Deo Vindice: Why the South Seceded

In honor of my great-great-great grandfathers, Privates John Armistead Pamplin, Stephen Touchstone, and James Rutledge, who fought for the freedom of Tennessee in the War for Southern Independence, and my grandfather, Lieutenant Col John Rutledge, Jr., who taught me what that meant

A central fable in the typical narrative of United-States history is that the “Civil War” was fought over slavery. In this storybook version of history, the righteous Northern states were morally opposed to slavery, and the racist Southern states - fearing the rising tide of progress - wickedly divided the nation to form an empire of slavery. The North, under the benevolent leadership of the messianic Abraham Lincoln (who was ultimately too good for this world and died for the nation's sins), courageously fought for the majestic virtues of preserving the union and emancipation, and in defeating the Southern rebels, ultimately freed the slaves and forged the nation anew.

First, aside from the principle that the ends do not justify the means (“freeing the slaves” does not justify the murder and plunder of war), this historical narrative is, as Mark Twain would say, a damned lie. Far from a national clash over slavery, the War for Southern Independence was fought over federal tariffs, much like the War for American Independence was fought over English tariffs. Although conventionally called a “civil war,” the War for Southern Independence was a savage war of aggression against the Southern states, which had invoked their constitutional right to secede from the Union and peacefully reconstituted themselves as the Confederate States of America, just as the Founding Fathers declared independence from the British Empire and reconstituted themselves into the United States of America. A civil war is when factions fight for control of a government, but the Southern states were fighting for freedom from a government. Yet this and many other lies about the glorious Southern cause persist to this day.

The Southern states seceded to free themselves from the unjust and unconstitutional burdens of federal taxation without representation, and the federal government invaded the South not to preserve the sanctity of the Union or free the slaves, but for money and power. The War for Southern Independence marked the last stand of freedom in the U.S., in which hundreds of thousands of Southerners rallied together in a desperate defense of their liberties from the aggression of the federal government. Sadly, tyranny and Northern industry triumphed over liberty and Southern gallantry, and thus history was recorded to discredit the cause of the conquered and exalt the conquerors and liberators. History may be written by those who have hanged heroes, but ideas are bulletproof. No matter how many hundreds of thousands of Southerners the federal government slew in its war to seize supremacy, the truth endures in the hearts and minds of Southerners. The Old South, although gone with the wind, has, in the words of Robert E. Lee, a spirit which may be destroyed, but can never be conquered.

The Great Divide

From the very beginning, the contrast between the Northern and Southern economies were stark, setting the two on divergent paths. Thanks to its arable land and warm climate, the antebellum Southern economy was agrarian, primarily engaged in the production of cash crops such as cotton, rice, and tobacco. When the tremendous agricultural productive capacity of the South exceeded what the U.S. market could bear, the South began exporting its crops abroad. Southern cotton, for instance, was sold to domestic and foreign textile mills, which processed the raw material into finished goods. Cotton alone comprised half of U.S. exports, with other Southern cash crops bringing the total to 67% of all exports. In fact, Southern cotton exports amounted to almost 90% of the world's cotton production. Up to 75% of Southern crop production was exported, the remaining quarter consumed domestically. The South's immense comparative advantage in agricultural production meant that it had a humble manufacturing base, relying on trade for many other finished goods, from clothes to farming equipment. In short, the South exported the majority of its production, and imported the majority of its consumption. The vast majority of Southerners were yeoman farmers who worked their land themselves, although the aristocratic plantation society of cavaliers and belles is more evocative of the Old South. Because of its reliance on free trade, classical liberalism flourished in the South, and its dominant political parties – first Jeffersonian Republicans, then Jacksonian Democrats – supported laissez-faire economics and states’ rights.

The North, by contrast, lacked the bountiful blessings of the South. In fact, the North did not appear to have a comparative advantage in producing anything on its own. After the War for American Independence, the North (particularly New England) was extremely overpopulated relative to the capacity of its resources. In a free market, in which the factors of production are mobile, labor and capital would have relocated to new opportunities in the South. Instead of allowing the market to reallocate resources to a higher-valued purpose, however, the incipient federal government interfered. In 1789, the first act of federal protectionism was signed into law, subsidizing Northern shipping in the fashion of Parliament prior to the American Revolution. At first, the shipping industry thrived in the North. Southern cash crops were exported abroad on Northern ships, which Southerners were legally compelled to patronize. During the War of 1812, however, the English blockade of Northern ports crushed its nascent shipping industry, forcing Northerners to shift from trade into manufacturing. After the war, the Northern states, grown accustomed to the privileges their shipping industry enjoyed, began lobbying for federal protection from competition, this time for manufacturing in addition to shipping. Because of its dependence on government, statism was strong in the North, and its dominant political parties – first Federalists, then Whigs, and finally Republicans – were all rabid partisans of mercantilism, a system of governmental protectionism for privileged industries.

As if the contrasting economic conditions between the North and South were not a great enough gulf, the two also suffered from irreconcilable cultural differences deeply rooted in their colonial heritages. The South was settled primarily by dispossessed English aristocrats and oppressed Celts, both of which journeyed to America hoping to preserve their traditional way of life - the former by recreating their landed lifestyle on plantations, the latter by seeking freedom on frontier farms. Although the English and the Celts were ancient foes in Britain, in America they were united by their love of tradition and liberty. The North, however, was not settled by those hoping to preserve tradition, but by Puritans hoping to transform America into a theocratic utopia. From these old foundations, Southern culture evolved along the lines of liberty and tradition, while Northern culture was generally collectivist and progressive. Given the economic enmity and cultural conflict between the North and South, the Union was divided before it even began.

Tariffs & the Constitution

Tariffs, taxes levied upon imports and exports, were the primary source of federal revenue throughout the 18th and 19th century. By 1860, for instance, tariffs comprised fully 95% of federal revenue. Tariffs originated innocently enough – as innocent as any expropriation of private property can be – as a simple means of collecting federal revenue. Over time, however, tariffs lost their bearings and devolved into sheer economic protectionism, disproportionately enriching the federal government and Northern industry at the expense of the South. In fact, federal protection of Northern industries was so pervasive that by 1860, the South was paying an estimated 80% of federal tariffs.

Beginning in the 1820s, Southern legislators (primarily Democrats) in Congress had vehemently opposed federal tariffs for a host of reasons, chief of which were that they reduced income and employment in Southern agriculture and forcibly redistributed Southern wealth to a Northern-federal nexus of corruption. The basic effect of tariffs appears straightforward – to lower imports by making them more expensive – but in economics, the incidence of a tax (meaning who is ultimately affected) is always more than meets the eye. In truth, the incidence of tariffs fall not only upon faceless importers from abroad, but also U.S. exporters and U.S. consumers. Tariffs are just as much of a tax on exports and consumption as they are on imports. This peculiar economic incidence of tariffs formed the core of the South's grievances against the North and the federal government.

Protectionist tariffs, aside from exploitative, are also unconstitutional. When the people of the states ratified the Constitution, they delegated particular powers to the federal government and reserved the rest to themselves. As the Tenth Amendment states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." Under the Constitution, the sovereign people of the states formed a voluntary confederation of peace, commerce, and friendship, but remained free to govern themselves. The U.S., as founded, was a bottom-up republic, in which all political power originated in people of the states. As an agent of the people of the states, the federal government (which the people of the states created to serve certain limited purposes), could not legally exceed its enumerated powers in the Constitution. If the federal government did transgress its constitutional limits, the people of the states – the original parties to the constitutional compact – could invoke their sovereignty and nullify its actions or even secede from the Union. Since the people of the states preceded the federal government, federal authority could never supersede the sovereignty of the states. The Founding Fathers viewed the Union as a means to an end – i.e. a means to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" – not as an end in itself. Patrick Henry, speaking at Virginia's Ratifying Convention in 1788, declared, "The first thing I have at heart is American liberty; the second thing is American union." Thomas Jefferson, writing in defense of his and James Madison's Virginia & Kentucky Resolutions, concurred with Henry, declaring that he and his countrymen should "sever ourselves from that union we so much value, rather than give up the rights of self-government which we have reserved, and in which alone we see liberty, safety, and happiness."

Secession is not a positive right which the Constitution grants to the people of the states, but a natural right of any freeborn people which the Constitution protects. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, the government is established in order to protect the natural rights of the people - in particular, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." If the government ever violates the rights of the people, then it no longer serves the purpose for which it was founded, and the people may not only rightfully resist its depredations, but also "alter or abolish" the government altogether. Indeed, since a government which usurps the rights of its people has betrayed its trust, the people themselves must do their duty to defend freedom from tyranny. Secession, a fundamentally peaceful invocation of independence from a political union, is an eminently legitimate form of alteration or abolition, for if government truly derives its authority from the "consent of the governed," then logically the right of secession must exist as the last resort for those whom no longer consent to the government's authority. If the right of secession is denied, then government does not derive its authority from the consent of the governed, but rather force of arms. Even if force of arms prevail over the consent of the governed, however, then the people still possess moral - if not legal - recourse to secession as a defense of their natural rights from encroachment.

Southerners argued that since under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, the people of the states only delegated the power to levy taxes for revenue to the federal government ("to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare"), not for the protection of domestic industries, federal protectionist tariffs were unconstitutional. Tariffs intended to collect revenue from trade are fundamentally different from protectionist tariffs, which aim first and foremost to restrict trade, and thus reduce revenue. Furthermore, the Constitution requires that "all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States," yet Southern states were paying the lion's share of taxes and receiving table scraps in return. Southerners believed that the Union, originally founded as a compact among equals, had become an empire, in which - to use Calhoun's formulation - Southerners toiled as the "tax-payers" while Northerners enjoyed life as "tax-consumers," enriching themselves upon confiscated wealth. To the South, tariffs amounted to "taxation without representation," the very issue which inspired the American Colonies to declare independence from the British Empire.

Economic Incidence of Tariffs

Tariffs adversely affect exporters and consumers in five ways. First, since a tariff increases the price of imports, U.S. demand for imports naturally falls. If the tariff is high enough, U.S. consumers begin substituting more expensive U.S. goods for imports. Because of this fall in demand for imports, fewer transactions are occurring in foreign currency, yielding a decrease in demand for foreign currency as well. In the complicated world of foreign exchange, this amounts to a depreciation (a decline in value) of the foreign currency, along with a relative appreciation (a rise in value) of the U.S. currency. Exporters are penalized as a result of this distortion of the foreign-exchange market. When exporters convert their foreign-currency holdings into U.S. currency, the artificial depreciation of the foreign currency means that every unit of foreign currency exchanges for fewer units of U.S. currency. For example, if a Southern cotton farmer living under a federal tariff exports his cotton to England, he will find that the conversion of pounds to dollars is not equivalent: the dollar-value of his income is lower than the pound-value of his income.

