big numbers of people who didn’t want slavery. There’s two ways to look at it: “this country no longer represents our needs, so we want a new one” or “the rules were fine as long as we were winning, but now that we’re losing, we don’t want to play by those rules anymore, so we’re going home.” They’re kinda hurt by not actually obeying the rules before they left.
Interestingly, there was a Democrat and Southern Democrat in the general election, due to the Democratic National Convention hijinks. That virtually guaranteed the Republicans the election. I’ve heard it speculated that was done on purpose so they’d have a reason to secede (Lincoln’s election), but I don’t think academic consensus supports that. Didn’t really matter, because Lincoln would have won the election anyway, even if all the votes for Breckenridge and Douglas had been behind one candidate. They would have won the popular vote, though (presuming no other votes changed as a result, and they would have, since Douglas lobbied his supporter for the Union after secession and Breckenridge joined the Confederacy), and that would have made a more compelling case to me.
I agree with you that the industrialists did not see the plantations as competitors. I did not intend to give that impression in my post.
The industrialists saw other countries becoming more industrial and saw that as their competition (as well as competition amongst themselves). The industrialists saw the South, and by that I mean the entire South, both the big plantations and the small farmers, as holding back progress and ruining the country’s chance to become a world player economically, due to the South’s focus on agriculture. The industrialists wanted tariffs, taxes, economic policies, etc. that all favored industrialism, since they saw that as the future of the country, and were extremely frustrated that the South was fighting them every step along the way in Washington.
Of course, since a lot of the things that favored industrialism also hurt agriculture, this caused the South to believe that the industrialists were out to get them. And when the industrialists allied themselves with the abolitionists, then the South really thought that they were being unfairly persecuted. The northern industrialists just wanted the South to get out of their way. The South, on the other hand, felt personally threatened and attacked.
Just talking about “state rights” can be a little problematic these days. There are two issues here.
The first issue is that there really was an issue about the rights of states vs. the federal government, with the most dramatic example probably being South Carolina deciding that the tariffs passed in Washington didn’t apply to South Carolina.
The second issue is that there are folks out there who like to say that the war wasn’t about slavery at all, and was really about “state rights”. A lot of folks seem to be in denial about all of the racism and slavery issues, and tend to make it out like the South was unfairly and unreasonably attacked. A lot of people get very frustrated trying to deal with these racism deniers, so as soon as they hear the phrase “state rights” they assume that you are one of those people and they immediately go into defensive mode against the state rights argument.
The second issue makes it very difficult sometimes to talk about the first issue.
If they were so concerned about the states’ rights, then why did the press so hard for the Fugitive Slave Act - which let the Federal government trump a free states’ rights and forced them to return escaped slaves?
Really, though just look at the declaration of causes of secession. It doesn’t divide states by agricultural and non-agricultural, but slave-holding and non-slaveholoding
Slavery was the life-blood of the South. The economy was dependent on it, and the social order generally said it was the natural and moral order of things*. They could either try to adapt or cling to it as the country became more and more against it. They tried to cling to it. I don’t know if they would have been able sucessfully to adapt to a new way. I expect they’d have had similar economic downfall even if they’d been able to secede without war, due to power and wealth mostly going to the more industrial nations. But we don’t know for sure, can’t know, without a window in a parallel universe. As it was, they went from slavery to share-cropping and Jim Crow.
It’s my understanding that slavery in the south had more a “necessary evil” context among the educated and wealthy southerners earlier, but as it became more profitable (the invention of the cotton gin made a big difference), attitudes became more and more favorable towards slavery. I know that’s the case with Thomas Jefferson, but don’t know widespread it was.
Oh, the English professor had several students jump on her statements, with some of the same arguments above. I pointed out that declarations that states put out specifically mentioned slavery as a reason to secede- she responded with a snippy tone that most of the boys fighting didn’t even have slaves, and they didn’t care why their states were seceding; they were fighting a war of northern aggression. I took multiple classes with every other English professor at school; I avoided her classroom after that.
