[Warning: Long post. Some unsettling may occur in transport]
Dinesh D’Souza writes a column praising Abraham Lincoln's leadership and scorning his modern critics, who break down neatly into left and right. This rhetorical trick puts the sainted president squarely in the center, navigating the nation between extremes, and casts him as a dynamic moderate in trying times. Yet it's no more convincing in this case than in any other argument based on "if both sides hate you you must be doing something right" (something news media organizations pride themselves in).
D’Souza is a conservative, and it's not hard to see the "Bush-as-Lincoln" meme emerging here. Really, there are a great many parallels between the two presidents -- including the nature of the virulent critics they faced. D'Souza artfully selects and arranges Lincoln's attackers in a way that makes them sound like Nancy Pelosi and Pat Buchanan:
What unites the right-wing and left-wing attacks on Lincoln, of course, is that they deny that Lincoln respected the law and that he was concerned with the welfare of all. The right-wing school — made up largely of Southerners and some libertarians — holds that Lincoln was a self-serving tyrant who rode roughshod over civil liberties, such as the right to habeas corpus. Lincoln is also accused of greatly expanding the size of the federal government. ... In an influential essay, the late Melvin E. Bradford, an outspoken conservative, excoriated Lincoln as a moral fanatic who, determined to enforce his Manichaean vision — one that sees a cosmic struggle between good and evil — on the country as a whole, ended up corrupting American politics and thus left a “lasting and terrible impact on the nation’s destiny.”To answer this, D'Souza chooses a tactic that may seem odd at first. He goes back into history to try to pull the rug out from under the Confederacy. He talls us the only reason the South rebelled was to promote racist slavery. It's a common enough view, to be sure, but what's it doing here?
Apparently, D'Souza, like many others, finds this easier than dealing with the harder issues of the extra-legality of so much of what Lincoln did to keep the union together. D'Souza chooses to sweep all this off the table in a few sentences after he's devoted extensive text to mashing on the idea that the Southern bid for independence was ever about anything except keeping blacks in chains. And since every argument against Lincoln's wartime administration is, we are taught to believe, an argument in favor of the Confederacy, all such arguments are reduced to racism.
People who choose this tactic find it frustratingly difficult to reduce American history to such a simplistic idea as "it was all about slavery." A shelf of books has been written on the topic, many attempting to prove this point, but it's not yet settled.
Naturally, people who want to regard it as settled will cut those corners. The easy expedient is to go in search of one zinger of a passage that, taken out of context, will seem to prove the case. Those willing to be convinced will look no further and those who disagree will be required to build up the cathedral of context, a tedious process. By the time they finish, the audience will have wandered off with the zinger lodged in their heads.
So they pick through the sources. Jeff. Davis's inaugural speech? No, it makes nary a mention of slaves or slavery. Robert Toombs' report to the Georgia legislature in 1860? No, that outlines how anti-slavery agitation in the North was exploited by political powers there to disguise economic motives.
The "Cornerstone Speech" by Alexander Stephens is their weapon of choice. Stephens, a Georgian who had served in Congress, was the new vice president of the CSA, and in this speech he explained the new Confederate constitution and the prospects of the new nation, as he saw them, to an audience in Savannah in the spring of 1861. D'Souza cherry-picks the usual passages from it:Stephens said that the American Revolution had been based on a premise that was “fundamentally wrong.” That premise was, as Stephens defined it, “the assumption of equality of the races.” Stephens insisted that, instead, “our new [Confederate] government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea. Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man. Slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great and moral truth.”Again, it's hard to imagine why this is here -- it has nothing to do with Lincoln -- except as a quick and dirty tactic to debase the moral legitimacy of those who criticize Lincoln from a Southerners' perspective, by implying that they are really just defending racist slavery. D'Souza makes this more implicit by linking it to Stephens post-war writings, which downplayed the importance of slavery in the sectional conflict, and which formed much of the foundation of the first generation of defense of the Southern nation -- the so-called "Lost Cause" view of the war.