Second, tariffs decrease foreign demand for exports in general, further harming U.S. exporters. Since a tariff raises the price of imports, U.S. demand for imports naturally falls. The reduction in U.S. demand deprives foreign producers of a market in which to sell their goods, and as their income falls, so does their demand for all goods/services, including imports of Southern cash crops. Income and employment may rise in the U.S. industries which the tariffs protect, but at the expense of the declining export industries. For example, if federal tariffs on foreign manufactures have their intended effect of reducing U.S. consumption of foreign manufactures, foreigners will now earn a lower income and therefore have a lower demand for all goods/services – including Southern exports – than they would have otherwise. Northern manufacturers will prosper from their coercive monopolization of the U.S. market, but trade will wither.

Third, tariffs impose government-protected monopolies on U.S. consumers. All consumers are forced to pay higher prices for products than they otherwise would, lowering their money's purchasing power and their overall standard of living. Tariffs create a lose-lose choice between doing business with overpriced government-protected monopolies or overtaxed foreign importers. One option enriches parasitic industries, the other enriches the parasitic government. Either way, consumers lose, forced to pay higher taxes or higher prices. Unlike a free market, in which firms compete on price for consumers, under a protectionist tariff one portion of the population holds another hostage in an indirect expropriation of their property. Profits in these government-protected industries are unnaturally high, which diverts the factors of production from beneficial enterprises to subsidized wastes of resources, thus compounding the economic damage. Especially harmed by government-protected monopolies are exporters, who, already suffering from the tariff's adverse effect on trade, must transact business in a protectionist market. Exporters, in other words, catch it coming and going.

Fourth, tariffs often provoke retaliatory measures from foreign governments. Angered over U.S. restrictions of trade, foreign governments compound the problem by raising tariffs of their own, harming exporters on both sides. The effect is not certain, but it is probable.

Fifth, tariffs disrupt the medium of exchange used in foreign trade. If the parties are exchanging goods directly (i.e. bartering) rather than indirectly (i.e. money for goods), then if one of goods in the exchange is taxed, the parties may be compelled to avoid the tax by shifting into less optimal forms of money. For example, in the 18th century, Parliament prohibited the minting of money in the American Colonies. Despite the prevalence of fiat money (artificial money which exists at government command), historically, money evolved naturally from goods with intrinsic value which everyone demanded in expectation of bartering them for other goods/services. To adapt to Parliament's ban on minting money, the American colonies substituted other commodities for money, such as rice in the Carolinas and tobacco around the Chesapeake. Southern exporters continued this practice into the 19th century, exchanging cash crops for foreign goods. Unfortunately, tariffs penalized this efficient medium of exchange, forcing Southerners to trade cash crops for currency, which they valued less and could not convert equivalently.

Tariffs are not only a tax on imports, but also a tax on exports and consumption, lowering overall trade and redistributing wealth from the productive to the parasitic. Tariffs, like any tax, are inherently oppressive, but are especially insidious because many not directly targeted still fall under their yoke. Even when tariffs are not intended to plunder one section of the country for the benefit of another, good intentions cannot overcome their fundamentally exploitative nature. Last but not least, like any tax, tariffs are a grievous violation of property rights, systematized plunder conducted on a grand scale. Since property rights are derived from the axiomatic truth of self-ownership (for if an individual truly owns himself, then he logically owns his body, the labor of his body, and the fruits of his labor), taxation in general and tariffs in particular are ultimately a violation of self-ownership, and thus a form of slavery. Federal protective tariffs, therefore, impoverished and enslaved the South for the enrichment of the North, thus sowing the seeds of the Union's destruction.

The Tariff of 1824

In 1816, after the War of 1812, the federal government enacted a protectionist tariff to compensate the North, particularly New England (for the damage the British Empire's blockade did to its economy), as well as defray the debt incurred in the previous war. Despite the fact that subsidizing industries which cannot compete independently causes more problems than it solves, Southerners - to their eternal regret - generously consented to the protectionist tariff, unaware that they had opened a Pandora's box of sectional strife.

In 1824, however, the federal government enacted another protectionist tariff into law, this time against the will of Southerners. Henry Clay, leader of the Whig Party, sponsored the tariff, which was an integral part of his “American System.” The American System was the party platform of the Whigs, and proposed a centralized regime of protectionist tariffs, internal improvements, and central banking - or, in modern parlance, high taxes, corporate welfare, and a Federal Reserve. First proposed by Alexander Hamilton and the Federalist Party in the 18th century (primarily in a series of reports Hamilton issued as George Washington's Treasury Secretary), the American System sought to reestablish the British Empire's empire of mercantilism in the U.S., except with Northerners instead of Englishmen at the helm. Later, in the 1850s, the ascendant Republican Party salvaged the American System from the wreckage of the then-defunct Whigs. Murray Rothbard, a distinguished 20th-century Austrian economist, described mercantilism as, “A system of statism which employed economic fallacy to build up a structure of imperial state power, as well as special subsidy and monopolistic privilege to individuals or groups favored by the state.”

Clay's tariff raised average rates from 25% to 35%. Southerners understood that the tariff would lower their standard of living for the benefit of the federal government and Northern industry, and were united in their opposition to the sacrifice of their property. Even some New-England farmers who were independent from the Northern industrial elite joined the South against the tariff. Unfortunately, Clay's tariff became law, setting the stage for a conflict that would eventually lead to Southern secession.

The Tariff of Abominations, 1828-1832

In 1828, the federal government imposed another crippling protectionist tariff upon the Southern economy. Labeled “the Tariff of Abominations,” the law spiked the rate of federal tariffs on imports from an average of 15% to 40%. Again, Clay led the charge for the tariff as part of his lifelong campaign to loot the South for all it was worth. As expected, the Tariff of Abominations was infamous throughout the South. Higher tariffs meant Southerners would be forced to purchase overpriced or overtaxed goods (their wealth shifted from the South to the federal government or Northern industry), convert foreign currency into domestic currency at a distorted exchange rate (yielding an artificially lower income in dollar terms), and bear the brunt of the overall decline in trade (resulting in lower income and employment in Southern agriculture). Tariffs at the abominable rates of 1828 would severely depress Southerners' standard of living and further enslave them to the North.

 

In 1828, John C. Calhoun, a former U.S. Senator from South Carolina, current Vice President under John Quincy Adams, and preeminent champion of states' rights, authored the “South Carolina Exposition and Protest,” challenging the Tariff of Abominations on economic and constitutional grounds. Calhoun argued that federal protective tariffs were a form of legalized plunder against the South. Calhoun concluded by threatening that if the tariff were not repealed, South Carolina would invoke its sovereign rights of nullification or even secession.

Calhoun began his essay with the South's Jeffersonian objections to the constitutionality federal protective tariffs:

“The general government is one of specific powers, and it can rightfully exercise only the powers expressly granted, and those that may be necessary and proper to carry them into effect, all others being reserved expressly to the states or the people. It results, necessarily, that those who claim to exercise power under the Constitution, are bound to show that it is expressly granted, or that it is necessary and proper as a means of the granted powers. The advocates of the tariff have offered no such proof. It is true that the third section of the first article of the Constitution authorizes Congress to lay and collect an impost duty, but it is granted as a tax power for the sole purpose of revenue, a power in its nature essentially different from that of imposing protective or prohibitory duties. Their objects are incompatible.”

After establishing the unconstitutionality of federal protective tariffs, Calhoun delved into economics:

“So partial are the effects of this system [federal tariffs], that its burdens are exclusively on one side and its benefits on the other. It imposes on the agricultural interest of the South...the burden not only of sustaining the system itself, but also that of the government.”

Calhoun's basic point was that the South disproportionately suffered beneath the burden of federal protectionist tariffs:

“We are the serfs of the system, out of whose labor is raised, not only the money paid into the treasury, but also the funds out of which are drawn the rich rewards of the manufacturer and his associates in interest. Their encouragement is our discouragement. The duty on imports, which is mainly paid out of our labor, gives them the means of selling to us at a higher price; while we cannot, to compensate the loss, dispose of our products at the least advance. It is then, indeed, not a subject of wonder, when understood, that our section of the country, though helped by a kind Providence with a genial sun and prolific soil, from which spring the richest products, should languish in poverty and sink into decay, while the rest of the Union, though less fortunate in natural advantages, are flourishing in unexampled prosperity.”

Calhoun claimed that federal protectionist tariffs created government-protected monopolies that exploited the domestic market and restricted foreign trade:

“Their object in the tariff is to keep down foreign competition, in order to obtain a monopoly of the domestic market. The effect on us is to compel us to purchase at a higher price, both what we obtain from them and from others, without receiving a correspondent increase in the price of what we sell [...] The case, then, fairly stated between us and the manufacturing states is, that the tariff gives them a protection against foreign competition in our own market, by diminishing, in the same proportion, our capacity to compete with our rivals, in the general market of the world. They who say they cannot compete with foreigners at their own doors, without an advantage of 45 percent, expect us to meet them abroad under disadvantage equal to their encouragement.”

Calhoun's essay reflected the general Southern position towards not just federal protectionist tariffs, but federalism and states' rights in general. Distributed among the South-Carolina state legislature, Calhoun's essay generated fiery debate on the federal tariff not just in South Carolina, but across North and South. Northerners claimed that they had the right to subjugate the Southern people against their will, so long as it was for the greater good of the Union – which conveniently coincided with their own economic self-interests. Southerners countered that the Union was merely a means to an end, and that the real greater good was liberty. Southerners hoped that Andrew Jackson, a Democrat from Tennessee elected president in 1828 with Calhoun as his vice president, would repeal or at least significantly reduce the federal tariff rates. Jackson's measures did not satisfy South Carolina, which began marshaling support for nullification soon after Jackson took office. Calhoun delivered a speech at Fort Hill reiterating the tenets of his Exposition and Protest:

“Formerly, the system was resisted mainly as inexpedient; but now, as unconstitutional, unequal, unjust, and oppressive. Then, relief was sought exclusively from the general government; but now, many, driven to despair, are raising their eyes to the reserved sovereignty of the states as the only refuge [...] The question is, in reality, one between the exporting and non-exporting interests of the country. Were there no exports, there would be no tariff. It would be perfectly useless. On the contrary, so long as there are states which raise the great agricultural staples, with the view of obtaining their supplies, and which must depend on the general market of the world for their sales, the conflict must remain, if the system should continue, and the disease become more and more inveterate. Their interest, and that of those who, by high duties, would confine the purchase of their supplies to the home market, must, from the nature of things, in reference to the tariff, be in conflict.”

Shortly thereafter, Calhoun resigned the vice presidency, believing that he would be freer to defend South Carolina's rights as a state senator rather than as vice president.

