The pro-Confederate view of history, also known as the Lost Cause ideology, insists that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War. Instead, in that view, the war was fought primarily over the issue of states rights. One of the main set-pieces in this argument is the Nullification Controversy of 1831-32, during Old Hickory's first Administration.
Briefly, the federal Tariff of 1828 was extremely unpopular in South Carolina. Many South Carolina leaders threatened to "nullify" the tariff, arguing that a state could impose its authority to block the implementation of a federal law it rejected. The dispute escalated to a point where a military confrontation threatened. Through the compromise efforts of Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, President Jackson secured from Congress both a reduction of the disputed tariffs and a Force Bill expressly authorizing him to use military force to put down state defiance of the federal law.
Lost Cause advocates love to point to this as a key event leading to the secession of 1861, though it occurred three decades earlier. In the Lost Cause view, this was an instance where the Southern states were grouped against a sectional bloc of Northern states, the latter using national power in the form of Jackson and the Force Act to impose an unconstitutional law on a state. And the issue here was a sectional one focused on tariffs, not slavery.
So the argument goes. But it has several obvious problems. Why does one need to go back 30 years before secession for such an example? Because every other major North-South confrontation from 1833 to 1860 had slavery as an explicit issue. Why does the Lost Cause dogma prefer to gloss over the fact that Jackson was a Southerner and a slaveowner and his movement was primarily based in the South? Because those facts are reminders that the controversy was not at all exclusively a North-vs.-South sectional issue.
Also, it's a matter of some serious dispute among real historians - not just a phony pseudohistorical issue made up by ideologues - as to whether the Nullification Controversy was really primarily about tariffs.
The South Carolina radicals certainly realized that the issue could come to a head over slavery. It had already come up in the slavery controversy settled by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. In 1831, the Nat Turner Rebellion had scared the Slave Power into a near frenzy. And that same year, free farmers from western Virginia forced the legislature to begin what became the last serious free debate about abolishing slavery in the states that eventually joined the Confederacy. (The debate was not "free" to slaves, of course.) The Slave Power felt increasingly on the defensive.
John C. Calhoun, Old Hickory's main opponent on the nullification issue, anonymously authored a pamphlet called The South Carolina Exposition which the defiant South Carolina legislature published. In it, Calhoun argued that the tariff controverysy was merely the occasion for demanding the right of nullification. The real issue was defending the "peculiar institution of the Southern States," i.e., slavery.
Jackson later said from his deathbed that he regretted that he hadn't hanged Calhoun for treason over the nullification incident. "My country would have sustained me in the act, and his fate would have been a warning to traitors in all time to come." (And you think political rhetoric today is harsh!) And Jackson was a Southern political leader who saw the issue of secession as being something other than a purely sectional issue. What Jackson the Southern President said in his proclamation to the people of South Carolina in December, 1832, was:
Those who told you that you might peaceably prevent [the] execution [of the laws] deceived you; they could not have been deceived themselves. They know that a forcible opposition could alone prevent the execution of the laws, and they know that such opposition must be repelled. The object is disunion. But be not deceived by names. Disunion by armed force is treason. Are you really ready to incur its guilt?That's what patriotic American Southerners thought of secession - in 1832 and in 1861.
No wonder old Jackson Democrats during the war used to grumble that if the General were still around, the slaveowners would never have dared to try seceding.
And no wonder the Lost Cause crowd doesn't like to recall great Southerners like Andy Jackson very often. That part of their "heritage" they would prefer not to remember, much less "honor."
But there was another major North-South controversy during Jackson's Presidency, one in which the vote in Congress was even more clear-cut than on the Nullification Controversy. That was the Indian Removal Act of 1830, in which slavery figured as a very minor issue, if at all.
Yet the silence about this Act from the Lost Cause crowd is deafening, even though it involved a North-South sectional controversy and national power vs. state rights, and slavery was not an issue. Wouldn't this be a perfect example for the Lost Cause argument that the Civil War was a sectional controversy over state rights, and slavery had nothing to do with it?
Well, it would. Except for one little catch. In this case, it was the Southerners, both in Congress and the Presidency, who were pressing for the use of national power to remove Indian tribes from lands coveted by the American whites. And they were willing to override states rights to achieve it. While that wasn't a central argument in the debate, Northern opponents of the bill mocked the Southerners for their willingness to overlook states rights when it was a measure they favored.
Over the following 30 years, there would be other occasions when the Slave Power would be willing to sacrifice the principle of states rights for the preservation of their "sacred institutions of slavery and white supremacy." And for "Southern honor," of course - though not a brand Old Hickory would have recognized as such.
See: Full text of 1832 Proclamation to the People of South Carolina
Tags: american civil war, andrew jackson, john c calhoun, lost cause, nullification controversy
1 comment:
Interesting article, but I don't buy it. The "War between the States" was primarily an economic war, and was fostered by international interests, who were delighted at the opportunity to weaken and control the United States of America. And, incidentally, the post Civil War amendments represented a hidden agenda.
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