In arguing with “The Civil War was really about an economic power struggle” types I rarely see the “Cornerstone Speech” cited. I had an FYI post on this several years back. In these conversations citing the “Cornerstone Speech” would effectively be a slam dunk argument stopper on the silliness of this assertion.
Why is it still only rarely cited? It gets to the heart of the matter and lays it out in explicit terms. It’s a rhetorical nuke that’s minimally deployed.
The South Carolina statement of Secession is harder to dismiss. The expected it to be read by school children for generations. It’s too bad they weren’t right.
It’s the first I recall having heard of that speech. That may be one reason it’s not used. Another is that the economic factors affecting how things played out are strongly correlated with slavery that was part of the economic system. That speech is probably weakest in dealing with the economic arguments as a root cause. The wealthy, politically active landowners, had a strong economic interest in the continuation of slavery to secure the system they had been successful in.
Interestingly I just found this which takes direct issue with my rationale for using the speech
Then again, you’ll search in vain for any leading Confederate voices who publicly objected to the Cornerstone Speech.
Jefferson Davis doesn’t seem to have told Stephens, “I’m afraid you’re wrong- our nation is built on states’ rights, not slavery,” nor did Robert E. Lee’s correspondence say “That idiot Stephens totally misrepresented what we’re fighting for.”
People have been citing it for years, you just haven’t been paying attention.
That argument might hold some water if the Cornerstone Speech was the only prominent Southern source to say “It’s slavery! It’s slavery!” Southern apologists might say, “Oh well, that’s just Alexander Stephens–he was real eccentric.” (And after all, Stephens was Vice President of the C.S.A., and Americans North and South have been making jokes about the vice presidency for a long, long time.)
But of course that one speech is far from the only piece of evidence. There are the “declarations of independence” published by several of the states: The Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union; and A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union (“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery…”); and A Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union.
People have been pointing out all of these documents and many more for years. Ta-Nehisi Coates just had an article on this in The Atlantic last month, in which he takes it beyond the days of the Civil War itself and links Confederate apologism during Reconstruction and Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era to–surprise, surprise!–support of white supremacy.
These sources all cite slavery, among other things, which we all already knew. Show me the other sources, like Stephens, who say it’s ONLY slavery (or white supremacy.)
Did you read them? The SC pretty much only has variations of the one reason, slavery: the failure of the “non-slave holding states” to return fugitive slaves, their encouraging abolition societies, electing a President who is “hostile to slavery” and making free blacks into citizens.
And if that was too subtle, it frames the whole argument as between the “slave holding states” and “non-slave holding states”.
There are no other reasons given that don’t have to do with slavery.
One can argue about why exactly the North went to war, but I don’t think there’s really and way to argue the other side. The evidence is overwhelming that the Southern legislatures Succeeded to preserve slavery.
ETA: The MIssissippi one is even more blatent. The give a list of reasons, but the list is explicitly presented as different ways the North has attacked the institution of slavery. No reasons for Succession is given outside that list.
I don’t even know why people obsess over the Confederacy. Was it full of racist, white supremacists? Of course it was; it was just like the North.
http://slavenorth.com/exclusion.htm
It was the overwhelmingly important cause. If someone calls something the “cornerstone” of an institution, then, yes, there may be pediments and gables and gargoyles, but the cornerstone–slavery–underpins and supports everything else.
Yes, sometimes the secessionists would throw in other reasons–for example, my own state accused the Republican Party of being the party of “exploded political heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of waste and corruption in the administration of Government”, but they went on to say that it was “anti-slavery” that was the Republican Party’s “mission and its purpose” and that “**y anti-slavery it is made a power in the state”.
And if you actually read it through carefully, you’ll see that the Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union talks solely about slavery.
Yeah, me neither. I really wish my fellow Southerners would quit glorifying the damned Confederacy and dragging out its symbols as the symbols of the entire South, from Jamestown to the present day.
How is slavery not about economics, though? If you say “The south seceded over slavery”, you’re saying “the south seceded for economic reasons.”
Because the reason to own a slave is white supremacy, not agricultural labor.
You left out treasonous. “Treasonous racist white supremacists, just like the North.”
Except for the Northern racist white supremacists weren’t treasonous.
Because from the failure of Reconstruction (the real end of the war) until at least the 1920s, the South and its apologists got to write the story. And they did - in movies, monuments, books, klans, and more. There was no organized “Northerners” or truthers to oppose them, and by the time they were done, an entire generation of genuine sons of CW veterans had been sold a fantasy version of the war and its causes.
It’s taken us close to 100 years to undo that Soviet-grade disinformation campaign.
Because people who want to believe it was about state’s rights are going to believe it was about state’s rights no matter what you show them. You could raise Robert E. Lee from the dead, reanimate him, and have him dance a samba while singing “The Confederacy existed to keep slavery legal/or else I’m a little spayed stray dachshund-beagle” and they would say “that’s one man’s opinions”. Show them the Mississippi Declaration of Secession which was just as blunt, that was just the opinion of whoever wrote that.
Trust me, I’ve been through this many many times, they will not listen and have no problem keeping their views in face of evidence. Many of these are the children and grandchildren of people who laughed and screamed racial slurs when the water hoses were turned on black marchers and then went to church. No region holds the patent on doublespeak, but I daresay we do it exceptionally well down heah.
That the south’s economy was almost 100% slave-based is both true, and zero justification for allowing the institution to continue. They had the same 100 years to phase it out that the other states did.
I think this is where it shows what a bad American I am–I don’t care about secession. They tried it; we put a boot up their asses; problem solved. They’ve hardly given us any trouble since, like Germany after 1918.
If “us” includes black people, they’ve given us tons and tons of trouble up to (and probably beyond) the mid-20th century (along with other states to a significantly lesser degree).
Please tell me you got the joke (1918 = World War I) and you’re just pretending to have been whooshed.