In 1832, South Carolina, furious with the North's resolve to commit legalized plunder of the South, nullified the Tariff of Abominations, declaring that since it was both unconstitutional and unjust, the state was obligated to protect its people from the unlawful aggression of the federal government. The federal government, in levying protectionist tariffs, was wielding powers to which the people of the states had never consented, and therefore, its actions were void and without force. After all, the people of the states formed the federal government to peacefully unite all the states into a republic, not an empire in which one section exploited, expropriated and enslaved another for its own enrichment.

At a state convention, South Carolina issued its “Ordinance of Nullification,” which explained its reasons for nullifying the Tariff of Abominations:

“Whereas the Congress of the United States by various acts, purporting to be acts laying duties and imposts on foreign imports, but in reality intended for the protection of domestic manufactures and the giving of bounties to classes and individuals engaged in particular employments, at the expense and to the injury and oppression of other classes and individuals...hath exceeded its just powers under the constitution, which confers on it no authority to afford such protection, and hath violated the true meaning and intent of the Constitution, which provides for equality in imposing the burdens of taxation upon the several states and portions of the confederacy: And whereas the said Congress, exceeding its just power to impose taxes and collect revenue for the purpose of effecting and accomplishing the specific objects and purposes which the constitution of the United States authorizes it to effect and accomplish, hath raised and collected unnecessary revenue for objects unauthorized by the Constitution.

“We, therefore, the people of the State of South Carolina, in convention assembled, do declare and ordain and it is hereby declared and ordained, that the several acts and parts of acts of the Congress of the United States, purporting to be laws for the imposing of duties and imposts on the importation of foreign commodities...are unauthorized by the constitution of the United States, and violate the true meaning and intent thereof and are null, void, and no law, nor binding upon this state.”

Jackson, although a native Southerner and old-fashioned Democrat ardently against central banking and internal improvements, failed to understand the evils of federal protectionist tariffs. Jackson took a strong stance against South Carolina in particular and states' rights in general. When South Carolina nullified the Tariff of Abominations, Jackson requested a bill from Congress which would authorize the use of military force against South Carolinians in the enforcement of federal taxation – a measure the Founding Fathers found inconceivable. In 1833, Congress obliged and passed the Force Bill, but passed the Compromise Tariff concurrently. The Compromise Tariff stipulated that all federal tariff rates would be reduced by 10% every two years. South Carolina accepted the compromise, repealed its nullification ordinance, but nullified the Force Bill to show that it did not surrender its rights and still meant business. The compromise, however, resolved none of the underlying issues, such as the Northern exploitation, expropriation, and enslavement of the South. Robert Barnwell Rhett, one of the leading voices in South Carolina for states' rights, warned that the South's fight for freedom was far from over:

“Every stride of this government, over your rights, brings it nearer and nearer to your peculiar policy...The whole world are in arms against your institutions...Let gentlemen not be deceived. It is not the tariff, not internal improvement, nor yet the Force Bill, which constitutes the great evil against which we are contending...These are but the forms in which the despotic nature of the government is evinced – but it is the despotism which constitutes the evil: and until this government is made a limited government...there is no liberty – no security for the South.”

The Morrill Tariff of 1860

Prior to the presidential election of 1860, the Compromise Tariff of 1833 had established an unsteady peace between North and South. Federal taxation was still adverse to Southern economic interests, but average tariff rates were now as low as they were anywhere else in the world. In fact, tariffs had been reduced below the original compromise rates, once in 1842 and again in 1857. For a time, the debate shifted from federal protectionist tariffs to the economic ramifications of the expansion of slavery in the territories. Southern resentment towards the North for enriching itself at the expense of the South still simmered beneath the surface, however. A long cold war between the North and South preceded the War of Southern Independence.

In 1860, the Republican Party held its primary convention in Chicago. The Republican party platform called, first and foremost, for the restoration of a high federal protectionist tariff. When the issue of tariffs arose before the Republican delegates for approval, an observer described a tremendous “hoopla and howling,” with canes and hats tossed gleefully into the air. Lincoln, an one-term U.S. Congressman from Illinois and former corporate attorney, received the Republican presidential nomination, catapulted from obscurity to celebrity practically overnight. Republican insiders had anointed Lincoln as an ideal presidential candidate because of his lifelong devotion to protectionist tariffs, which were particularly important to the swing states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. A prominent Illinois newspaper, the Chicago Press and Tribune, editorialized in 1859 that Lincoln “was an old Clay Whig, is right on the tariff...is there any man who could suit Pennsylvania better?” At the same time, Lincoln wrote to an in-law curious about his opinion on tariffs, “My dear sir: Your brother...showed me a letter of yours, in which you...inquire for my tariff view. I was an old Henry Clay-Tariff Whig. In old times I made more speeches on that subject than any other. I have not since changed my views.” Indeed, Lincoln, while running for the Illinois legislature in 1832 described his stalwartly held views:

“Short and sweet, like the old woman's dance. I am in favor of a national bank...in favor of the internal-improvements system, and a high protective tariff.”

That is, a Federal Reserve System, corporate welfare, and, of course, the North's expanded exploitation, expropriation, and enslavement of the South. In short, Lincoln adhered to the American System, the regime of mercantilism which Federalists, Whigs, and now Republicans had been relentlessly striving to impose on the U.S. since its independence was won.

John Sherman, U.S. Senator from Ohio, prominent Republican, and brother of the infamous Yankee war criminal William T. Sherman, said that “those who elected Mr. Lincoln…expect him…to secure free labor its just right to the Territories of the United States; to protect…by wise revenue laws, the labor of our people; to secure the public lands to actual settlers…; to develop the internal resources of the country by opening new means of communication between the Atlantic and Pacific.” Austrian economist and historian Thomas DiLorenzo translates these 19th-century political idioms to mean the exclusion of slaves from the Territories to protect white labor from black competition, a high federal protectionist tariff to grant monopoly privileges to Northern industry, a homesteading law which would allow speculators to loot the public domain, and the subsidization of a transcontinental railroad for the enrichment of politically connected Republican insiders. Sadly, Lincoln accomplished all of that and more.

After receiving the Republican nomination, Lincoln returned home to Illinois, attending a Republican rally that featured an immense sign reading, “Protection for Home Industry.” Pennsylvania steel lobbyist Henry Carey, so confident that Lincoln owed his candidacy to protectionists, boasted that without a higher federal protective tariff, “Mr. Lincoln's administration will be dead before the day of inauguration.” Although the ensuing four-way presidential campaign is popularly portrayed as a dramatic debate over slavery, as far as Southerners were concerned, the slavery question was moot. The Republicans’ general policy of protectionism and Lincoln's particular zeal for protectionist tariffs were far more troubling to Southerners than Lincoln's opinion of slavery.

As the presidential campaign raged, the specter of protectionism began looming in the hellish halls of Capitol Hill. In 1859, Vermont Congressman Justin T. Morrill, in consultation with Carey (Lincoln's steel lobbyist), drafted a tariff bill which reversed the tax reductions of 1833, 1842, 1857, and more. In spring of 1860, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives summarily passed the Morrill Tariff along sectional lines – the North in favor and the South in opposition. The Morrill Tariff then proceeded to the Democrat-controlled Senate, which initially held the line against the bill. In the meantime, Republicans like Morrill went campaigning for Lincoln in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, touting the Morrill Tariff as proof of their commitment to reinstating a federal policy of protectionism. Lincoln himself campaigned for the Morrill Tariff, and after winning the presidency, promised to make raising tariffs a priority if the Morrill Tariff failed in the Senate. When Lincoln won the presidential election, however, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas promptly seceded from the U.S., withdrawing their senators (including future Confederate president Jefferson Davis) and forfeiting control of the Senate to the Republicans. The Senate now in the rapacious clutches of protectionists, the Morrill Tariff passed in the winter of 1861, and was signed into law two days before Lincoln's inauguration.

If the Tariff of 1828 was an abomination, then the Morrill Tariff was the spawn of Satan. Tariff rates were more than doubled, surging to a punitive average of 37% from 15%. The rates were clearly prohibitive, not intended for the collection of federal revenue, but for the bestowal of privileged position to Northern industry. During the war, when Southern representatives were gone and Northerners had free rein over the federal government, the rates were raised even higher, to an average of 47% with many in excess of 50%. The Morrill Tariff would, as economics dictates, hold Southerners hostage in the lose-lose choice between paying for overpriced Northern manufactures or overtaxed imports, force Southern exporters to convert their foreign currency holdings to dollars at a distorted exchange rate, disrupt the flow of trade between the South and the rest of the world, and lead to an enormous fall in income, employment, and the standard of living in the South. In effect, the Morrill Tariff would forcibly redistribute vast amounts of Southern wealth to the federal treasury and Northern industry on a historically unprecedented scale.

Although seven Southern states - the “Deep South” or “Gulf States” - seceded before the Morrill Tariff was signed into law or Lincoln was inaugurated, their decisions were not impetuous or illogical. Southerners were well-aware of the official Republican position in favor of protectionist tariffs, Lincoln's lifeling advocacy of protectionist tariffs, and the pending protectionist legislation in the Senate. When Lincoln was elected president, the people of the Deep South reasoned that the prospects for a peaceful and prosperous union were grim, and that a massive resurgence of the Northern exploitation, expropriation, and enslavement of the South - which they had borne bitterly for decades - was inevitable. Indeed, the writing was on the wall, and the Deep-South states decided that the best way to defend their rights was to follow Jefferson’s advice in the Declaration of Independence and form a new union rather than fight a losing battle in the old. Given the years of indignity the South had suffered in the Union, secession was not only the Southern states' sovereign right, but also its patriotic duty. Indeed, Southerners rightly saw themselves as following in the footsteps of their revolutionary forefathers, for they too had seceded from an empire over oppressive taxation.

After Lincoln's election, Southern states called conventions to determine whether to declare independence from the Union. At these secession conventions, federal protectionism in general and the Morrill Tariff in particular were a popular topic of conversation. For example, in November of 1860, U.S. Senator of Georgia Robert Toombs spoke against the “infamous Morrill bill” before the state legislature. “The instant the government was organized,” Toombs thundered in his opening salvo, “at the very first Congress, the Northern states evinced a general desire and purpose to use it for their own benefit, and to pervert its powers for sectional advantage, and they have steadily pursued that policy to this day.” And Toombs was just getting started.

After detailing the vast history of the myriad protections which the federal government had bestowed upon Northern interests – all of which came at the expense of the South – Toombs remarked, “No wonder they cry aloud for the glorious Union...by it they got their wealth.” Toombs perceived that in any union between the productive and the parasitic (the South and the North, respectively), freedom for the productive will be treason to the parasitic. Toombs condemned the confiscatory Morrill Tariff and the Republican coalition of protectionists and abolitionists:

“…and at the last session of Congress they brought in and passed through the House the most atrocious tariff bill that ever was enacted, raising the present duties from twenty to two hundred and fifty per cent above the existing rates of duty. That bill now lies on the table of the Senate. It was a master stroke of abolition policy; it united cupidity to fanaticism, and thereby made a combination which has swept the country. There were thousands of protectionists in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and in New England, who were not abolitionists. There were thousands of abolitionists who were free traders. The mongers brought them together upon a mutual surrender of their principles. The free-trade abolitionists became protectionists; the non-abolition protectionists became abolitionists. The result of this coalition was the infamous Morrill bill - the robber and the incendiary struck hands, and united in joint raid against the South.”

