We’re pleased to welcome back guest-poster Kathleen Logothetis….
I recently attended a session at the American Association for State and Local History conference in Richmond, Virginia that caused me to reflect on the history we present to the public. The session, titled “Secession and the Confederacy: Issues for Local History Sites,” focused on the fact that “many Americans still greatly misunderstand secession and the coming of the war” (taken from the session description). The panelists come from a wide range of backgrounds—Chair Dr. Marty Blatt is the Chief of Cultural Resources/Historian at Boston NHP; John Coski is the Director of Library and Research at the Museum of the Confederacy; James Loewen is a professor of sociology and author of The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader; and Dwight Pitcaithley is the former Chief Historian of the National Park Service—but all offered a united point of view on the cause of the Civil War: Slavery is the answer.
And they have a point. Many of the secession conventions and declarations specifically pointed to slavery as the cause of their secession. South Carolina, leader of the secession movement, speaks largely of the ability of independent states to break away from the Union and Constitution to protect their rights—which could lead to the claim that state’s rights caused secession. The rights they are referring to? Slavery:
The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.
The government had broken its responsibility to uphold the fugitive slave law laid out in the fourth Article of the Constitution; since the agreement of the Constitution had been broken, the states had every right to break away to protect their interests. The declaration points to “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, [which] has led to a disregard of their obligations” despite the Constitution’s affirmation and protection of slavery.
Virginia’s Ordinance of Secession speaks to the “oppression of the Southern slaveholding States,” and the second sentence of Georgia’s declaration states, “For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slaveholding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.”
Perhaps Mississippi said it best:
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.… There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
So yeah, secession was about slavery, whichever way you want to package it.
However, if you listen to the public, slavery is one of a variety of answers, and it is not always the answer that comes first or most often. States’ rights is most often put forward as the cause of secession with Lincoln’s election, economic and cultural factors, and the settlement of the west also earning some votes. Scholars and historians may put forward a (mostly) unified answer that slavery was the cause of secession, but the public will not.
Civil War sites have to find ways to work through this divide, because no matter what you interpret at your site, or how, visitors will always ask the question: “What caused the Civil War?”
Those of us who have worked at a Civil War site know that that question is not always a simple one to answer and that there are multiple ways it can be asked. There are those visitors who ask it as a test. They are seeing if the staff member answers the question correctly so they can then ask more questions or, if unsatisfied, move onto someone else who is “smarter” or “better informed.”
There are those who direct it as a challenge. They want to argue with someone to make their point heard, so they are gearing up in their heads while you make your answer so they can correct you and make you see the “truth.”
And then there are those visitors who simply are asking the question because they can’t remember, don’t know, or are confused about what they have heard. These visitors can sometimes be tough to handle, but the lesson learned is that as much as we historians want there to be one version of history, there never really will be. Everyone comes in the door with different knowledge, different traditions, different pre-conceived notions, and different educational backgrounds, and they come to a historical site for different reasons. Some will be willing to learn something new, some won’t.
History IS essentially his-story; stories that are told and retold over time, changing over time and from place to place. Even the stories in our museums and sites change; it’s called changes in interpretation. It is like classic fairy tales; the story is the same and recognizable in all its renditions, but details change in different cultures.
Of course, our job as historians and interpreters is to educate people about the full picture, about the stories we believe contain the full truth as we see it. Part of this is understanding where different theories about the causes of secession come from and having a good argument in place to talk to those visitors who are willing to listen and think about it. Part of it is encouraging people to “check their ancestors at the door” and be willing to be open minded as they visit your site or museum. Part of this is realizing (as most of us do) that this issue is still alive and able to flare passions; sometimes you cannot win. And part of it is realizing that the stories and backgrounds that these visitors bring with them is just as much history and part of our stories as the information contained in our tours and exhibits.
Perhaps history should be shared instead of just taught. Listen to them and maybe they will listen to us.
Yes, secession is all about slavery, and each of the other answers commonly given all point back to slavery, but not everyone believes that. Finding out why just might be the more rewarding experience than proving to a visitor that you know what you are talking about.
