Re: north, south, and racist laws… when my grandparents moved to the US, their marriage wasn’t recognized by their state because my grandfather was presumed to be non-White (he was Hungarian Roma and thus very dark skinned) and my grandmother was as lily white as they come. They lived in Nebraska. They were living there when the law was repealed in the early 60s.
The attack on Fort Sumter was war, not the cause of war. The cause of the battle was secession. The cause of secession was the idea among secessionist states that the United States under political control by Lincoln and the Republican party might actually abolish slavery via government policy. All the other ideas about tariffs, state’s rights, etc. being the cause of the civil war are peripheral to the proximate cause being slavery. So peripheral that these non-slavery reasons hardly deserve mention.
I completely agree that the Confederate states didn’t have a monopoly on racism in 1861 and that some citizens of the Confederate states didn’t like the idea of slavery. However, majority ruled the day in the secessionist conventions.
^ romani is right. Most northern and western states had “anti-miscegenation laws” prohibiting mixed-race marriage or cohabitation, or in some cases interracial sexual relations of any kind. The only states never to have had such laws were Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Alaska and Hawaii. Some were repealed early on, e.g., Pennsylvania in 1780, but many persisted in northern states (including Nebraska) until the 1950s or 1960s. All the northern and western states eventually repealed those laws or had them overturned by state courts, but similar laws persisted in 17 southern states until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia (1967) that marriage is a fundamental civil right, and denial of the right to marry on the basis of racial classifications violated 14th amendment due process.
“The south has nothing to be proud of in the causes of secession and the Civil War, but it is not like the north should get a free pass either.”
Agree. Especially since there were several slave holding states on the Union side. The economies of those border states were not nearly as dependent on slave labor as the deep South. So the economic stakes for the border states were not high enough to warrant secession.
Ultimately, both sides (as is typical) were fighting over power and money. Not morality in the form of (i) abolitionist racial equality or (ii) a vision of a Madisonian federalist utopia. Grubby on both sides.
To add on to what bc said, it’s also worth noting that it was Western and Northern states that also had laws against Asians and other non-White groups whereas the South tended to leave it to just no Black-White mixing. (Of course, there are very specific historic and demographic reasons for this but I think it’s interesting).
As a not-so-fun fact, the last state to repeal specific anti-Roma laws was New Jersey… in 1998. It was in a law that regulated “Gypsies” along with cars, meat, etc.
Of course, with that said, even states that have a legacy of x, y, or z laws and issues do not necessarily represent the beliefs of current residents. However, we must not let history be rewritten to make it rosier than it was just so we can feel pride in our birth or adopted state.
“Of course, with that said, even states that have a legacy of x, y, or z laws and issues do not necessarily represent the beliefs of current residents. However, we must not let history be rewritten to make it rosier than it was just so we can feel pride in our birth or adopted state.”
That’s precisely what I feel goes on when I hear the “but the north was’t perfect!” Well, duh.
^ Yes, this. Just read the statements made by the seceding Southern states explaining their reasons for seceding. It’s all about slavery. They spun it in different ways: some cited the refusal of northern states to enforce the federal Fugitive Slave Act. Others cited the failure of northern states to control abolitionists who actively sought to undermine slavery, inter alia by encouraging and assisting slaves to escape. Some claimed the right to hold slaves was guaranteed to them by the federal Constitution, and/or by the contractual terms on which they had agreed to enter the Union, and they argued the northern states were “subverting” the Constitution by failing to respect these guarantees. Some cited the election of Lincoln whom they described as an avowed opponent of slavery (which he wasn’t, at least not straightforwardly so, though his famous 'House divided" speech certainly suggested that he thought slavery would eventually have to go if it didn’t fall of its own accord). Some cited efforts by northern states to prevent the spread of slavery in the west, which they viewed as a conspiracy to tip the national political balance in favor of anti-slavery forces as a means to achieve abolition of slavery on a national scale.
In my reading of these documents, the only mention of protectionist taxes, tariffs, and subsidies for northern industries I have found appears in Georgia’s declaration of secession, which discusses those issues wholly in the past tense. It states that northern sectional interests lost that battle once and for all with the Tariff of 1846, when southern and western legislators joined forces to decisively pass a bill reflecting principles of “free trade, low duties, and economy in public expenditures” long sought by the South. The document then goes on to argue that it was only after northern sectional politicians had lost on the protectionism issue that they took up the cause of anti-slavery as a new way to rally public support in the north. So if Georgia’s declaration got its current events right, tariffs and protectionism were no issues at all by the time of secession and the onset of the Civil War, because the southern states had decisively won on those issues–though they certainly had been a source of sectional division earlier in the nation’s history.