Alexander Stephens, former vice president of the Confederacy, published a two-volume history of the Civil War between 1868 and 1870 in which he hardly mentioned slavery, insisting that the war was an attempt to preserve constitutional government from the tyranny of the majority. But this is not what Stephens said in the great debates leading up to the war.[Note, please, that the Savannah speech was not a "debate." The debates were over by this time. Stephens was educating the people of his state and preparing them for a fight he had tried desperately to keep them out of. In the state legislature in July 1860, he fought hard against Georgia's call for a secession convention, then at that convention Stephens spoke out against secession so vehemently that the North circulated copies of his speech as propaganda during the Civil War. If he's already not sounding like a typical Southern fire-eater, it gets worse.]
The "Cornerstone Speech" is, in the slavery passages, a personal justification of Stephens' career, and the post-bellum history ("Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States") is the same. They are public, political rhetoric. D'Souza and others who wish to follow his lines here treat the one as an utter lie and the other as absolutely true, without showing any reason for choosing the one as true other than its convenience to them.
Both the speech and the book are delivered in language many people would and did accept as true, but to see the speech as some defining Genesis moment of the Confederacy, out of the mouth of the eternal spirit of the nation instead of one political man, is a gross absurdity.
A brief glance at Stephens' life and career shows how far this remarkable man stood from being representative of the leaders, or the common citizens, of the Confederacy. Even his position as the Confederate vice president was a matter of old-fashioned ticket-balancing, not a proof of his centrality in the Southern cause. He was, in most ways, an eccentric.
Stephens was a small, sickly, prickly, brilliant man, perhaps impotent, in a time and place where leaders were expected to be strong, handsome and virile. He stood barely 5 feet tall and never reached 100 pounds weight in his life.
From the start of his career, he identified himself with the Whig party, and their platform was his natural ideology. But this set him apart from most Southerners, who were Democrats. It gave his politics some of the oddity of a modern-day Red State Democrat. By nature and necessity he partook of the vaules of the people in his community, and he had to wrestle his broad ideology into alignment with the local realities.
Yet as far and as long as he was capable of it, he kept his political convictions. Stephens "defended slavery apologetically where it already existed, in much the same manner as [Henry] Clay" [Howe, "Political Culture of the American Whigs," p.244]. Clay, by the way, was Lincoln's ideal, too, and they shared the same view of American slavery. Stephens also vehemently opposed the war on Mexico, which most Southern slavery-advocates supported, and denounced it as illegal and unjust.
In the 1850s, as North and South grew increasingly bitter toward each other, the bridges between Stephens's ideals and the South's realities stretched and broke. The Whigs fell apart over sectional issues, and many of Stephens's party friends from the North, including Lincoln, gravitated into the new, radical, sectional Republican Party. The Southern Whigs were hopeless, paralyzed by the limp drifting quality that always seems to infect a party that has accepted its minoritarian status. Stephens refused to drift with them. He cast his lot with the Democrats.
One result of the sectional rift was that the South gradually hardened in its defense of slavery. Stephens followed it, and became, for a time, among the most strident believers in slavery as ordained by nature and a "positive good" to both races. In this he outran the bulk of Southerners. This is the face he showed in the Savannah speech. And it was the result of his need to reconcile his embrace of slavery with his essential Whig ideology.
That moral contortion required him to fit slavery into a social context based on order and philanthropy. The "cornerstone" passage is a reflection of his internal struggle to maintain consistency of social thought. He spoke extemporaneously, as the words flowed, and the tumult in the lecture hall must have been matched by inner turmoil. Here was a man who had publicly reversed most of his earlier political positions. He seems to be talking of himself, primarily, when after justifying slavery he says, "Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago."
