Patito de Hule

I think we could all agree that slavery was the main cause of the civil war. Or, as Davis said, slavery was the occasion but not the cause.

But there are a lot of issues that can be teased out of it.
1. In the nullification crisis, the issue was the tariff of 1828. How did slavery become entangled in that issue? It did, and it became one of the crises in the buildup to the civil war.

2. The Webster-Hayne debates arose over a resolution about temporary suspension of surveying new lands until some land in Ohio was sold. The second reply of Webster is one of the most eloquent speeches in the history of Congress. It was about the "nation" concept of the U.S. And how did slavery come up in this sectional issue.

The first of these had to do with tariff and was contrary to the south's cotton exportation. The second had to do with the expansion of slavery west. Both were vital economic issues to the south and related to the economic viability of slavery. But obviously, the deep issue was a manufacturing north opposed to a plantation economy in the south. This was a very large part of Jeff Davis's point.

But my question still remains. Was DuBois' argument essentially correct as summarized in the two quotes I posted?

Rongo

I guess this is where you're confusing me. I see the two sentences above as contradictory. In the first sentence, you're saying "slavery was the main cause of the civil war." In the second sentence, you're saying it was "not the cause".

Patito de Hule

Davis would see the sentences as contradictory. I see the difference as semantic. It's a quibble on Davis's part.

Davis is trying to minimize the effect of slavery as a cause in his book, sure. But he was trying to say there was a much deeper cause--that the sectional differences between the North and South were so deep that a breakup was the only solution left.

Consider the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, for example. Davis cites those as sectional differences and as partial justification in secession. I'm not at all sure I can agree about those being sectional issues, but Davis saw them as such. Again, states' rights are cited as a reason and I can't believe that that was a sectional issue. The south was on the wrong side of the states' rights issue when it came to the fugitive slave law, weren't they?

So I don't necessarily agree with Davis, but I think he has a valid position and that is why I chose to juxtapose the two statements which do clash even though they aren't necessarily contradictory.

Rongo

Well, personally I see it as nothing but an attempt by Davis to rewrite history many years after the fact. He made no bones about where he stood on slavery before and during the war, like in this address to the Provisional Confederate Congress:

He goes on in this speech to talk about the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, but only as a legal justification for the act of unilateral secession. The reason for secession he had already made clear in the passage above: to protect "interests of such overwhelming magnitude".

laketahoejwb

hello patito:

A chicken or egg story. ..... The south wanted the Plantation system which needed slaves. The North didn't and couldn't compete with "big cotton" and tobacco and needed an excuse to force the Plantations to play fair and eliminate slavery. The South chose to succeed and the North said No, No, ....The United States is not to be broken into many countries like europe and continue to fight wars among them. ... We still argue about the Constitutionally of all this.

Patito de Hule

Hi yourself. I'm going to miss my trips to the Reno area now that my mother's gone and her property sold. I removed your formatting in the quote so I could read on my screen, not out of any objection to your choices.

I had prepared a reply instead of eating breakfast, but lost my train of thought through interruptions. Now I'm going to eat breakfast.

But my whole idea of chicken/egg is that in the South there was a complex society of aristocracy, white lower class (called "crackers" in the 1860's lit I'm reading, but "rednecks" by 1900), and the slave class. Slavery couldn't have existed in the South without the culture that built up around it nor could the culture have developed without slavery.

In the North there were a labor class and industrial class that resulted in a rapidly changing dynamic. They both were neutral about slavery but opposed to freeing the slaves. Their dynamic changed and developed rapidly after secession.

Patito de Hule

He wrote his book 20 years after secession. And it was revisionist since the standard historiography of secession at the time was (both north and south) that it was because of slavery. Volume I is a rant about the abuses of the North and the sectional differences.

Every one of these sectional differences became embroiled in the Slavery issue. The differences were:
1. The slave-dependent plantation economy and the not necessarily slave-dependent agrarian economy (an ideal in the south and midwest) as opposed to the burgeoning industrial economy of the North.
2. The tariff, needed for a growing industrial economy but disadvantageous to a southern economy dependent on exports of agricultural materials and import of manufactured items.
3. Form of government. The south was over represented in the federal government because of the 3/5 rule. Their aristocracy was even more over-represented in the state government. Note: it was that aristocracy that had the most to lose by abolition.
4. Class conflict (to use a Marxian flavored vocabulary). In the North it was between Labor/industry, and within labor it was nativist/immigrant/freedmen. In the South the social structure involved a powerful aristocracy/lower class whites/slaves. Class conflicts in the two regions took them in different directions so that the poor whites of the South did not mesh with the labor class of the North and the Aristocracy did not correspond well to the industrial class of the North.