Toombs opened and closed his speech with an impassioned call for Georgia to secede:

“We have not sought this conflict; we have sought too long to avoid it; our forbearance has been construed into weakness, our magnanimity into fear, until the vindication of our manhood, as well as the defense of our rights, is required at our hands. The door of conciliation and compromise is finally closed by our adversaries, and it remains only to us to meet the conflict with the dignity and firmness of men worthy of freedom. We need no declaration of independence. Above eighty-four years ago our fathers won that by the sword from Great Britain.

[...]  

“Withdraw yourselves from such a confederacy; it is your right to do so - your duty to do so. I know not why the abolitionists should object to it, unless they want to torture and plunder you. If they resist this great sovereign right, make another war of independence, for that then will be the question; fight its battles over again - reconquer liberty and independence.” 

When Georgia seceded from the U.S., it reiterated Toombs' case against federal protectionism in its Secession Ordinance:

“The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the federal government; that of the South not at all.”

[...]

“In the first years of the Republic the navigating, commercial, and manufacturing interests of the North began to seek profit and aggrandizement at the expense of the agricultural interests. The navigating interests begged for protection against foreign shipbuilders and against competition in the coasting trade. Congress granted both requests, and by prohibitory acts gave an absolute monopoly of this business to each of their interests, which they enjoy without diminution to this day. Not content with these great and unjust advantages, they have sought to throw the legitimate burden of their business as much as possible upon the public; they have succeeded in throwing the cost of light-houses, buoys, and the maintenance of their seamen upon the Treasury...

“The manufacturing interests entered into the same struggle early, and has clamored steadily for government bounties and special favors. This interest was confined mainly to the Eastern and Middle non-slave-holding states. Wielding these great states it held great power and influence, and its demands were in full proportion to its power. The manufacturers and miners...pleaded in their favor the infancy of their business in this country, the scarcity of labor and capital, the hostile legislation of other countries toward them, the great necessity of their fabrics in the time of war, and the necessity of high duties to pay the debt incurred in our war for independence. These reasons prevailed, and they received for many years enormous bounties by the general acquiescence of the whole country.”

Robert Rhett, the old colleague of Calhoun's and fellow veteran of the Nullification Crisis, also criticized the Morrill Tariff before the South-Carolina legislature. Rhett also authored Address of South Carolina to Slaveholding States, a detailed assault on federal protective tariffs which accompanied South Carolina's Secession Ordinance:

“The Southern states now stand in the same relation towards the Northern states, in the vital matter of taxation, that our ancestors stood towards the people of Great Britain. They are in a minority in Congress. Their representation in Congress is useless to protect them against unjust taxation; and they are taxed by the people of the North for their benefit, exactly as the people of Great Britain taxed our ancestors in the British parliament for their benefit. For the last forty years, the taxes laid by the Congress of the United States have been laid with a view of subserving the interests of the North. The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports, not for revenue, but for an object inconsistent with revenue - to promote, by prohibitions, Northern interests in the productions of their mines and manufactures.”

Rhett criticized how the South paid the lion's share of federal taxes yet received nothing but scorn and scraps from the federal government and the North:

“The people of the Southern states are not only taxed for the benefit of the Northern states, but after the taxes are collected three-fourths of them are expended at the North. This cause, with others connected with the operation of the general government, has provincialized the cities of the South. Their growth is paralyzed, while they are the mere suburbs of Northern cities. The bases of the foreign commerce of the United States are the agricultural productions of the South; yet Southern cities do not carry it on.”

John H. Reagan, a U.S. Congressman from Texas, forcefully summarized the Southern position that federal protectionism amounted to a form of tribute from the North to the South in a speech before the House of Representatives shortly before Texas seceded and the Morrill Tariff passed the Senate:

“You are not content with the vast millions of tribute we pay you annually under the operation of our revenue laws, our navigation laws, your fishing bounties, and by making your people our manufacturers, our merchants, our shippers. You are not satisfied with the vast tribute we pay you to build up your great cities, your railroads, your canals. You are not satisfied with the millions of tribute we have been paying you on account of the balance of exchange which you hold against us. You are not satisfied that we of the South are almost reduced to the condition of overseers of Northern capitalists. You are not satisfied with all this; but you must wage a relentless crusade against our rights and institutions.

 [...]  

“We do not intend that you shall reduce us to such a condition. But I can tell you what your folly and injustice will compel us to do. It will compel us to be free from your domination, and more self-reliant than we have been. It will compel us to assert and maintain our separate independence. It will compel us to manufacture for ourselves, to build up our own commerce, our own great cities, our own railroads and canals; and to use the tribute money we now pay you for these things for the support of a government which will be friendly to all our interests, hostile to none of them.”

Jefferson Davis, former U.S. Senator from Mississippi and newly elected president of the Confederacy described how the divergent economic conditions of the North and South laid the road to Southern serfdom in an address to the Confederate Congress:

“The people of the Southern states, whose almost exclusive occupation was agriculture, early perceived a tendency in the Northern states to render the common government subservient to their own purposes by imposing burdens on commerce as a protection to their manufacturing and shipping interests. Long and angry controversies grew out of these attempts, often successful, to benefit one section of the country at the expense of the other. 

[...] 

“And the danger of disruption arising from this cause was enhanced by the fact that the Northern population was increasing, by immigration and other causes, in a greater ratio than the population of the South. By degrees, as the Northern states gained preponderance in the national Congress, self-interest taught their people to yield ready assent to any plausible advocacy of their right as a majority to govern the minority without control.”

Davis expounded upon the economic enmity between the North and South in his postbellum manifesto, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. After describing the North's overarching ambition to “destroy the original equilibrium between the two sections,” Davis declared that federal protectionist tariffs forced the artificially high prices of Northern manufactures on Southerners, impeded Southern trade of its cash crops, and saddled the South with the burden of federal taxation while the bulk of the revenue was redistributed to the North, and thus constituted an unconstitutional violation of the Southern people's natural rights:

“Nor was this the only injury to which the South was subjected. Under the power of Congress to levy duties on imports, tariff laws were enacted, not merely 'to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States,' as authorized by the Constitution, but, positively and primarily, for the protection against foreign competition of domestic manufactures. The effect of this was to impose the main burden of taxation upon the Southern people, who were consumers and not manufacturers, not only by the enhanced price of imports, but indirectly by the consequent depreciation in the value of exports, which were chiefly the products of Southern states. The imposition of this grievance was unaccompanied by the consolation of knowing that the tax thus borne was to be paid into the public treasury, for the increase of price accrued mainly to the benefit of the manufacturer. Nor was this all: a reference to the annual appropriations will show that the disbursements made were as unequal as the burdens borne - the inequality in both operating in the same direction.”

Later, at the start of a lengthy section on the evolution of the federal protectionist tariff, Davis referred to “the question of the tariff” as “the most prolific source of sectional strife and alienation” between the North and South.

Southern outrage against protectionist tariffs also found voice in the press. In January of 1860, before the Morrill Tariff passed Congress, the Vicksburg Daily editorialized, “The North has been aggrandized, in a most astonishing degree, at the expense of the South...taxing us at every step, and depleting us as extensively as possible without actually destroying us.” Days before the fateful election of 1860, the Charleston Mercury (a newspaper owned by Rhett), explained the “real causes” of secession, clarifying that, “The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government from a confederated republic, to a national sectional despotism.”

Even foreign observers saw the Morrill Tariff as the chief impetus of Southern secession. James Spencer, an English cotton broker writing in the Northern British Review, ruminated on the Morrill Tariff's decisive role in driving the South to disunion:

“[The] tariff question, again, enters largely - more largely than is commonly supposed - into the irritated and aggrieved feelings of the Southerners. And it cannot be denied that in this matter they have both a serious injury and an unconstitutional injustice to resent...All Northern products are now protected; and the Morrill Tariff is a very masterpiece of folly and injustice...No wonder then that the citizens of the seceding states should feel for half a century they have sacrificed to enhance the powers and profits of the North; and should conclude, after much futile remonstrance, that only in secession could they hope to find redress.”

Charles Dickens, famed English author and social critic, wrote in a London scholarly journal that the entire conflict was ultimately based on money:

“So the case stands, and under all the passion of the parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle. Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many other evils [...] The quarrel between North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel.”

There was even dissent against the Morrill Tariff in the North. Clement Vallandigham, U.S. Congressman from Ohio, criticized the tariff as “obscure, ill-considered, ill-digested, and unstatesmanlike.” Despite living under Lincoln's wartime despotism, Vallandigham did not mince words:

“The real purpose of these acts was national banks, bankrupt laws, a vast and permanent public debt, high tariffs, heavy direct taxation, enormous expenditure, gigantic and stupendous peculation and strong government, no more state lines, no more state governments, and a consolidated monarchy or vast centralized military despotism.”

For his criticism of Lincoln's unconstitutional usurpations of power, Vallandigham was illegally arrested without a civil warrant, illegally detained indefinitely without due process, and ultimately illegally deported from the U.S. to Canada. Vallandigham's tragedy is one of tens of thousands which dissident Northerners endured during Lincoln's reign of terror.

The audacity and indignity of the Morrill Tariff was the final measure for the South, inflaming the spirits of long-embittered Southerners. Rightfully judging the Union to have betrayed the original purposes for which it was first founded, the people of the Deep-South states, in order to free themselves from exploitation, expropriation, and enslavement, invoked their sovereign right of secession.

The Confederate Constitution & Southern Free Trade

At first, Northern opinion of Southern secession ranged from neutral to favorable. “Let our erring sisters go in peace” summarized the Northern sentiment towards the Confederacy. In November 1860, shortly after Lincoln’s election, the Circleville Watchman, an Ohio newspaper, wrote, “Our ideas of true democracy, of the natural and inalienable rights of man, lead us to the opinion that any state of the confederation has, or at least ought to have, a perfect and undoubted right to withdraw from the Union and to change her form of government whenever a majority of her people shall be of opinion that their rights are being encroached upon and impaired by the other states.” In December 1860, days before South Carolina seceded from the U.S., the New York Tribune printed a downright Jeffersonian defense of secession:

“We have repeatedly said, and we once more insist, that the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, that governments derive their just powers from consent of the governed, is sound and just; and that if the slave states, the Cotton States, or the Gulf States only choose to form an independent nation, they have a clear, moral right to do so. Whenever it shall be clear that the great body of southern people have become conclusively alienated from the Union, and anxious to escape from it, we will do our best to forward their views […] We hope never to live in a Republic where one section is pinned to the other section by bayonets.”

