The major point that
opponents of Confederate symbols assert is that the panoply of those monuments,
flags, plaques, and other reminders honoring Confederate veterans represent a
defense of historical slavery. Slavery was the cause of the war, they say, and
since American society has supposedly advanced progressively in understanding,
it is both inappropriate and hurtful to continue to display such memorials.
Again,
there are various levels of response. Historically, despite the best efforts of
the ideologically-driven Marxist historical school (e.g., Eric Foner) to make
slavery the only underlying cause for the War Between
the States, there is considerable evidence—while not ignoring the significance
of slavery—to indicate more varied and profound economic and political reasons
why that war occurred (cf. writers Thomas DiLorenzo, Charles Adams, David
Gordon, Jeffrey Hummel, William Marvel, Thomas Fleming, et al). Indeed, it goes
without saying that when hostilities began, anti-slavery was not a major reason
at all in the North for prosecuting the war; indeed, it never was a major reason. Lincoln made this
explicit to editor Horace Greeley of The New York Tribune a short time prior to the Emancipation
Proclamation (which only applied
to states in the South where the Federal government had no authority, but not to the states such
as Maryland and Kentucky, where slavery existed, but were safely under Union
control).
Here
is what he wrote to Greeley on August 22, 1862:
“My
paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is 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 all the slaves, 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 about Slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe
it helps to save this Union, and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not
believe it would help to save the Union.”
The
Emancipation Proclamation (January 1, 1863), issued just three months after
Lincoln’s communication to Greeley, was a desperate political ploy by Lincoln
to churn up sagging support for a war that appeared stale-mated at the time.
Indeed, Old Abe had previously called for sending blacks back to Africa and the
enforcement of laws that made Jim Crow look benign. He knew fully well that
“freeing the slaves” had little support in the North and was not the reason for
the conflict.
In
the Southern states, the issue of slavery as the raison
d’etre for secession (and
for war) is more complex. Clearly, the secession of North Carolina, Virginia,
Arkansas, and Tennessee (and the attempted secession of Kentucky and Missouri)
was chiefly a response to Lincoln’s call for troops to suppress the states of
the Deep South and incursions by Federal troops (e.g. the Federal occupation of
St. Louis and invasion of Missouri, and the tyrannical suppression of habeas
corpus in Maryland). The overwhelming view in those states, as elsewhere in
many areas of the Union, was that the Federal government did not have the right
to coerce a state that had seceded, and that such action was a flagrant
violation of the Constitution.
In
January of 1861 North Carolina voted by a healthy margin to remain in the
Union. The other states in the northern tier where slavery existed initially
resolved to do the same thing. However, the demand by the Lincoln
administration that the states supply troops to participate in an attack on
South Carolina was met by widespread revulsion. Tar Heel Governor John W.
Ellis’s famously replied to this summons: “You can get no troops from North
Carolina!” Zebulon Vance, a leader of the state’s Whigs and an adamant
unionist, and future war-time governor, recounted that he was on the stump when
the news of the Federal demand came: “When during my oration my hand went up I
was a staunch Unionist, but when it came down, I was a diehard secessionist.”
In the North Carolina debates over secession in early May 1861 slavery was hardly
mentioned, and the state’s representatives voted unanimously in convention to
secede on May 20, 1861.
In
several of the Deep South states, declarations of grievances did mention
slavery as a reason for severing connection with the Federal union. And it is
true that a defense of the “peculiar institution” forms one of several
justifications for the secession of Texas, Mississippi, South Carolina, and
Georgia. The Federal government appeared increasingly incapable or unwilling to
secure property rights and insure civil order for those states. Still,
for them slavery was subsumed in the overriding question of constitutionality
and the perceived impression that the Federal government could no longer be
depended upon to defend the Founders’ Constitution.
But as
an issue slavery was overshadowed by the severe and immediate hit that
Southerners were threatened with economically through the imposition of the
Morrill Tariff, which raised the average tariff rate from 15% to 37.5% (and
eventually to 47.5%) and greatly expanded the list of taxable items. Abraham
Lincoln had campaigned vigorously on a platform of strong support for the
Morrill Tariff and increased economic protectionism—extreme protectionism that
threatened to completely cripple the economies of the import-dependent Southern
states. As noted economist Frank Taussig detailed in his classic study,Tariff History of the United States (Augustus M. Kelley Publishers,
1967 edition), the tariff was the chief revenue source for the Federal
government, and the South would be paying nearly 80 % of the tariff, while most
of the revenues were spent in the North.