You can find some of the declarations of reasons for secession here:
http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/primarysources/declarationofcauses.html
@romanigypsyeyes - The Chinese exclusion act a classic. Not one of our most shining moments. And let’s not forget “no dogs or Irish allowed” - though anti Irish (and other immigrants of the 1840s ) discrimination was rarely a legal issue, it did lead to a political party, the know nothing party
@bclintonk - nice work with primary sources, that’s something I always recommend to my students. You are right rage tariffs were not often directly cited in 1861, primary b/c the south had already “won” much of what they wanted through the series of compromises that characterized American politics from the 1820s on. (Missouri is where we start to unravel) however -'tariffs did lead to talk of secession long before slavery, with the Virginia and Kentuxky resolutions, and the crisis that surrounded the tariff of abominations. As I said earlier, if the south had left then, and the north fought to prevent it (which Andrew Jackson certainly would have done) many historians feel they might have won the war.
The so called reasons for many historians who are attempting to use to justify the civil war are quite lame and can be easily refuted. Power (political and economic), States rights, taxes and tariffs are just excuses being offered by the Confederate apologists to revise history. The bottom line is that without slavery there would not have been a war at least not a remotely competitive one. The South would not have had any reasonable resources to assemble an Army or Army facilities put up a fight against the North. How could anyone possibly believe that without the enslavement of black people the South would have had such huge government treasuries? The South would have been slaughtered without such “Free” resources or they would not have had the courage to even put up a fight.
@Proud3894 - I can only speak for myself, not other posters, but I would certainly never deny that slavery was a huge part of the reason for the Civil War. You are right that without slavery the war (certainly the war we know) would not have happened. It became an issue where compromise (attempted for decades) became impossible. Slavery became a symbol for two different economic and ideological systems that developed within this nation. However it was not only issue which divides the north and south before, during, and after the Civil War
It really does shock me to know that our United States, with a collective shared history, is unable to present a factual historical account to educate the children of our entire country.
I
Texans are only happy to gloss over slavery but I bet if someone tried to downplay the importance of the Alamo they would blow a gasket.
From the end of the Civil War in 1865 until the early 1900s, it was accepted that the war was primarily about slavery. It wasn’t until the great revisions of the 1910s and 1920s that the textbook authors looked for the existence of other disagreements that were around 1860 and elevated them to the status of “other causes of the war.” If you find an 1885 textbook, the war was over slavery. By 1925 it became about states rights and a few other things (like slavery).
Texas, based on their statewide standard curriculum, holds disproportionate sway on a national level and has not stopped rewriting history.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html?_r=0
Embarrassing.
The centrality of slavery as a cause of the CW is obvious if you look at votes by county. Georgia for example had a vote on whether to secede or not. The farmland counties voted overwhelmingly to secede. The mountainous counties where there were few slaves voted either to remain in the union or voted by very all majorities to leave.
“States’ rights” was not a different rationale for secession, it was just a euphemism.
BTW @pizzagirl in the list of ways the South codified racism, we should add separate washers and dryers in public laundromats. We went up to SC for vacation in the 1970s and went into one where there were signs on the machines as to whether the machine was for the clothes of whites or blacks. Because dirt and grass stains were completely different if the person wearing the clothing was a different race, amirite??
Awful. Just awful.
If the South was fighting for slavery, why didn’t the Southern states take Lincoln up on his offer to ratify the Corwin Amendment and preserve slavery forever? Ohio, Illinois, and Maryland ratified it immediately, but when it became apparent the Southern states wouldn’t return it died.
The reason, of course, is that slavery was one issue among many. And it is important that we teach that Lincoln was willing to have slavery permanently guaranteed as an express right under the Constitution. I’m glad to see that Texas is insisting on textbooks teaching the truth rather than a bunch of Northern propaganda.
Note that seven of the seceding states had already seceded by the time the Corwin amendment was passed by Congress.
However, it was the biggest of many issues, not a side issue. The seceding states’ governments own words in 1861 said so: http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/primarysources/declarationofcauses.html
South Carolina in its declaration of causes of secession did make a big deal about states’ rights in the abstract, but later makes it clear that slavery was the most important of them.