Only when Northerners fully realized the economic implications of an independent South did they turn hostile towards secession. In particular, the Confederacy's espoused laissez-faire policy of free trade posed a serious threat to the federal power and the Northern profits. Ironically, the very federal protectionist tariffs which were the cornerstone of federal power and Northern prosperity (all seized from the South by force) now proved potentially fatal to their mercantilistic empire.

The Confederate Constitution, ratified in the spring of 1861, was a monumental achievement which honored the original intent of the Founders' Constitution - so much so that it actually preserved the same structure - but fixed the fatal flaws which had driven the North and South to disunion. Although the Founders were committed to liberty, years of federal encroachment proved that Constitution was woefully unworthy of their noble cause, just as the Anti-Federalists had warned. The Confederate Constitution aimed to amend the failures of the Founders' Constitution, instituting reforms which were, in the words of Southern philosopher Donald Livingston, “designed to protect and strengthen the substantial moral and political communities of the states, and to limit the power of the central government by reducing its revenue, restricting its power to spend, and making it difficult to pass legislation for special interest groups.” Therefore, far from revolutionary or treasonous, the Confederate Constitution was an act of loyalty to the freedoms for which the Founders had fought and their Constitution had lost. In a postbellum correspondence with Robert E. Lee, Lord Acton, one of England's foremost classical liberals, praised the Confederate Constitution for protecting the principles of its predecessor:

“I saw in states' rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of democracy. The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of republics. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.”

Naturally, one of the Confederate amendments to the Founders' Constitution - along with the banishment of the general-welfare clause, restriction on the appropriation of internal improvements, and enforcement of the interdiction of the slave trade - was the prohibition of protectionist tariffs. Tariffs, after all, impoverished the South, as they had for decades in the Union, so it would have been self-destructive for the nascent Confederacy to levy taxes in the form of protectionist tariffs. Since the people of the Southern states were now free to govern themselves, they constructed a new tax system which made sense in their trade-based economy. Article 1, Section 8 of the Confederate Constitution stated:

“Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, imposts, and excises for revenue necessary to pay the debts, provide for the common defense, and carry on the government of the Confederate States; but no bounties shall be granted from the Treasury; nor shall any duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry; and all duties, imposts, and excises shall be uniform throughout the Confederate States.”

To avoid federal protectionist tariffs, trade would flow from protectionist Northern ports to free-trade Southern ports. Now that Southern ports were free from the burden of federal tariffs, importers could trade with their Southern customers directly, competing in the Southern market which federal tariffs had once rendered prohibitive. Southerners would finally be able to obtain manufactures at competitive rather than monopolistic prices and resume the lucrative export of their crops around the world. As free trade flourished, income, employment, and the standard of living would all grow in the South. A Confederate policy of laissez-faire meant the restoration of prosperity which Northern exploitation, expropriation, and enslavement had suppressed and stolen.

Once trade shifted from North to South, however, the federal government would lose its principal means of financing itself - taxes on imports to the South - and Northern monopolies would lose their captive Southern customers. As the New Orleans Daily Crescent observed in January 1861 days before Louisiana seceded:

“They know that the South is the main prop and support of the federal system. They know that it is Southern productions that constitute the surplus wealth of the nation, and enables us to import so largely from foreign countries. They know that it is their import trade that draws from the people’s pockets sixty or seventy millions of dollars per annum, in the shape of duties, to be expended mainly in the North, and in the protection and encouragement of Northern interests. They know that it is the export of Southern productions, and the corresponding import of foreign goods, that gives profitable employment to their shipping. They know that the bulk of the duties is paid by the Southern people, though first collected at the North, and that, by the iniquitous operation of the federal government, these duties are mainly expended among the Northern people. They know that they can plunder and pillage the South, as long as they are in the same Union with us, by other means, such as fishing bounties, navigation laws, robberies of the public lands, and every other possible mode of injustice and peculation.

[...]

“These are the reasons why these people do not wish the South to secede from the Union. They are enraged at the prospect of being despoiled of the rich feast upon which they have so long fed and fattened, and which they were just getting ready to enjoy with still greater gout and gusto. They are mad as hornets because the prize slips them just as they are ready to grasp it. Their fruitless wailing and frantic rage only serve to confirm the South in her inflexible determination to break up an alliance which is as unnatural as it is, to us, oppressive and degrading.”

In December 1860, well after the House of Representatives passed the Morrill Tariff, and over a year before the Deep-South states seceded, the Chicago Daily Times anticipated the dire consequences for the federal government and Northern industry if they were forced to compete with free trade in the South:

“In one single blow our commerce must be reduced to less than one-half of what it now is. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all of its immense profits. Our manufactories would be in utter ruins. Let the South adopt the free-trade system, or that of a tariff for revenue, and these results would likely follow.”

The Chicago Daily Times anticipated the eventual opinion of the North. On March 11, when the Confederate states ratified their Constitution, Northerners realized that free trade in the South jeopardized their own pampered standard of living, and quickly changed their tune on Southern secession:

“The Southern Confederacy will not employ our ships or buy our goods. What is our shipping without it? Literally nothing. The transportation of cotton and its fabrics employs more ships than all other trade. It is very clear that the South gains by this process, and we lose. No - we MUST NOT let the South go!” - New Hampshire Union Democrat, February 1861

“That either the revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the port must be closed to importations from abroad, is generally admitted. If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed; the sources which supply our treasury will be dried up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe. There will be nothing to furnish means of subsistence to the army; nothing to keep our navy afloat; nothing to pay the salaries of public officers; the present order of things must come to a dead stop.” - New York Evening Post, March 1861

“...with no protective tariff, European goods will under-price Northern goods in Southern markets. Cotton for Northern mills...The general government...to prevent the serious diminution of its revenues, will be compelled to blockade the Southern ports...and prevent the importation of foreign goods into them.” - Philadelphia Press, March 1861

“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 centers of traffic can be changed from Northern to Southern ports. The merchants of New Orleans, Charleston, and Savannah are possessed of 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...The government would be false to its obligations if this state of things were not provided against.” - Boston Transcript, March 1861

In March 1861, the New York Times simply demanded, “At once shut down every Southern port, destroy its commerce, and bring utter ruin on the Confederate States.” The Newark Daily Advertiser  wrote in April 1861 that since the Confederate states – South Carolina as the “chief instigator” – had “taken to their bosoms the liberal and popular doctrine of free trade,” which “would operate to the serious disadvantage of the United States,” a “blockade” was warranted. That is, if the systematic confiscation of Southern wealth was not maintained, the power of the federal government and profitability of Northern industry would decline precipitously. In short, Northerners, grown accustomed to an economy based upon federal protectionism, were terrified at the prospect of having to actually compete for a living. Rather than emulate the contemporaneous example of France, which was reducing its protective tariffs in order to compete with England, the North resolved to conquer the South for the reestablishment of its empire. In the minds of Northerners, for Confederacy's crime of daring to be free, its trade – the Southern people's chief means of providing for themselves – must be crushed.

While war hysteria was surging in the North, Lincoln was devising a clever scheme to bait the Confederacy into firing the first shot. At his first Inaugural Address – which the Richmond Enquirer described as “couched in the cool, unimpassioned, deliberate language of the fanatic” –  Lincoln announced that he would “collect the duties and impost; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.” In other words, continue to pay tribute to the federal government and Northern industry in the form of punitive taxes – now doubled, and soon to be tripled – or face “bloodshed” in the form of a federal invasion. Southerners rightly interpreted Lincoln's inaugural address as appeasement on slavery and aggression on taxation. Robert H. Smith, an anti-secessionist from Alabama, immediately recanted his faith in the Union after hearing Lincoln's address:

“It is impossible to doubt that it was Mr. Lincoln's policy, under the name of reinforcing the laws, to retake the forts, to collect the revenue of the United States in our ports, and to reduce the seceded states to obedience to the behests of his party. His purpose, therefore, was war upon and subjugation of our people.”

Lincoln's address caught the Confederacy in a vexing dilemma. The Deep-South states had seceded in opposition to the resurgence of the mercantilistic regime of federal protectionism of the North and exploitation, expropriation, and enslavement of the South, but if the federal government continued to confiscate taxes from the Southern people, the whole point of secession would be defeated. Indeed, if the Confederacy were still forced to surrender tribute to the federal government and Northern industry, then it was neither free nor independent, but enslaved as abjectly as ever. If Lincoln drew a line in the sand over the issue of federal forts – where federal tariffs would have been collected – then the Confederacy saw no other course but to defend themselves against the threat of federal forts expropriating their property. Yet the avowed policy of the Confederacy was peace and free trade, not war. Indeed, at Confederate President Jefferson Davis' first inaugural address, he stated:

“An agricultural people, whose chief interest is the export of commodities required in every manufacturing country, our true policy is peace, and the freest trade which our necessities will permit.

[...]

“Actuated solely by the desire to preserve our own rights, and promote our own welfare, the separation by the Confederate States has been marked by no aggression upon others, and followed by no domestic convulsion.”

Tragically, Lincoln's own inaugural address had thrown down the gauntlet, threatening the Confederacy with a choice between taxes or war. Since the Confederate states had seceded over taxes in the first place, they considered the underlying threats of Lincoln's address a declaration of war. All Lincoln had to do was fortify federal forts and attempt to levy federal taxes, and the South would either submit or resist. In the former case, Southern secession would have been, in effect, voided; in the latter case, Lincoln would have a pretext for war. Fort Sumter would decide the issue. A federal fort at the mouth of the port city of Charleston, Fort Sumter was precisely the kind of fort to which Lincoln referred in his speech as an enforcement point for federal tariffs. Find a way to provoke the Confederate forces at Charleston to attack Fort Sumter, Lincoln reasoned, and the illusion of Southern aggression would inflame Northern nationalism. Lincoln decided that attempting to resupply Sumter should be sufficient provocation. When the U.S. naval convoy arrived to resupply Fort Sumter, General P.G.T Beauregard had orders from Davis himself to bombard Sumter, which he did. At a Cabinet meeting shortly before the bombing, Toombs, now serving as Confederate Secretary of State, argued with Davis over the dire consequences of striking at Fort Sumter:

“The firing on that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has ever seen. Mr President, it is suicide, it is murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet's nest which extends from mountains to ocean; and legions, now quiet, will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary, it puts us in the wrong. It is fatal.”