The "cornerstone" image is hardly original to Stephens. It was a standard one in defense-of-slavery rhetoric at least from the 1830s. In 1845, for instance, James M. Hammond wrote, "I endorse without reserve the much abused sentiment of Governor M'Duffie, that 'Slavery is the corner-stone of our republican edifice.' " ["Letter to an English Abolitionist"]
And by that, of course, Hammond (and M'Duffie, and others who used the phrase) meant the American republic. They were writing and speaking in both economic and social terms; slavery was widely understood to be a necessary adjunct of a republican form of government, as it had been in Greece and Rome, because it freed a class of men from pursuit of money by labor or commerce and allowed them to devote time and energy to political life and "preserving a reasonable and well ordered government. ... Hence, Slavery is truly the 'corner-stone' and foundation of every well-designed and durable 'republican edifice.' " As wrong as that is now, Hammond at the time had the partial evidence of history on his side.
Stephens, however, gave the trope a particular twist. He took it one step further and put it into the Biblical image of "The stone which the builders refused" which "is become the head stone of the corner." [Psalms CXVII:22]
As late as the 1860 election, Stephens had backed the moderate Douglas, not the South's hard-line choice, Breckenridge. He considered secessionists "demagogues," and he defended Lincoln, with whom he had served in the House. Lincoln, he wrote, "is not a bad man. He will make as good a president as Fillmore did and better too in my opinion." Lincoln, for his part, actually considered inviting Stephens to join his cabinet.
But Stephens cast his loyalty with his section, not his principles. If he could not correct the South, he would try to guide it and, by compromising some, attempt to save the rest. He failed, and the South failed.
The Savannah speech is a sad affair, not just because of the blunt racism of that one passage -- the racism itself, it ought to be noted, would hardly have offended any white audience in 1861 America, North, South, or West, outside a few abolitionist circles. But sad because it shows a politician who has so twisted himself to try to hold the reins of a revolution that he has got tangled in them and they now rule him. He embraces what he once scorned, and he mocks positions he once held. He has thrown away his ideals, and the "cornerstone" passage, to me, reads so much more accurately as an odd intrusion of a warped and very personal ideological struggle.
It really has no place in the overall speech, which is essentially a very practical laying-out of the situation. It doesn't deserve such prominence in a treatment of the Confederate Constitution, which was pretty much a carbon copy of the U.S. Constitution, except that it stipulated that the government could not impose protective tariffs, grant subsidies, or finance internal improvements. (But then, D'Souza tells us economic points like that were just a cover for slavery promotion). On the matter of slavery, it specifically asserted the inviolability of that institution. This was more clear than the U.S. Constitution, but not at odds with it, and Lincoln and many in his camp publicly declared they were willing to amend the U.S. Constitution to make it say the same, if doing so would end the rebellion.
Other than that, you can read the two constitutions side by side for long stretches and not be sure which is which. The CSA Constitution banned slave imports from Africa, proscribed international traffic in slaves, kept the three-fifths clause, and even allowed non-slave states the option of joining the new nation.
As to the role of slavery, compare the Southern revolt of 1860 to the colonial uprising of 1776. What moved the colonists to break the ties with the "mother country?" Taxes? Tea? George William Brown, mayor of Baltimore in 1861, was a non-partisan politician and an opponent of secession (Lincoln jailed him anyhow). Yet like many people in his day he understood the move, in the light of the American Revolution, and how small points of disagreement can be the flashpoints of broader conflicts:
"The men of '76 did not fight to get rid of the petty tax of three pence a pound on tea, which was the only tax left to quarrel about. They were determined to pay no taxes, large or small, then or thereafter. Whether the tax was lawful or not was a doubtful question, about which there was a wide difference of opinion, but they did not care for that. Nothing would satisfy them but the relinquishment of any claim of right to tax the colonies, and this they could not obtain. They maintained that their rights were violated. They were, moreover, embittered by a long series of disputes with the mother country, and they wanted to be independent and to have a country of their own. They thought they were strong enough to maintain that position." [George W. Brown, "Baltimore & the Nineteenth of April, 1861," 1887]No one can deny the importance of slavery to the feud that split the United States, or that the CSA states made protection of slavery one of its central purposes. But the secession of 1860-61 and the shooting war that followed were the climax of a long interplay. Like a couple heading into divorce, the regions fought often, in the open and in secret. But they nursed grudges, and what they argued out loud was not always the real issue. During the 1840s, slavery became the symbol and character of all sectional differences. It was the emotional gasoline on the sectional fires. Its moral and social implications colored every issue in terms of right and rights. William Seward, the Republican leader, recognized the fact: "Every question, political, civil, or ecclesiastical, however foreign to the subject of slavery, brings up slavery as an incident, and the incident supplants the principal question."