In
his famous “cornerstone speech” to the Georgia legislature, November 13, 1860,
Senator Robert Toombs, laid bare these Southern grievances and explained why
they would provoke secession and war:
“…the
Northern States evinced a general desire and purpose to use it [the
Constitution] for their own benefit, and to pervert its powers for sectional
advantage, and they have steadily pursued that policy to this day. They
demanded a monopoly of the business of ship-building, and got a prohibition
against the sale of foreign ships to citizens of the United States, which
exists to this day.
They
demanded a monopoly of the coasting trade, in order to get higher freights than
they could get in open competition with the carriers of the world. Congress
gave it to them, and they yet hold this monopoly. And now, to-day, if a foreign
vessel in Savannah offer[s] to take your rice, cotton, grain or lumber to
New-York, or any other American port, for nothing, your laws prohibit it, in
order that Northern ship-owners may get enhanced prices for doing your
carrying.
This
same shipping interest, with cormorant rapacity, have steadily burrowed their
way through your legislative halls, until they have saddled the agricultural
classes with a large portion of the legitimate expenses of their own business.
We pay a million of dollars per annum for the lights which guide them into and
out of your ports.
The
North, at the very first Congress, demanded and received bounties under the
name of protection, for every trade, craft, and calling which they pursue, and
there is not an artisan . . . in all of the Northern or Middle States, who has
not received what he calls the protection of his government on his industry to
the extent of from fifteen to two hundred per cent from the year 1791 to this
day. They will not strike a blow, or stretch a muscle, without bounties from
the government.
No
wonder they cry aloud for the glorious Union . . . by it they got their wealth;
by it they levy tribute on honest labor. Thus stands the account between the
North and the South. Under its . . . most favorable action . . . the treasury
[is] a perpetual fertilizing stream to them and their industry, and a
suction-pump to drain away our substance and parch up our lands.
They will [under Lincoln] have
possession of the Federal executive with its vast power, patronage, prestige of
legality, its army, its navy, and its revenue on the fourth of March next.
Hitherto it has been on the side of the Constitution and the right; after the
fourth of March it will be in the hands of your enemy.
What more can you get from them under this Government?” [emphasis added]
In
his first inaugural address, delivered Monday, March 4, 1861, Lincoln threw
down the gauntlet. After declaring that “I have no purpose, directly or
indirectly, to interfere with slavery where it exists…I believe I have no
lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so,” he warned: “The
power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property,
and places belonging to the government, and
to collect the duties and imposts.” [emphasis added]
Professor
Thomas DiLorenzo sums up this volatile economic and constitutional tinderbox:
“Whatever
other reasons some of the Southern states might have given for secession
are irrelevant to the question of why there was a war. Secession
does not necessitate war. Lincoln promised war over tax collection in his
first inaugural address. When the Southern states refused to pay his
beloved Morrill Tariff at the Southern ports [monies that supplied a major
portion of Federal revenues], he kept his promise of ‘invasion and bloodshed’
and waged war on the Southern states.”
The
inability to find compromise in late 1860 and early 1861 must be laid squarely
at the door of the Lincoln administration, as William Marvel has detailed.
Various attempts at finding a compromise (e.g., Crittenden Compromise) and
avoiding war were repeatedly undermined by the administration. “It was Lincoln,
however, who finally eschewed diplomacy and sparked a confrontation,” writes
Marvel. “[H]e backed himself into a corner from which he could escape only by
mobilizing a national army, and thereby fanning the flames of Fort Sumter into
full-scale conflagration.” (p. xvii)
Thus,
it was the intransigence of the Lincoln administration that literally provoked
war, and not the cause of “freeing the slaves.”
In
fact, in the Southern states during the years previous to the outbreak of war
there had been discussion about “the institution,” its future, and its
continuing role in the American nation. Even in South Carolina, probably the
most famous and brilliant theologian of the antebellum South, James Henley
Thornwell, struggled with the issue for years. While staunchly defending the
institution of slavery biblically with solid arguments, he, nevertheless,
continued to search for an all-encompassing and just solution to the question,
but a solution that the South, working by
itself without outside
interference, might find. The late Professor Eugene Genovese, perhaps the
finest recent historian of the antebellum South, has written that Thornwell
attempted “to envision a Christian society that could reconcile–so far as
possible in a world haunted by evil–the conflicting claims of a social order
with social justice and both with the freedom and dignity of the individual.”
