I recommend selecting the PDF option because the text option at least in places relies on a garbled scan. A slightly more convenient version can be found at Archive.org. But the text version there is pretty bad, too.The Civil War was already under way when this book was published. And it's pretty noticeable right there on the booklet's first page that it purports to be about a "slaveholders' conspiracy" and that "the slave aristocracy" was the main enemy to be fought. Obviously, somebody at the time thought the war was about slavery, contrary to what Lost Cause pseudohistory would have us believe. The volume quotes speeches by Col. Andrew Jackson Hamilton, an American officer from Texas,(presumably not related to, but sharing some of the spirit of, the real Andrew Jackson who hated secessionism worse than death), a Texas politician named Lorenzo Sherwood, and publications of a pro-Union organization called the Democratic League for Sustaining the National Unity.
In a speech of October 1862 in New York, Col. Hamilton quotes from a long letter by "a Mr. Spratt, of South Carolina" who he calls "one of the leading spirits" of the Southern rebellion. As Hamilton related Spratt's argument to the crowd:
He said that there was no man who deserved the name of statesmen in the South, who would pretend that Secession was caused by any aggression of the North upon the right of the people of the South. He said it was still less the result of any act of oppression on the part of the United States Government. (italics in original)Spratt seemed to think that labor was in control of the governments in the non-slaves states most of the United States:
What then was then the reason? He said it was because of the difference in the organization of society North and South. It was because in the non-slaveholding States, from the fact that every man was a freeman, you were necessarily Democratic; every man being a freeman, it resulted that the laboring class in the non-slaveholding States had the power in the Government, and it required but little argument to prove that when that was the case, the Government was in the heels of society, because labor was always in excess of the direction of labor; that is to say, there were more laboring men, and there would continue to be, than there were men who by means of their capital directed labor. He said when Government was in the hands of those who direct labor alone, it was in the head of society, where it properly belonged.Even in that formulation, it was the dominance of free labor in the North, i.e., the fact that the free states were not based on a slave system, that was the problem. But Mr. Spratt made it more explicit, according to Hamilton's account:
He was explaining in this letter that the [Confederate] Government at Montgomery, Ala., had failed in meeting the objects of the [Confederate] revolution, because it had not provided for reopening the African slave-trade. Said he, it will involve the necessity of another revolution. Here is the evil; here are the laboring men, and they are in the majority, too, who wield the power in the Government. They vote at the ballot-box, and from the premises that I have laid down you will perceive that slavery and Democracy are incompatible. [Loud cheering.] [my emphasis]I'll inject here that I do not have the original text by Spratt available, so I can't say how accurately Col. Hamilton is relating Spratt's arguments. But Hamilton in his presentation of Spratt's argument is clearly presenting slavery to his Northern audience as the key issue in the contest between the Union and the Confederacy. And he presents it as a contest between democracy and slavery, two incompatible bases of society.
Hamilton goes on to describe his own prewar attitude, which was a widespread one in the North. He said he would not have been willing for the national government to initiate a war for the purposes of abolishing slavery where it existed. But, he says:
The question has been changed. It is not what it was two years ago. There was no party then who sought more than simply to protect slavery under the laws, and when the experiment of secession was being entered upon, I said to them: Do not enter upon it. If you do, you will inevitably destroy the institution; it is laying the knife to the throat of slavery. (italics in original)One of the pseudohistorial Lost Cause arguments is that the war couldn't have been about slavery because so many Northerners didn't care about slavery. Col. Hamilton here explains how a Northerner could be opposed to active measures to destroy slavery where it existed but also able to see that slavery itself was hateful and that the South was motivated by their defense of slavery to secede from the Union, however foolish a choice that might be for the slaveowners in a more objective sense.
His description of how non-slaveowning Southerners were persuaded to go along with secession to the extent they did is also intriguing:
Every artifice was used. Minds had been poisoned through a long series of years. It had got to be a fashion to out-Herod Herod in maintaining that not only was slavery a divine institution, but one of the brightest evidences of the perfection of that wisdom that created all good - [Laughter] - and even those whose mission it ought to have been to spread the doctrine of peace on earth and good-will toward men, to spend their time in the pulpit proving that it was an institution ordained by God. I have about the same opinion of some in the North who spent their time in proving that it originated in hell. [Laughter.] My simple, unregenerate view of the subject was, that God knows best, and that it was permitted, for some wise, inscrutable purpose; and that, when that had been accomplished, it would, by the very same power, cease. The public mind was poisoned. The argument was: The only way you can stop the Northern people, is to go out of the Union; and if you go out now they will soon begin to beg for your own terms for reconstruction. [my emphasis]Again, this is a great example of skepticism or outright hostility to the Abolitionists combined with a recognition that slavery was the issue that drove the Confederate states to secede.
O'Reilly, the editor, also reports of Hamilton's speech:
He spoke on behalf of the once enfranchised free white man of the South. Whether slavery was compatible with Democracy or not, the leaders of the rebellion intended to save slavery, whether Democracy was saved or not.This position was entirely compatible with a prewar indifference to slavery, even with a great deal of racism to African-Americans free and slave - most white Americans presumably had quite a bit of that attitude. Here he frames slavery as the issue not in moralistic terms of slavery being an evil and a sin, but in terms of the danger that the institution of slavery represented to the freedom of white Americans. Whether Yankees loved black people - most of them did not in any meaningful sense of the word - is not at all a determining factor in recognizing that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War.
If we did not accept the issue, it would be forced upon us.
The liberties of the North were inseparably bound up with those of the South. If secession should become an accomplished fact, he could see no safety for republicanism on this continent. (italics in original)
Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, slavery
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