So far from slavery being the cause of secession, the fact is many thinking men in the South knew that secession would be the doom of slavery. Slavery could not be economically viable or legally enforcable where freedom was just a river away. They had pushed the North so hard to enforce the Fugitive Slave Laws for just this reason. Among those thinking men was Alexander Stephens, who judged "slavery much more secure in the union than out of it."
D’Souza is a conservative, and it's not hard to see the "Bush-as-Lincoln" meme emerging here. Really, there are a great many parallels between the two presidents -- including the nature of the virulent critics they faced.
That was the position of the POTUS at the opening of the Lincoln Presidential Museum -- the challenge to freedom faced by Lincoln is part of the same challenge faced by Americans today. Bush even made a joke about the NY Times.
Apparently, D'Souza, like many others, finds this easier than dealing with the harder issues of the extra-legality of so much of what Lincoln did to keep the union together
Except the South (or at least several southern states) had seceded before Lincoln became President, so the justification for secession couldn't be in anything Lincoln did or did not do.
South Carolina seceded first and its reasons were clearly stated:
PD Shaw: South Carolina seceded first and its reasons were clearly stated:
Yes. It is a useful exercise to look up all the various Declarations of Secession and count up the number that mention slavery (either by name or by inference direct to a casual 21st century reader) vs those that do not.
far from slavery being the cause of secession
Instead the cause of the civil war was these issues, which were totally unrelated to slavery...
PD Shaw: Except the South (or at least several southern states) had seceded before Lincoln became President, so the justification for secession couldn't be in anything Lincoln did or did not do.
Alexander Stephens himself argued, before the Georgia secession congress, that Georgia would be in the wrong if they seceded merely because Lincoln (or any other individual) had been elected president:
Georgia seceded anyway, with Robert Toombs declaring that failure to secede would be submitting to "Black Republican rule".
On slavery:
Georgia's declaration: "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. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic." [The actual formal notice of secession did not include any reference to slavery, or any other grievance.]
Mississippi: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth ... These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin."
Texas: "She [Texas] was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time."
Most of the state declarations of secession just declared secession, period. They did not mention slavery or any other grievance. Several referred to Lincoln's election, though:
Alabama: "The election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin to the offices of president and vice-president of the United States of America, by a sectional party, avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions and to the peace and security of the people of the State of Alabama, preceded by many and dangerous infractions of the constitution of the United States by many of the States and people of the Northern section, is a political wrong of so insulting and manacing a character as to justify the people of the State of Alabama in the adoption of prompt and decided measures for their future peace and security ..."
Arkansas: "The sectional party now in power in Washington City, headed by Abraham Lincoln, he has, in the face of resolutions passed by this convention pledging the State of Arkansas to resist to the last extremity any attempt on the part of such power to coerce any State that had seceded from the old Union, proclaimed to the world that war should be waged against such States until they should be compelled to submit to their rule, and large forces to accomplish this have by this same power been called out, and are now being marshaled to carry out this inhuman design."
The several references to "the sectional party": this was the 1861 equivalent of calling someone an extremist.
The Lincoln-Bush parallels are strong, and so too I think the parallels between now and the Revolution.
After the French were defeated permanently in North America in the aftermath of the French and Indian War in 1763, Revolution was inevitable given the distance between what the Colonists wanted (independence, freedom to settle westwards) and what the Brits wanted (paying off the broke treasury for the costs of said War).