I think a big part of the reason why the public does not always understand that the Civil War is about slavery is because the the popularity of bogus neo-Confederate views of the Civil War among the general populace. Another aspect is because the economic and “states’ rights’ ” arguments themselves in the end circle back to slavery in ways that aren’t always straightforward. For example, the South was until 1857 very fond of the use of federal power to expand slavery–the unconstitutional hostility to the right to petition Congress against slavery led to the gag rule, as well as the act of judicial tyranny that led Chief Justice Taney to declare in Dred Scot (against legal precedent and abundant historical evidence) that blacks had no rights of citizenship, and had never had such rights, within the United States when they had voted for the Constitution in at least five Northern states in the 1780′s. It was only after the rise of the Republican party in the North, and the understanding that pro-slavery Democrats could be a permanent minority based on the sectionalism of slavery, that the South switched to the “State’s rights’ ” position not out of belief, but rather out of tactics. An understanding of American history will show that all parties on the “outs” in Washington DC have utilized the tactic of states’ rights at some point or another–even the Federalists did in the early 1800′s, and few people were theoretically more friendly to the increased power of the federal government than they were.
Of course, we must remember as well, in explaining how slavery is the cause of the Civil War, that this did not assume any kind of moral excellence on the part of slavery opponents. Many free-soilers in the North, who became staunch supporters of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, were of far from enlightened views on blacks. Many in the Midwest did not want blacks in their states or in the new territories of the West, whether slave or free. It was the fact that slavery tended to depress the wages of free white workers, as well well as the threat of slaves to break strikes and lead to a loss of rights for poor whites (as had occurred in the South, in Richmond’s premier iron works, for example, as well as in Southern railroad construction) that led many poor whites to oppose slavery on economic grounds, despite a strong unwillingness to consider blacks as equal. So, yes, however you slice it, slavery was the cause of the Civil War. Nonetheless, the unwillingness of neo-Confederates to allow their precious ancestors to be tarred with the brush of supporting so nakedly and so brutally such a wicked and abominable institution, as well as the fact that the opposition of much of the North to the institution was not founded on moral hatred to slavery but on naked self-interest, makes the issue much more difficult for the general public to really understand. Our loss.
Thank you for this thought provoking piece. I am a Northener and a relatively new student of the Civil War. For a long time I just couldn’t figure out why intelligent, moral people in the South supported slavery. That decorated officers like Lee and so many others, educated in the North or at US military academies, could essentially commit treason to support the South baffled me. I knew these people weren’t monsters yet they supported a monstrous thing.
I don’t recall where I read it, but an article acknowledging slavery as the cause of the CW enlightened me. It discussed the child labor/sweat shop conditions of the North, and the terrible plight of those who lived in urban slums where disease and crime reigned. To Southeners, Northern moralizing about slavery must have felt very hypocritical. After all, they fed, clothed, doctored and sheltered their slaves, and provided care for life when they were too old to work. Obviously most Southerners didn’t own slaves, just like most Northeners didn’t think chaining a 7 year-old to a loom was a wonderful idea. But both lived in a country where these abominations were a fact of life. Both tolerated these injustices as “just the way it is.” So for one section of that country to upbraid the other on moral grounds must have been unbearable, and led to a knee-jerk defense of a way of life. And as Nathanalbright points out above, much of this Northern outrage was really just economic self interest, futher fueling Southern indignation.
I think a peculiar and admirable characteristic of Americans in general is that we have always despised hypocrisy in a very visceral way. We decry the bankers who took bailouts and gave themselves huge bonuses, and environmentalists who fly around in private jets and live in 20,000 square foot mansions. Europeans think we’re quaint because of this, but I hope we never become jaded.
You and Nathanal have brought up some great points. I would also think some has to do with where you grew up. If you were in the north you knew one way, in the south another. So it would be foreign for many of the people of the era to have or not have slaves, depending where they grew up and or lived.
To compare it to sports, you grow up around Green Bay and you are a Packers fan. Why are you a Packers fan because your whole family is, your friends are, and you’re from Green Bay why would you be anything else?
My experience has been that people who deny that slavery played a crucial role in bringing about the Civil War are defending 1860-era Southerners, and perhaps themselves, from what they perceive to be 1860′s Northern self-righteousness. If the war was about slavery, then Northerners were good and right and Southerners were bad and wrong.
In the North, the war began as a fight to save the Union. In the South, the war began as a fight to save Slavery. The conflict should not be characterized as the good Northerners against the bad Southerners. When we say today, however, that slavery played a crucial role in bringing about the war, I believe that some hear it as this kind of value judgment, even though that is not what is intended.
Raymond
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