Toombs' counsel was not heeded; the Confederates played right into Lincoln's scheming hands. After the bombing of Fort Sumter, Lincoln had the pretext for war which he desired. The outcry for war in the North had now reached a fever pitch, just as Lincoln intended. Almost immediately after the bombardment, Lincoln ordered his War Department to summon 75,000 men from the states to “suppress insurrection” in the Confederate states. Under the Constitution, however, only Congress is permitted to declare war, but Congress had authorized no such measure, and had not even been called to convene despite the dire situation. Lincoln's unconstitutional marshaling of troops was a fateful crossing of the Rubicon, preventing a Congressional debate in which the remaining Democrats – from the Upper South and North alike – could have forced a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. Earlier, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, although subject to the same oppression as their seceding Southern sisters and supportive of a state's right to secede, opted for diplomacy over secession. After Lincoln began massing troops for an imperial invasion of the Confederate states, however, the Upper South saw the horrors of what remaining in the Union entailed. The governors of these Southern states were shocked when they were ordered to organize troops for war at Lincoln's command, and were openly defiant in their refusal:

“I have only to say, that the militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purpose as they have in view. Your object is to subjugate the Southern states, and a requisition made upon me for such an object - an object, in my judgment, not within the purview of the Constitution - will not be complied with. You have chosen to inaugurate civil war, and having done so, we will meet it in a spirit as determined as the administration has exhibited towards the South.” - Governor Letcher, Virginia

“Your dispatch is received; and, if genuine, which its extraordinary character leads me to doubt, I have to say in reply, that I regard the levy of troops made by the administration for the purpose of subjugating the states of the South as in violation of the Constitution, and a usurpation of power. I can be no party to this wicked violation of the laws of the country, and to this war upon the liberties of a free people. You can get no troops from North Carolina.” - Governor Ellis, North Carolina

“Your dispatch is received. I say emphatically that Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern states.” - Governor Magoffin, Kentucky 

“Tennessee will not furnish a single man for coercion, but fifty thousand, if necessary, for the defense of our rights, or those of our Southern brethren.” - Governor Harris, Tennessee

“In answer to your requisition for troops from Arkansas, to subjugate the Southern states, I have to say that none will be furnished. The demand is only adding insult to injury. The people of this commonwealth are freemen, not slaves, and will defend to the last extremity their honor, lives, and property against Northern mendacity and usurpation.” - Governor Rector, Arkansas

“There can be, I apprehend, no doubt that these men are intended to make war upon the seceded states. Your requisition, in my judgment, is illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its objects, inhuman and diabolical, and can not be complied with. Not one man will the state of Missouri furnish to carry on such an unholy crusade.” - Governor Jackson, Missouri 

Lincoln was already rapaciously centralizing power in the federal government in clear violation of the Constitution. The protectionist tariffs which Lincoln was committed to enforcing were unconstitutional and unjust, but since taking office he had further trampled upon the Constitution, revoking the writ of habeas corpus in order to jail suspected dissidents without due process (a usurpation of Congress' constitutional authority and violation of the Fifth Amendment), disarming the people in order to leave them defenseless against Federal invaders (a violation of the Second Amendment), censoring anti-war newspapers in order to suppress dissent (a violation of the First Amendment), ordering a military coup against the sovereign state of Maryland state in order to preempt its impending secession and blockading Southern ports in order to starve the South into submission (both of which were acts of treason under Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution, and the former of which was a violation of the federal guarantee that all states would have a republican form of government), along with a host of other monstrous injustices. Wanting no part in the subjugation of their Southern sisters or a life of poverty and corruption under Northern mercantilism, the Upper-South states soon seceded as well, resuming their rights as sovereign states, and joining their fellow Confederate states in a new, more perfect union. The die now cast, the Confederacy prepared to defend itself against the impending federal invasion.

In 1861, the South, exploited, expropriated, and enslaved beneath the cruel lash of federal protectionist tariffs, finally reclaimed its independence, but it was Northern panic over the loss of its money and power which started the war.

What About Slavery?

“...war is most often fought for economic reasons. But economic wars are drive by moral and emotional overtones. Our own Revolution was fought to escape from excessive taxation, but was inspired and drive by our desire to protect our God-given right to liberty. The War Between the States, fought primarily over tariffs, was nonetheless inspired by the abhorrence of slavery. It is this moral inspiration that drives people to fight to the death, as so many Americans did between 1861 and 1865.” - Ron Paul

Federal protectionist tariffs were the main cause of Southern secession, but they were not the sole factor. The national debate over slavery - particularly the expansion of slavery into American Territories - which raged throughout the 1850s, also fanned the flames of Southern resentment of the North. The slavery debate, however, was not a moral issue on either side, but fundamentally economic. In fact, slavery was actually just a small part of federal protectionism.

A few sincere abolitionists believed that slavery was immoral, but they were a minuscule minority. In fact, Northerners, especially those with a stake in Northern industry, were predominantly reconciled to slavery in the South. Even though many Northern states had abolished slavery, they relied on slave labor to produce affordable cash crops for their mills, and were perfectly content to leave slavery undisturbed in the South. Indeed, the North had a substantial commercial interest in the preservation of slavery in the South.

When it came to the Territories, however, many Northerners were against the expansion of slavery. The reason Northerners objected to permitting slavery to exist in the Territories (and therefore new states) was not because they believed it was immoral, but because they wanted to protect white labor from the competition of black labor. Restricting the expansion of slavery would, in effect, grant white settlers a government-enforced monopoly over the labor market, artificially inflating wages above free-market levels. Northerners, as with federal protectionist tariffs, were voting themselves privileges at the expense of Southerners.

Contrary to popular belief, white supremacy was extremely prevalent in the North - far more so than the South. Slavery was abolished in many Northern states because it was uneconomical, but not because the North was any less racist than anywhere else in the world. In fact, the typical way that Northern states abolished slavery was to emancipate the children of existing slaves, but force existing slaves to remain as slaves, many of whom were then sold down South. Northern abolition amounted to a profitable opportunity for Northerners to rid themselves of the blacks whom they despised. John Adams, Founding Father from Massachusetts, wrote the following about the motives of Northern abolition:

“Argument might have some weight in the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts, but the real cause was the multiplication of laboring white people, who would no longer suffer the rich to employ these sable rivals so much to their injury. The common people would not suffer the labor, by which alone they could obtain a subsistence, to be done by slaves. If the gentlemen had been permitted by law to hold slaves, the common white people would have beat the slaves to the death, and their masters too, perhaps.”

So, according to Adams, feelings of racism and labor protectionism were so virulent in the North that they bordered on murderous. Indeed, many Northern states, such as Illinois, adopted Black Codes, oppressive statutes which ranged from denying blacks basic rights to prohibiting them from living in the state altogether. Unlike the South, where whites and blacks coexisted, living and working together in relative harmony, blacks (along with many other immigrants, such as the Irish or the Germans) were systematically segregated in the North. To win votes from Northern white settlers, the Republicans capitalized on Northern racism, opposing the extension of slavery to the Territories in order to ensure artificially higher wages for their target constituency. Lincoln, the so-called “Great Emancipator,” summarized the Republican position against the expansion of slavery in a speech in 1854:

“The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these territories. We want them for the homes of free white people. This they cannot be, to any considerable extent, if slavery shall be planted with them.”

Later, during the much-celebrated Lincoln-Douglas debates, to be sure that there was no confusion, Lincoln clarified his position, stating that he “[is] not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.” In a later campaign speech at Cooper-Union, Lincoln said the following:

“As those fathers marked it, so let it be again marked, as an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity. Let all the guarantees those fathers gave it, be, not grudgingly, but fully and fairly, maintained. For this Republicans contend, and with this, so far as I know or believe, they will be content.”

That is, slavery should not be permitted to spread, but should be “fully and fairly maintained” where it already exists. Lincoln was so distraught over the prospect of letting slaves settle in the Territories that he claimed it would be the loss of the “last, best hope of earth.”

The Republican Party platform of 1860, established at the Chicago convention at which Lincoln was nominated, while calling for a high federal protectionist tariff, expressly disavowed any intention of interfering with slavery in the Southern states. As Lincoln explained in his first inaugural address:

“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.”

Lincoln also voiced support for a Thirteenth Amendment which ensured the protection of slavery. In fact, one – the Corwin Amendment – had just passed the House of Representatives and Senate, both under Republican control. Despite Republican appeasement on slavery, the supposed cause of the war, the Confederate states remained staunchly independent, and more would soon follow. If the South were truly up in arms over slavery, then they would have remained in the Union, in which it was legally protected, and not gambled on independence. Appeasement on slavery was irrelevant to Southerners, however, who were more concerned with the damage that the Morrill Tariff would inflict upon their economy.

Lincoln's motivations in opposing the extension of slavery into the Territories were not aberrant. William Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State, had similar sentiments. “The motive of those who protested against the extension of slavery," Seward reflected “had always really been concern for the welfare of the white man, and not an unnatural sympathy for the Negro.” Horace Greeley, prominent Northern abolitionist and editor of the New York Tribune, also saw abolitionism in the territories as a fundamentally economic issue, stating, “All the unoccupied territory...shall be preserved for the benefit of the white Caucasian race – a thing which cannot be except by the exclusion of slavery.” In 1858, Lyman Trumbull, U.S. Senator from Illinois and personal confidante of Lincoln's, described the Republican Party's views on race:

“We, the Republican Party, are the white man's party. We are for the free white man, and for making white labor acceptable and honorable, which it can never be when Negro slave labor is brought into competition with it.”

In 1847, speaking for California's admission as “free state,” David Wilmot, the Pennsylvania Congressman whose namesake proviso excluded slavery from all territories acquired after the Mexican War, claimed that he “had no morbid sympathy for the slave,” but “plead the cause and rights of white freemen.”

The Republican-controlled Congress of 1862 adopted a resolution stating, “…this war is not waged upon our part [for the] overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those states; but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution, and to preserve the Union, with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several states, unimpaired.” To Lincoln and the Republicans, the Union was no longer the Founding Fathers' practical political arrangement based on the consent of the governed and antedated by the sovereign states, but a mystical bond which transcended all other earthly allegiances and must be upheld by force of arms.

Lincoln bluntly informed Charles Lester, a Northern abolitionist preacher, that, “We didn't go to war to put down slavery, but to put the flag back.” If there were still any doubt of the irrelevance of slavery as a factor behind Lincoln's invasion of the South, Lincoln cleared it up in a shockingly revealing letter to Greeley in 1862:

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do abut slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.”

Southerners knew good and well that they were fighting for their freedom, not slavery. Alexander H. Stephens, Confederate Vice President, published A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States in installments from 1867-1870, in which he sought to elucidate the true causes of Southern secession, and to illustrate that the War for Southern Independence was, at root, the violent culmination of a clash between two conflicting ideologies, i.e. Jeffersonian freedom versus Hamiltonian tyranny:

“The contest...which ended in the War, was, indeed, a contest between opposing principles; but not such as bore upon the policy of African subordination. They were principles deeply underlying all consideration of that sort. They involved the very nature and organic structure of the government itself. The conflict, on this question of slavery, in the federal councils, from the beginning, was not a contest between the advocates or opponents of that peculiar institution, but a contest, as stated before, between the supporters of a strictly federative government, on the one side, and a thoroughly national one, on the other.”