There is a huge disconnect between the US now, after the end of the Cold War, and the rest of the world, particularly Europe. The US wants security from terrorism and is no longer willing to subordinate national interests in the policy of maintaining anti-Soviet "unity" with Western Europe, nor is the US focused on defeating a now non-existent threat pouring through the Fulda Gap. We are now focused on the Middle East while Europe wishes again for the US to protect it from all threats (see: Bosnia).
And just as Lincoln slowly evolved from a policy of preserving slavery to preserve the Union, and in the course of War, horrific bloodshed, and terrible expenses, came to the conclusion that Slavery must be abolished everywhere and the South itself changed, so has Bush largely concluded that only a systematic change in the Middle East will give the US security.
Just as Lincoln suspended many civil liberties, and constructed a vast spy network, so has Bush acted against the latter day Copperheads, Secessionist sympathizers, and secret agents spread throughout the US, although in much kinder, gentler form.
In both cases, Lincoln and Bush's it was the dynamic of accelerating violence and costs that changed the goalposts.
The secessions began only after Lincoln won the election.
But D'Souza isn't writing about the South at all. He's professing to write about Lincoln. So dragging the South through the mud has little relevance to his point. Any more than you could justify, or criticize, anything George W. Bush did constitutionally based on the fact that Saddam was an evil man (or not).
And yes, I've read all the declarations of causes of the various states -- in full, not just in excerpts.
I've also reasd the equivalent document from 1776, the Declaration of Independence, which, after Jefferson's poli sci lesson in the preamble gets down to business and states causes. And I find there, among other things, New England's obsession with Catholic Quebec, and South Carolina's defensiveness about slavery. Does that mean the sole purpose for the existence of the United States is slavery and anti-Catholicism?
I think it's ridiculous to insist that some great movement in history was "all about" one cause and only one cause -- and to tarbrush any dissent from that view as somehow racist. That's not history; that's not even intellectually honest.
And if D'Souza or anyone else is going to put "protection of race-based slavery" at the heart of the entire movement of Southern nationalism, you're going to have to make a better case for that than just an extempore flight of rhetoric from Alex Stephens on a hot night in Savannah.
South Carolina, despite what it liked to think of itself, was not "the South," any more than Paris is France (despite what Paris likes to think of itself).
The weakness of the "it was all about slavery" argument seems most apparent to me when you consider that when the shooting began, four future CSA states, with 1.2 million slaves, remained in the Union. The state with the single largest number of slaves of any state, Virginia, was among them.
If the entire South was going to be a minority force in the government after 1860, how much moreso, and how much more vulnerable, the Upper South alone would have been. Yet it was willing to stay, till it saw the course of the Lincoln Administration with regard to force, not to slavery.
The secession of the Upper South, when it came, was hardly a bid to protect slave property. Virginia, Tennessee, even North Carolina, with a hostile anti-slavery United States on their frontier, could never hope to maintain slavery as a viable economic and social institution. Their pre-war complaints about fugitives prove they knew it. The mere presence of "free" states nearby in the 1850s exerted an economic pressure that was rapidly draining slavery out of the Border States.
National union, with slavery intact, was the only guarantee for slavery's continuance in the Upper South.
callimachus: The weakness of the "it was all about slavery" argument seems most apparent to me when you consider that when the shooting began, four future CSA states, with 1.2 million slaves, remained in the Union.
The middle states, whose economies were more complicated than cotton and slaves, found it harder to break ties with the Union in favor of an uncertain future in the CSA. West Viriginia "seceded" from Virginia because West Viriginians were not willing to break their ties with the Ohio River Valley economy.
None of that argues against the importance of slavery as an issue. You might point to Maryland, a slave state that remained in the Union. They would gladly have seceded if enormous pressure and bribery had not prevented it.
Likewise New York City, whose mayor would have been hanged if Lincoln were any kind of a tyrant.
Sure there were other issues, but it was slavery that burned hot enough to lead to bloodshed. Lincoln wrote to Alexander Stephens: "You think slavery is right and should be extended; while we think slavery is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us."