The outbreak of war abruptly halted such discussion, making a peaceful solution
practically impossible.
Late
in the conflict (March 13, 1865) the Confederate government authorized the
formation of black military units to fight for the Confederacy, with
manumission to accompany such service. According to several research studies
(see Ervin Jordan, Jr. Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War
Virginia. University of Virginia Press, 1995; Charles Kelly Barrow, J. H.
Segars, and R. B. Rosenburg,Black
Confederates, Pelican Publishing, 2001), thousands of black men fought for
the Confederacy, perhaps as many as 30,000. Despite the earlier declarations of
some Deep South states, would a society ideologically committed to preserving in
toto the peculiar
institution as the reason for war, even in such dire straits, have enacted such
a measure? Did the thousands of black men who fought for the Confederacy
believe they were fighting for slavery?
It
is, of course, easy to read back into a complex context then what appears so right and natural to
us now;
but it does a disservice to history. Understanding the intellectual struggle in
which many Southerners engaged over the issue of slavery, Professor Genovese
cautioned readers about rash judgments based on politically correct presentist
ideas of justice and right, and in several books and numerous essays defended
those leaders of the Old South who were faced with difficult decisions and a
nearly intractable context. And more, he understood as too many writers fail to
do today, that selecting this or that symbol of our collective history,
singling it out for our smug disapprobation and condemnation, may make us feel
good temporarily, but does nothing to address the deeper problems afflicting
our benighted society.
For
an overwhelming majority of contemporary Southerners the Battle Flag is a
symbol of regional pride and an honorable heritage. In recent years it has been
used universally as a symbol of liberty against oppression, including atop the
Berlin Wall in 1989 and by the ethnic Russian freedom fighters in eastern
Ukraine; it has nothing to do intrinsically with “hate” or “prejudice.”
Concerning Dylann Roof, the disturbed lone gunman responsible for the
Charleston shootings, the proper response should be: if a lone rabid fox comes
out of the woods and bites someone, you don’t burn the woods down, you stop the
fox.
But
in the United States today we live in a country characterized by what historian
Thomas Fleming has written afflicted this nation in 1860—“a disease in the
public mind,” that is, a collective madness, lacking in both reflection and
prudential understanding of our history. Too many authors advance willy-nilly
down the slippery slope—thus, if we ban the Battle Flag, why not destroy all
those monuments to Lee and Jackson? And why stop there? Washington and
Jefferson were slave holders, were they not? Obliterate and erase those names
from our lexicon, tear down their monuments, also! Fort Hood, Fort Bragg, Fort
Gordon? Change those names, for they remind us of Confederate generals!
Nathan Bedford Forest lies buried in Memphis? Dig him up and move him to
obscurity! Amazon sells “Gone with Wind?” Well, to quote a writer (June 2015)
at the supposedly “conservative,” Rupert Murdoch-owned New
York Post, it should be banned, too!
It
is a slippery slope, but an incline that in fact represents a not-so-hidden
agenda, a cultural Marxism that seeks to take advantage of tragedy to advance
its own designs which are nothing less than the remaking completely of what
little remains of the Founders’ Old Republic. And, since it is the South that
has been most resistant to such impositions and radicalization, it is the
South, the historic South, which enters the cross hairs as the most tempting
target. And it is the Battle Flag—true, it has been misused on occasion—which
is not just the symbol of Southern pride, but becomes the target of a broad,
vicious, and zealous attack on Western Christian tradition, itself. Those
attacks, then, are only the opening salvo in this renewed cleansing effort,
this new Reconstruction, and those who collaborate with them, good intentions
or not, collaborate with the destruction of our historic civilization. For that
they deserve our scorn and our most vigorous and steadfast opposition.
About Boyd Cathey
Boyd D. Cathey holds
a doctorate in European history from the Catholic University of Navarra,
Pamplona, Spain, where he was a Richard Weaver Fellow, and an MA in
intellectual history from the University of Virginia (as a Jefferson Fellow).
He was assistant to conservative author and philosopher the late Russell Kirk.
In more recent years he served as State Registrar of the North Carolina
Division of Archives and History. He has published in French, Spanish, and
English, on historical subjects as well as classical music and opera. He is
active in the Sons of Confederate Veterans and various historical, archival,
and genealogical organizations.
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