I truly wish I could remember the arguments that the History prof made – I seem to recall that tariffs were actually brought up as a counter example, and he broke that issue down to the same “right to treat people badly” roots. But damned if I remember now how he did. It seems like there is a legitimate concern about what rights states have vs what rights federal government have; his point was that those who use that as a rallying cry are, at the heart of it, motivated by less lofty sentiments.
ETA It’s possible that the base argument about the protective tariffs could be seen as “you’re hurting us for having cheap slave labor, and that’s not fair!” But that is a gross oversimplification, and seems a stretch to say the least.
Not to be flip but probably everyone. One of my old history prof’s at Pitt described it as probably being one of the few unavoidable conflicts. There had grown to be too many differences between the northern and southern states for peaceful means to have worked.
I read an interesting analysis of that once. Of course, there’s the link I posted earlier showing that in seceding states, the percentage of households owning slaves was 26-49%, depending on the state. Definitely a minority, but not a tiny one. But from General Lee’s Army; From Victory To Collapse regarding the Army of North Virginia
More than half the officers owned slaves.
It could be argued that’s going too far looking for slavery links - counting non-family-member household ownership. It’s interesting, though.
That’s the only year without conscription, so the only year it was all volunteer. Later, if a man volunteered, he could pick his arm of service and his company, and he couldn’t if conscripted, so there was that motivation to volunteer. After that, a lot men (on both sides) were fighting mostly because they had to.
I don’t think that’s going too far looking for links. If you live in a household with slave ownership, I would argue that slavery has a direct impact on your life, whether or not you are related to the slave owners. It may or may not be a major impact, but I don’t think it can be denied that it influences your perspective.
Because free states had no “right” not to return escaped slaves:
[QUOTE=Constitution]
No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.
[/QUOTE]
I hope I don’t need to put the disclaimer that I believe slavery is wrong, but under the jurisprudence of 1860, the south had every right to bitch about states enacting “Personal Liberty Laws” and the like. It was a clear violation of the compact that all of the states, both north and south, agreed to follow. The north was openly flouting that.
Otherwise, your post mischaracterizes a “states rights” argument. The argument is not that states should be able to act as their own country, but that the federal government should exercise only its enumerated powers. If I am opposed to national gun laws, it doesn’t make me a hypocrite to support a national military since raising and supporting armies is an enumerated power.
I’d say this is stretching the timeline a bit. The North was not a world player industrially before the war and I don’t think they even thought seriously about becoming one. The North was enormously more industrialized than the South, to be sure, but it was still about 75% farm and rural. Tariffs were important to them because they needed protection to develop industry. It would be almost a half century before the U.S. had world player status and nobody truly looks ahead 50 years; they were concerned with contemporary needs. Ironically, the war itself helped to create the path toward the domination of industrialization because of the need to provide large amounts of goods that had previously been imported. It tremendously speeded up an already rapid process.
History is Irony. Never more so in that the South found that the state’s rights it insisted upon including in its structure made conducting the war so impossible that virtually every one of them was thrown out by 1865.
None of the state’s rights arguments can be taken seriously as other than code for preserving slavery. There really aren’t two issues here, because that would imply a legitimate argument that could have induced secession. There was not one then any more than state’s rights today is anything but code for ideological hatreds.
It wasn’t just Lincoln. Southern politicians had been saying before the election that they would secede if Douglas were elected. They probably also would have seceded if Bell had been elected but everyone knew that wasn’t going to happen.
The southern states were not big fans of states rights. They only favored it in one situation: they favored the right for a state to support slavery. But they denied that states or territories had any right to oppose slavery and wanted the federal government to intervene against any state or territory that tried.
It’s true that most southerners didn’t own slaves. But most southerners weren’t asked if they wanted to secede. Secession was decided at meetings where the wealthy slave owners were the only people represented. (And they didn’t stop there. Slave owners dominated the Confederate Congress where they the Twenty Negro Law which said that anyone who owned twenty or more slaves was exempted from military service.)