So what Davis was trying to say is that these sectional differences were the real deep reason for the secession. Slavery was an issue that intruded itself into every issue that came before the national government. Even such things as the Foot bill that developed into the Webster-Hayne debates over national v. state sovereignty.

That is the revisionism of Davis's book. As to its historical value, it has little except for the insight into Davis's thinking on secession and the conduct of the Confederate government. Even the insight on his POV in defending himself against his southern critics.

Rongo

The flaw in Davis' logic there is that the West had much more in common with the South than it did with the North. If sectionalism was the main cause of the conflict, California, Oregon, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Indiana would have been fighting alongside the Confederacy, not the Union. What separated the South from both the West and the North was one thing, and one thing only: slavery.

That's not to say that sectionalism wasn't a factor though. The secessionists played on sectional differences to motivate non-slaveholding Southerners to go along with secession and to fight their war. Those sectional differences were very real, but it was the exaggeration of those differences by the slaveholding elite that elevated them to the level that men would fight and die over them.

laketahoejwb

Patito:

The N-S conflict has been considered on many threads in our forum but gut feelings are appropriate when it turns to the impacts of the hometown folks.

Backing up a bit, The North mainly came from the Industrial culture of the the Londoners. Where as the Plantations were an outgrowth of the Manor houses including the Cotswolds’’, (IMHO). I think that this introduced a built in prejudices as the Manner House land owners had to have servants and the Poor Londoners were workers , farmers and the poor among industrialism. Ratcheting this up to the 1860 US, Slaves were looked upon in the North as apposed to the South. At this there is a seam of religious conflict on both sides and John Brown is belting his Anti-Slavery preaching. What I am saying here is that the north was little dependent on the slave but resented the market advantages particularly exporting to Britain that the slave brought to the plantations.

To survive, the South had to have Slaves and moved to succession. From the North agrarian perspective, the Plantation had a unfair market advantage and Slavery wasn’t allowed in the Bible. These two irreconcilable differences led to a war resolution with the North having an overwhelming resource advantages.

In summary , (IMHO) it was Northern individualistic farmers vs The Plantations.

Different Subject.
Sorry to hear that your mothers is gone. Hope to have you back here to bless us all.

… I chose the screen font to ease us old timers read, particularly to make the Quote much easier. Let me know of your preference and we will try it out. The women in the forum must approve it also. The young chaps like EoR can have a say also but they get only a limited vote.

Patito de Hule

What those midwestern states had was economic dependence on the North:



Texas and Arkansas probably would have gone Union but for their economic dependence on the South. They almost did until Lincoln called for troops. Look at the connections between New Orleans and Richmond or even Charleston. One railroad from Chicago already had reached Winona, MN, but for building a bridge over the river. And even where a man could travel along a single rail on this map, he had to stop and switch railroads multiple times along the trip. The economic differences almost overrode the slavery issue, and some would assert that they did override those differences.

Another critical difference was the form of government. South Carolina in particular was a very aristocratic state. Jacksonian democracy was a sham in the Piedmont. This tied into slavery, sure. The state government was controlled in South Carolina by only 7% of the white population, those who had a large number of slaves. If the upper midwest had gone with the Confederacy they would have had even less say in Confederate Congress than they had in the U. S. congress.

Arizona did in fact have an Arizona Confederate Territorial faction. Because they were more economically dependent on the South. The Oklahomans contributed Indians to both sides. Again they had economic connections to the South. Missouri, which had a plantation economy along the Missouri River between St. Louis and Kansas City but remained Loyal above and below the river. They and the other three border states remained Union in spite of the fact that they were slave states.

Davis had a valid POV when he pointed to sectional differences, including but not restricted to slavery, between the two sections. Slavery was abolished, "as a war measure" said Lincoln, but the sectional differences remained in a weakened form until the migrations of the depression and war years.

EDIT: Source of the map is Carteret County Schools