Stephens replied: "The private opinions of individuals upon the subject of African slavery, or the status of the negro with us, were not looked to in the choice of Federal officers any more than their views upon matters of religion, or any other subject over which the Government under the Constitution had no control. But now this subject, which is confessedly on all sides outside of the constitutional action of the government, so far as the States are concerned, is made the 'central idea' in the platform of principles announced by the triumphant party. The leading object seems to be simply, and wantonly, if, you please, to put the institutions of nearly half the States under the ban of public opinion and national condemnation. This, upon general principles, is quite enough of itself to arouse a spirit not only of general indignation, but of revolt on the part of the proscribed."
Yet the fact is the upper South did bolt from the union, but not over slavery. It was the actions of the administration that tipped them into secession.
Saying that slavery was the fuel on the sectional fire is one thing. But saying it was the root cause of the sectional split, and the sole reason the South became an independent nation, is another matter.
In the 1820s and '30s, no one would disagree that the tariff was the chief political issue disturbing the United States. A generation later the same conflict was playing out, with essentially the same players, but the nominal cause of it had been replaced by a new war cry.
I'm instinctively suspicious of the "it was all about slavery" argument, especially when pressed so hard as to disallow any contradiction, because in my experience it usually is made more with an eye to present social conflicts than to historical realities.
The creation of West Virginia had a lot more to do with political wire-pulling in D.C. than with any wish of the people of the counties that eventually comprised it.
callimachus: The creation of West Virginia had a lot more to do with political wire-pulling in D.C. than with any wish of the people of the counties that eventually comprised it.
The West Virginia counties (which incidentally had very few slaves) voted against the Ordinance of Secession. General Robert Garnett, who was charged with defending the region from McClellan, said that the people there "are thoroughly imbued with an ignorant and bigoted Union sentiment."
McClellan easily defeated the few troops that Garnett raised, and was declared a military genius by the newspapers. Much trouble followed from that.
But I think we're arguing past each other here, when you say I'm claiming slavery was the sole cause. There is no such thing in all of history as a sole cause, but some causes are more important than others. And the bloody incidents leading up to the war - John Brown and the Kansas-Missouri war, etc. - had more to do with slavery than anything else.
The first states seceded because of Republican opposition to slavery - not their views on tariffs or anything else. If subsequent states seceded because of Lincoln's response to this, the cause remains slavery.
In the 1820s and '30s, no one would disagree that the tariff was the chief political issue disturbing the United States.
To bring Paul Johnson into it again, he notes that it was in the 1820s that the term "The South" began to be used, and the chief distinguishing characteristic of the South was slavery. It was at this time that John Adams noted that Congress was filling up with "slavish" orators, who were openly and defiantly defending slavery instead of treating it as a shameful and impolite subject.
Against this you could cite all of the States' Rights Southerners, many of whom personally disapproved of slavery. But the States' Right that mattered, and that led to war, was the "right" to practice slavery.
South Carolina, despite what it liked to think of itself, was not "the South," any more than Paris is France
I'm almost inspired to a wholly unrelated essay. I note that the classical super-powers or empires did, in fact, have principle cities --one city in all the polity which hosted the capital, the central bank, a population twice or more that of the next-most-populated city; often hosting the university, the seat of the church, the national theater ---
Rome, Constantinople, London, Paris, Amsterdam ...
The U.S. divided not only the power of government among constitutional branches but set aside a capital (D.C.) from then-and-now centers of commerce (New York City) or academia (Boston) or media (then Franklin's Philadelphia, now Los Angeles,) or export (Charleston...) That nominal STATES worked out division of power in the Congress reflected divisions of power among the centers of civilization: cities.
It's interesting to me that newly emerging Empires like India and China follow the U.S. model -- no principle city -- rather than the classical model of Rome or Paris.
Coming back to the question of "the South" I've seen it noted that if you rank-order the percentage of slaves in a state's population in 1860 you 'coincidentally' congrue to the date-order in which states secedeed. South Carolina had the highest percent of slaves and was first to rebell. This may not be "representative" of the South, but maybe the role is one of "leadership".
