"Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it."
Winston Churchill (with a nod to George Santayana)
In today's hyper partisan environment, it is time to learn how a war over one issue was a consequence of partisan fiction about a different issue. America's bloodiest conflict (1861-1865) was a consequence (unintended?) of the partisan fiction that Republicans were "John Brown fanatics". Brown had attempted to start a slave insurrection. The majority of white Southerners did not own slaves but all feared a slave insurrection as the Haitian revolt carnage was common knowledge then. Those believing the partisan fiction chose secession when Republicans won a national election in 1860. Politicians lied, people died.
To demonstrate that secessionist fears were groundless and entice the seceding states to return to the Union, the North offered this concession: March 2, 1861, Congress approved (with Republican support) and sent to the states for ratification this constitutional amendment:
"No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State."
Proposed Amendments not Ratified by the States
Lincoln addressed the partisan fiction behind secession: "Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican Administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that-- 'I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.' Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this and many similar declarations and had never recanted them."
First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln - from Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy by Yale Law School
Lincoln quoted the fugitive clause of the Constitution and explained how it provided a protection for slavery that would be lost by seceding states. Because of fugitive law, the underground railroad went all the way to Canada and the leading abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, had since 1850 advocated secession by the North. According to Jeffrey Rogers Hummel: "Letting the lower South secede in peace was a viable antislavery option. Slavery was doomed even if Lincoln had permitted the small Gulf Coast Confederacy to depart in peace. With chattels fleeing across the border and raising slavery's enforcement costs, the peculiar institutions final destruction within an independent cotton South was inevitable."
It was ludicrous for a slaveholding state to secede. Many large slave owners understood this and did not favor secession. They were a conservative lot. They had no influence over their fellow citizens who believed the partisan fiction about Republicans. The first state to secede was South Carolina, of which it was said, "Too small for a republic, too large for an asylum." Texas Governor Sam Houston, slave owner, campaigned against secession to no avail. Houston was removed from office when he refused to swear an oath to the Confederacy. Lincoln offered troops to maintain Houston in office but the offer was declined.
There was not much time to change secessionist minds. The slippery slope to war may have been reached as soon as the Confederacy's free trade policy began to undermine the Republicans' protective tariff and neither side offered to compromise on that issue.
Lincoln supported the above mentioned constitutional amendment yet warned of using force "to collect the duties and imposts."
The Boston Transcript explained on March 18, 1861: "It does not require extraordinary sagacity to perceive that trade is perhaps the controlling motive operating to prevent the return of the seceding states to the Union which they have abandoned. Alleged grievances in regard to slavery were originally the causes for the separation of the cotton states; but the mask has been thrown off and it is apparent that the people of the principal seceding states are now for commercial independence. They dream that the centres of traffic can be changed from Northern to Southern ports. The merchants of New Orleans, Charleston and Savannah are possessed with the idea that New York, Boston, and Philadelphia may be shorn, in the future, of their mercantile greatness, by a revenue system verging on free trade. If the Southern Confederation is allowed to carry out a policy by which only a nominal duty is laid upon imports, no doubt the business of the chief Northern cities will be seriously injured thereby.
"The difference is so great between the tariff of the Union and that of the Confederate States that the entire Northwest must find it to their advantage to purchase their imported goods at New Orleans rather than New York. In addition to this, the manufacturing interests of the country will suffer from the increased importation resulting from low duties."
Note, the editorial refers to the partisan fiction as "alleged grievances".
Do states have a right to secede? If not, does the national government have the authority to use force to prevent it? The Constitution is silent. During drafting of the Constitution, a clause was included authorizing the use of force against a "delinquent state". During deliberations, on May 31, 1787, that phrase was removed. The silence is deliberate, not an oversight.
Notes on the debates in the Federal Convention
It was not a contradiction for the antislavery North to support the above mentioned constitutional amendment because antislavery had more than one meaning. Abolitionists favored racial equality and were unpopular in every state. Those who preferred a population of "whites only" were also known as antislavery. One editorial blamed slavery for white unemployment and submitted: "The problem of slavery will not be solved until the children of Africa are returned to Africa." States that ended slavery allowed time for owners to "sell south". Northerners sneered that Southerners acquired traits of stupidity and laziness from proximity to the African race.
The partisan fiction explanation only applies to the first wave of secession, those in the second wave are called "Reluctant Confederates" as they rejected secession until called upon to wage war to hold unwilling states in a union supposedly based on consent of the governed. The cascade of events leading to war was a consequence of the first wave which depended on partisan fiction.
Partisan fiction made possible certain circumstances that seem contradictory. Nearly everyone clings to one of the mythologies that ignores part of the history and/or sustains the fiction that Republicans were abolitionists. Partisan fiction about slavery led to a war that was not over slavery. The war was over whatever secession denied the North that the North desired strongly enough to resort to the military option. It could have been economic, Fort Sumter, or something else, but the record is clear that secession in no way interfered with northern intentions regarding slavery.