Lysander Spooner, Massachusetts abolitionist and anarchist, wrote in his famous anti-war tract No Treason that Lincoln invaded the Confederacy not to free the slaves, but to overturn the consent of the governed and establish federal supremacy by force of arms:

“On the part of the North, the war was carried on, not to liberate slaves, but by a government that had always perverted and violated the Constitution, to keep the slaves in bondage; and was still willing to do so, if the slaveholders could be thereby induced to stay in the Union.

“The principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.”

Slavery, although a terrible evil completely contrary to natural law and abhorrent to a free society, was, under the Constitution, a right reserved to the sovereign states. The states never delegated any powers pertaining to slavery – save for the prohibition of the slave trade – to the federal government. As the Tenth Amendment states, the people of the states reserve unto themselves any power not delegated to the federal government, and that included slavery. In short, under the Constitution, states were free determine the legality of slavery themselves, whether that meant abolition or perpetuation. Southerners, steeped in a political tradition of liberty - although economic self-interest tragically blinded them to the hypocrisy of slavery - were defensive of their sovereign right to self-government, which the collectivist Northerners were constantly seeking to usurp. Furthermore, and most importantly, slavery was not an exclusively Southern institution. In fact, in the case of the South, it was an English one, for the American Colonies had inherited slavery from the British Empire, which had practiced slavery along with the rest of the world for thousands of years. Slavery is as old as time itself, dating back to the dawn of civilization in places as diverse as Sumeria, Greece, China, and the Americas. Slavery is even implicitly legitimized by wise men such as the Apostle Paul, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas. Nevertheless, by the 19th century, most European countries had peacefully abolished slavery, and the Southern states were heading in that direction as well. Slavery flourished in the South because of economic conditions (in particular, arable land and warm climate suited to agriculture), but a growing understanding of slavery's immorality and inefficiency ensured the inevitability of abolition. Slavery was surely a vice of the South - as it was of many great civilizations throughout history - but Southern virtues such as honor, duty, family, gallantry, and liberty should not be dismissed altogether due to slavery. Slavery was neither unique to Southern soil nor defining of Southern culture. In fact, a popular Southern euphemism for slavery - “our peculiar institution” - captures slavery's awkward place in what was for the most part a free, peaceful and prosperous society.

Southerners favored permitting slavery in the Territories so that they would be free to settle there with their slaves. Prohibiting the extension of slavery in the Territories disproportionately harmed Southerners, because it interfered with the natural migration of Southerners and Northerners to a given territory, many of which the federal government acquired with the blood of Southern soldiers or treasure of Southern taxpayers. Prohibiting slavery in the territories also interfered with the doctrine of “popular sovereignty” (which held that the people of a newly admitted state had the right to decide whether slavery was legal in their state), because it prevented Southerners from settling there in the first place, and thus guaranteed that protectionist Northerners would be the prevailing population in new states. If Northerners were the only Americans free to settle in the Territories, Southerners feared that their growing representation in the federal government would portend a sectional tyranny of the majority in which North seized control over the federal government to further subjugate the South. Because of the threat of tyranny that disproportionate Northern migration to the Territories posed, Southerners resented restrictions on permitting the extension of slavery to the Territories. Referenda on whether a state would be “free” or “slave” were not about the morality of slavery, but about competing economic interests: Northern whites for a whites-only labor market versus Southern whites for freedom from federal protectionism.

Despite the controversy over the status of slavery in the Territories, the Southern states and its long-term economic implications, the South had absolutely no incentive to secede over the issue of slavery itself. The argument that the Southern states seceded over slavery ludicrously claims that the South feared a sectional tyranny of Northern Republicans which would ratify a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. At the time, however, Republicans were attempting to do the very opposite - ratify a constitutional amendment which plainly protected slavery in the Southern states! By contrast, for the South to secede over federal protectionist tariffs made obvious sense, because tariffs were a longstanding Southern grievance. Seceding over slavery, however, would have been an irrational - if not utterly insane - risk over what tax historian Charles Adams described as “a pyramid of ‘what ifs.’” Indeed, Dickens, who wrote prolifically in defense of the South during the war, observed, “The South, instead of seceding for the sake of slavery, seceded in spite of the fact that its separate maintenance will expose them...to risks and losses against which the Union would afford security.” Simply put, regarding slavery, the South had nothing to gain and everything to lose in seceding from the Union.

Slavery was also not nearly as pervasive of an institution in the South as abolitionists assumed. According to U.S. Census data from 1860, of the 5.3 million people living in the South, approximately 6% owned slaves. Even then, about half of that percentage were yeoman farmers who worked in the fields alongside their slaves. The other half were the aristocratic planters, gallant cavaliers, and Southern belles who lived in the grand plantations depicted in American classics like Gone With The Wind. The vast majority of Southerners, however – a whopping 94% – owned no slaves. Since so few Southerners actually owned slaves, Northerners claimed that wealthy Southern planters, protecting their own financial interests, had manipulated the general population into a rebellion against their better judgment. Actually, the fact that so many Southerners fought and died for a cause in which they no stake implies the opposite – that they must have had other motives, such as liberating themselves from tyranny or defending their homeland from invasion. Robert E. Lee, for instance, resigned his position in the U.S. Army to command the Army of Northern Virginia, but abhorred slavery and freed his own slaves. Two of Lee’s most famous corps commanders, Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart, owned no slaves themselves. Even during the dark days of Reconstruction, during which the federal government was disenfranchising Southern whites and privileging blacks, Lee himself said that, “So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished.” Lee and his fellow officers - as well as the hundreds of thousands of non-slaveowning men under their command - would not have fought for slavery.

Slavery was also not nearly as barbaric as abolitionists screeched, either. Much of the abolitionist propaganda, such as Uncle Tom's Cabin, was written by Northerners who had never even been down South to witness slavery themselves. Slavery in the South encompassed a wide of social relationships between whites and blacks, ranging from cruel dominion to genuine friendship. In the South, the paternalistic Victorian family was firmly implanted into plantation society. Because of this ideal, a slave-owner felt morally responsible to care for his slaves, often providing services beyond mere food, shelter, and clothes. For instance, Mary Boykin Chestnut, a South-Carolinian of the aristocratic planter class, wrote in her diary of her family's obligation to take care of 17 elderly slaves, despite the fact that the Thirteenth Amendment had already emancipated them. Although the Chestnut family was financially ruined after the war, their obligation to provide for their slave was a moral duty which none of Lincoln's legislation could abolish. 

Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Slavery, the definitive book on slavery, dispels many of the common myths about slavery in the South. Slaves were rarely physically abused or “sold down the river,” although sadly those things would happen from time to time. The breeding of slaves and miscegenation between slave-owner and slave were practically non-existent in the South, more fiction than fact. To the extent that such acts of malice did occur, they were the exceptions which proved the rule. The standard of living for slaves (measured by life expectancy, birth rate, diet, clothing, housing, and healthcare) exceeded not only that of contemporaneous working-class whites in the North and Europe, but also post-bellum blacks. Although slavery had its origins in violence, since the federal ban on the slave trade in 1807, the U.S. slave population had been born and raised in the South. Most slaves spent their entire lives on the same plantation with the same family, and naturally came to consider their native plantation their home and themselves a part - however peripheral - of their master's family. Many slaves, taking a personal interest in the success of the plantation, even learned trades and worked in a managerial capacity, phenomena which declined sharply in post-bellum America. Consent sustained slavery to a far greater degree than physical and psychological coercion. 

Both Northern and foreign visitors were surprised at the level of amity which existed between Southern whites and their slaves. Frederick Law Olmsted, a Northern historian touring the South in the early 19th century, was astonished when he saw a white woman and a black woman sitting next to each other on a train, with their children sharing candy. Olmsted remarked, “...the girls munched candy out of the same bag with a familiarity and closeness which would have astonished and displeased most Northerners.” Alexis de Tocqueville, the French sociologist who recorded his observations of early 19th-century America in the classic Democracy in America, wrote of race relations in North and South:

“The prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slaves than in the states where slavery still exists. White carpenters, white bricklayers, and white painters will not work side by side with the blacks in the North but do it in almost every Southern state.”

The reason for this level of social intimacy is simple. Northern states abolished slavery because it made no economic sense in their region of the country, and subsequently segregated blacks from white society because they were racists and no longer had any reason to tolerate blacks. Southern states, like the North, inherited slavery from the British Empire, but retained it because slave labor was economically adapted to the commercial production of cash crops. Racism was prevalent throughout the Western world, but Southerners, given their agrarian economy, actually lived and worked among blacks. Whether men farming the land, women managing their households, or children growing up, whites and blacks in the South built the bonds of community together. In addition, Southerners believed in following Christ's example of compassion and charity towards all - especially the slaves in their charge. Indeed, no less of a hardcore Confederate than Stonewall Jackson taught a “colored Sunday school” at his church in Virginia. From this thriving coexistence, whites and blacks grew closer in the South than anywhere else in the world.

Furthermore, the extent of the abolition movement in the South has been unfairly discounted. Southern abolitionism having preceded Northern abolitionism, Southerners were abolitionists while Northerners were just learning to lobby for federal favors. In fact, abolitionists comprised a major part of the Jeffersonian tradition. Virginian St. George Tucker, a legal professor at William & Mary, U.S. judge, and author of the Jeffersonian View of the Constitution of the United States, exhorted his students, many of whom were the sons of planters:

“Thus, by the most clear, manly, and convincing reasoning does this excellent author refute every claim, upon which the practice of slavery is founded, or by which it has been supposed to be justified [...] That such horrid practices have been sanctioned by a civilized nation; that a nation ardent in the cause of liberty, and enjoying its blessings in the fullest extent, can continue to vindicate a right established upon such a foundation; that a people who have declared, 'That all men are by nature equally free and independent,' and have made this declaration the first article in the foundation of their government, should...tolerate a practice incompatible therewith, is such an evidence of the weakness and inconsistency of human nature.”

George Mason, Virginian Anti-Federalist and “Father of the Bill of Rights,” speaking to the Virginia Ratifying Convention in 1788, said, “The augmentation of slaves weakens the states; and such a trade is diabolical in itself, and disgraceful to mankind.” Patrick Henry, another Virginian patriot and fiery Anti-Federalist, lamented slavery:

“Slavery is detested. We feel its fatal effects. We deplore it with all the pity of our humanity. I would rejoice my very soul if every one of my fellow human beings was emancipated. As we ought with gratitude to admire that decree of heaven which has numbered us among the free, we ought to lament the necessity of holding our fellow men in bondage.”