D'Souza does an excellent job of pointing out the parallels between the two men and the two times.
Callimachus usefully demonstrates the obvious point that no analogy is perfect.
The troubling thing to me is that although the internet forum can instigate such discussions, the internet does not always provide the meaningful information and original text that will make such discussion enlightening. Such discussions often come dangerously close to the "angels on the pin" arguments of medieval times.
I've tried to post recently and been rejected for "objectionable content." Let's see if this one sticks.
I'll accept the "talking past each other" settlement. Of course slavery was what they talked about most in 1860 and '61. But my reading into the original sources convinces me that the Confederate States of America was about a great deal more than just slavery, and was a legitimate national movement reacting to a range of perceived provocations, some of them based in slavery, some of them masked by it, some of them not slavery-based at all.
It is curious to me that the extensive writing about the tariff in Southern complaints is dismissed as a mere mask for the "true" racist motivations of the seceders. There are reams and reams of Southern articulation of their resentment at being vampirized by Northern financial interests, yet even well-read people often are not aware of this angle. Frankly, I haven't found a good historical exploration of the role of economic policies in the Southern rebellion written in the past 100 years.
Slavery, after all, was an economic as well as a social issue.
Whenever I run up against an argument that insists one and only one motivation is the true one, and insists that any attempt to counter that argument is a mask for racism, then I believe I am in the presence of polemics, not history. Yet, as I've said, I encounter this reaction often when defending the South against the charge of being "nothing but" a slave nation.
There are people who treat history as nothing more than a crude cudgel, useful for beating up on current events issues.
On West Virginia: The whole creation of the state, by a Virginia government-in-exile, was farcical and unconstitutional
I don't say that's happened here. But my tendency to anticipate it may contribute to the talking past each other. Its eastern boundary included regions that had no sympathy with the mountain counties, but were included for strategic reasons: to dominate the Shanandoah Valley which had been used so effectively by the Confederates.
re. Paris: I sometimes try to explain the place of Paris in French history by asking people to imagine Manhattan, Hollywood, Berkeley, Boston, and Washington, D.C. were all one city, and then imagine how the rest of America would feel about it.
re. information available online. There's actually a remarkable amount of it, for Civil War historical research. The House Journals, for instance, and the Official Records. Unfortunately the first can't be block-quoted and the second is in very poor transcription.
Sorry, C. Commenting fixed now. (Our friend A.L. entered the wrong thing into MT-Blacklist, and it started blocking any comment with "bl" in it.)
And he's still a friend, Joe?
( Just kidding )
Joe K.: Sorry, C. Commenting fixed now. (Our friend A.L. entered the wrong thing into MT-Blacklist, and it started blocking any comment with "bl" in it.)
Ah, that makes me feel better-- I'd thought I'd posted something over the line as well, despite trying very hard not to.
To summarize what I'd said before, to Callimachus: It seems to me that your perception is of some people using the issue of slavery to drive the entire argument, thus cheapening the debate into simple racism or not-racism.
However, my perception tends to be the reverse; that some unscrupulous people have tended to over-accentuate the non-slavery related issues in an attempt to gloss over what very certainly was a racist streak in the politics and culture of the time. I've seen that a great many times, and, yes, my natural reaction to seeing it again is to examine it very closely.
I am certainly aware that there were issues other than slavery in and leading up to the Civil War. Economics is the oft-cited one. But even this tends to become dodgy because as you say, "Slavery, after all, was an economic as well as a social issue." My reading of history tells me that, yes, there were multiple issues leading to the Civil War, but many of them seemed to radiate outward from the central crater of slavery. Trying to disassociat slavery from the culture and politics of the time seems an insurmountable task to me. Where does the slavery issue stop and the economic issue start?
Also, while I am aware of no good single work on economics leading to the Civil War (I'd buy one if I knew of one and it looked interesting) I've found that reading the biographies of the time helps a great deal. I started with biographies of the Great Triumvirate: Webster and Clay, by Remini, and Calhoun by Coit.