Henry asked, “But is it practicable, by any human means, to liberate [slaves] without producing the most dreadful and ruinous consequences?” Henry believed that emancipation of an “uncivilized” people amid a “civilized” people would be disastrous. The best and brightest minds of the South contemplated this troubling dilemma, Thomas Jefferson among them. Indeed, Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, a masterful political treatise published in 1785 shortly after the War for American Independence, was groundbreaking on the subject of slavery. In particular, Jefferson recommended that a system of compensated emancipation (governmental reimbursement of slave-owners in return for emancipating their slaves) be instituted, as had become popular in Europe. Jefferson thundered against slavery in Notes:

“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other [...] Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

Unfortunately, the state of Virginia never ratified Jefferson's plan for compensated emancipation into law, although it was the first state to abolish the slave trade independently. Jefferson himself, however, treated his slaves very humanely, teaching them trades, working among them, and freeing many of them. In his old age, Jefferson was quieter on the subject of slavery, although he feared that the debates over its extension to the territories would create irreconcilable sectional tension between North and South. Jefferson's erstwhile colleague from Virginia, James Madison, however, discovered the wisdom of Jefferson's view later in life, and worked diligently at the federal level as president and at the state level in retirement to abolish slavery.

In the early 19th century, manumission (slave-owners emancipating their slaves) was on the rise, but freed slaves were also having trouble adjusting to independent life. Then, in 1831, Nat Turner, a black preacher, interpreting the color of the sun as a divine sign that he must punish slave-owners, led a violent gang of blacks on a killing spree in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Local militia quickly subdued Turner, but the debate over slavery he generated had a much greater effect than his abortive uprising. In 1832, the Virginia General Assembly debated the future of slavery in the state. The abolitionist reformers, in the tradition of their revolutionary ancestors, objected to slavery on a number of fronts, claiming that it was a violation of natural law, economically burdensome, and morally corrosive. Among the reformers was the grandson of Jefferson, along with many other distinguished Virginia planters. Sadly, the conservatives prevailed over the reformers, and the consensus in the South was that one day slavery may be abolished naturally, but until then Southerners should ensure that the system was as humane as possible.

By the time of the Confederacy, there were two philosophies of abolition in the South. The first, held by the champion of the Old South, Lee, was that slavery was sinful and should be abolished at once. Putting his money where his mouth was, Lee freed the slaves his wife inherited. Five years before he resigned his commission in the U.S. Army and took up in arms in defense of his native Virginia, Lee wrote the following in a letter to his wife:

 “There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil [...] Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influences of Christianity than from storm and tempest of fiery controversy [...] While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is still onward, and give it the aid of our prayers, let us leave the progress as well as the results in the hands of Him who, chooses to work by slow influences, and with whom a thousand years are but as a single day.”

The second, held by the Confederate President Davis, was that slavery was wrong but should be abolished gradually. Davis believed that slaves should not be freed until they were ready for freedom. “The slave must  be made fit for his freedom by education and his discipline and thus be made unfit for slavery,” Davis said of his brand of abolitionism. On his Mississippi plantation, Davis, like many slave-owners, took it upon himself to provide a secular and spiritual education for his slaves. Davis went above and beyond the social norm, however, even developing a court system for his slaves so they would understand the legal system outside the plantation, and adopting a black boy as his own. The main difference between Northern and Southern abolitionism is that Southerners actually lived amid slavery, cared for blacks, and understood the ramifications of abolition, whereas Northerners were largely ignorant of the slavery and harbored self-serving ulterior motives behind abolition. As John Remington Graham, legal scholar of secession, rhapsodized:

“The fact remains that in 1861 the condition of slaves was relatively good. The peculiar institution of the Dixie States had been woven into a social fabric which had a gentle and quiet beauty, as well as a workable and pleasing balance [...] Slavery in the South would not have hardened into a destructive fossil, because it had already proved to be elastic. In spite of all the blemishes...things were getting much better. Jefferson had noticed ameliorations in the practice of slavery in 1782: these beneficial trends continued year after year, great strides had been made by 1861, and, at the rate progress was then being made, general liberation was foreseen and not far distant as many Southerners then conceded.”

Despite racial harmony in the South, racism in the North, the fundamentally economic causes of the conflict between North and South, and Lincoln's opposition to abolition, the Emancipation Proclamation changed everything. The Emancipation Proclamation was, besides baiting the Confederacy into firing the first shot at Fort Sumter, Lincoln's most masterful political maneuver. After two years of trouncing, courtesy of Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, the federal government was desperate for a win. Furthermore, the Confederacy, given its trade-based economy, had superior foreign relations than the North, the prohibitive trade barriers of which had left it largely isolated from the rest of the world. Many Northerners feared that European powers, particularly England, would intervene on behalf of the Confederacy in order to preserve their commerce. When Lee's campaign to liberate Maryland from federal occupation ended in a stalemate, however, Lincoln saw an opportunity to revive flagging Northern morale and preempt foreign intervention. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which turned the tone of the war from “preserving the Union” to “freeing the slaves.” The Emancipation Proclamation was a political ploy which cunningly changed the public perception of the war from an imperialistic conquest of the South into a righteous crusade for freedom. Northern morale soared, and foreign intervention was now out of the question. The Emancipation Proclamation, however, was as impotent as it was unconstitutional. Far from freeing any slaves, the Emancipation Proclamation only decreed that slaves in the Confederate states – i.e. states in which Lincoln had no authority to enforce his proclamation – were freed. In the border states that the federal government were ruling under martial law, such as Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey, slavery was upheld. According to Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation was a temporary “war measure” that would expire when the conflict closed. In other words, the Emancipation Proclamation was simply political theater, and did not free a single slave. In fact, under the Emancipation Proclamation, any blacks which Federal forces encountered in the Confederacy, whether slave or free, were conscripted into military service, replacing one set of chains with another. Despite the utter vacuity of the Emancipation Proclamation, postbellum Southern historian Clifford Dowdey rightly marks it - along with the stalemate at Sharpsburg - as the beginning of the end of the Confederacy. Although it was an insincere, impotent, and insidious gesture which enslaved more blacks than it freed, the Emancipation Proclamation turned the tide of the war from the South to the North.

Lincoln continued his abolitionist propaganda in the Gettysburg Address, in which he billed his conquest of the Confederacy as a preservation of the right of self-government, even though it was the Confederate soldiers who were defending their right to govern themselves. H.L. Mencken, writing from the once-occupied city of Baltimore, described the Gettysburg Address as “poetry, not logic,” and “beauty, not sense.” In “the cold words of everyday,” the speech itself is devoid of meaning. According to Mencken, Lincoln asserted that, “the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination - that government of the people, for the people, by the people should not perish from the earth,” but, “it is difficult to imagine anything more untrue.”

“The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against the cause of self-determination. It was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.”

Besides the immediate propaganda effect of distorting the significance of the federal victory at Gettysburg, the Gettysburg Address' most lasting effect was the corruption of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln twisted Jefferson's bold defense of natural rights and secession - far too reminiscent of the Confederacy's own creed, apparently - into an egalitarian manifesto. In 1864, during his second Inaugural Address, Lincoln, although a closet atheist, blamed God for the war he deliberately started, using disturbing fanatical and blasphemous rhetoric to justify some of the most heinous acts of plunder, rape, and murder in history. Lincoln himself was apathetic to the plight of freed slaves, personally preferring that they were deported to foreign colonies. In fact, at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln was engaged in negotiations to deport freed slaves to Caribbean colonies. When Alexander H. Stephens, Confederate Vice President, met with Lincoln to voice common Southern concerns about the consequences of instant emancipation - e.g. what would happen to freed slaves, many of whom were uneducated, illiterate, and innumerate? - Lincoln laughingly answered, “Root, pig, or perish.” So much for the Great Emancipator.

Lincoln’s politicization of abolition paled in comparison to the Republicans who seized power after his assassination. In the postbellum Reconstruction regime, Republicans, in addition to presiding over a nefarious decade-long legalized looting spree of the South, consolidated their power by pitting freed slaves against Southern whites. For instance, while Southern whites were systematically disenfranchised and dispossessed while freed slaves were awarded political privileges. Republicans sought to turn all of the freed slaves into a permanently government-dependent underclass of reliable Republican voters, thus sealing their dominion over the empire Lincoln's war had won. Fortunately for the South, the Ku Klux Klan – which originated as a Southern militia of ex-Confederates dedicated to upholding the rule of law and resisting Reconstruction – thwarted this strategy, undermining the federal regime at every turn, and ensuring that loyal Democrats would represent the Southern states in the federal government. Sadly, much of the racism which prevailed the postbellum South was actually attributable to the Northern influence of Reconstruction, particularly the way in which Republicans pitted whites and blacks against each other in a successful strategy to divide and conquer.

Astoundingly, Lincoln's plainly political pivot on slavery duped most Northerners and many foreigners. Dickens, however, piercing through the propaganda in his sardonic style, wrote, “The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.”

Conclusion

The South, seeking freedom from the exploitation, expropriation, and enslavement of federal protectionist tariffs, followed in the footsteps of their revolutionary ancestors and declared independence from a government which, by violating the natural rights of the people, had betrayed its founding purposes. The federal government and Northern industry, terrified at the prospect of losing the money and power to which they had come accustomed to plundering from the South, resolved to “preserve the Union” by force. Economics was the cause of the War of Southern Independence, as it is with all wars. Later, as a political maneuver, Lincoln’s rhetoric shifted to emancipation, but that was merely a convenient flag to wave as a distraction from the fundamentally economic origins and imperial character of the war he started.

From 1861-1865, several hundreds of thousands of Southern soldiers and tens of thousands of Southern civilians fell fighting for their freedom in an unprecedented war of aggression. Confederate soldiers, despite defying overwhelming odds and winning inspiring victories against the Federal invaders, were steadily slain in a war of attrition which the Confederacy had neither the men, materiel, money, nor the mind to sustain. Likewise, Southern civilians, such as women and children, bravely supported the home front in the absence of their husbands, fathers, and brothers, but were horrifically starved and slaughtered in a total war of rape, pillage, and murder. When the Confederacy finally surrendered, the republic of sovereign states established by the Founding Fathers was finished, a centralized nation-state over which the federal government now reigned supreme erected upon its ruins. These truths are why what is commonly called the “Civil War” is better-known down South as The War Between the States, The War for Southern Independence, the Second War of Independence, or The War of Northern Aggression.

Might, however, does not make right. The conquest of the South in no way defeats the justice of the principles for which it fought. Force may suppress dissent, but it does not decide questions of right and wrong. No matter what propaganda the federal government and its cronies impose upon the conquered, the sacred memory of their fallen ancestors and the rebellious fire of liberty still burn brightly in the hearts and minds of Southerners along with any freeborn people. William Faulkner, writing of the tragic gallantry of Pickett's Charge in Intruder in the Dust, noted, “For every Southern boy...there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863.” So long as that spirit of hope prevails, so long as each generation inherits the valor of its Confederate forebears and honors their noble cause, so long as the Confederacy remains undying in the hearts and minds of its descendants, then the South shall rise again!