The Expansion of Slavery or States’ Rights?

In my various interactions with promoters of the winners’ version of the Civil War, I often hear that the South and the Confederacy desired to expand slavery into the western territories, to reignite the slave trade, and generally to create a republic built upon slave labor; and that they left the Union to protect slavery and its extension into the territories. In contrast, the Northern Republicans desired to limit slavery due to moral issues.

Well-informed, unreconstructed Southerners know full well that the Republican agenda was born not from moral outrage against slavery but rather from wanting to keep blacks out of the western territories. Some Northern states banned blacks from even entering their jurisdiction, others had discriminatory and restrictive laws directed and enforced against black people, and none wanted to compete with black slave labor in the west. The west was to be kept for whites to live off Republican federal land grants, and to become industrialized. Southern agrarians were to be fenced into the South; otherwise, they would bring their despised black slaves along with them. On October 16, 1854, Lincoln stated, “The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these (new western) territories. We want them for the homes of free white people.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson criticized abolitionist rhetoric, saying it sounded more like the black man was to be abolished than that slavery was.

“We, the Republican Party, are the white man’s party. We are for the free white man, and for making white labor acceptable and honorable, which it can never be when Negro slave labor is brought into competition with it.” -Lyman Trumbull, Illinois Republican United States Senator, quoted in The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War by Kenneth M. Stampp Oxford U Press 1981

The fight over whether the territories would outlaw slavery or allow their citizens the choice to own slaves or not was economic and political, not moral. The same antagonism would occur were the territories to be obligatorily declared industrial, tariff-promoting, or internal-improvement-supporting. Likewise, the North would complain if those territories were federally forced to adopt low tariffs, to be agrarian, anti-industrial, and opposed to internal improvement and agricultural colleges. The point is that either way if the federal government were involved it would be a violation of both sectors, favoring one culture and society over another while also violating states’ rights and expanding its power beyond the written constitution, thereby nullifying the document.

Further, the various compromises, such as the Missouri Compromise and the later 1850 Compromise, were just that: compromises, not ideals, but lesser evils accepted so as to hold the Union together. For example, the 1850 compromise was created by Whig senator and Lincoln idol Henry Clay, and by a Democrat from Illinois, Steven A. Douglas, who was a supporter of the Union during the Civil War until his early death. These sorts of compromises were between the Whigs and the Democrats of that time; they hardly tell us what the Confederacy and the South in 1860 were thinking.

It was not the Whig Party or any compromise that led to secession; rather, it was the rise of the Republican Party in 1854 and Lincoln’s election in 1860 that led to disunion. The 1860 election had four major political parties, and it was the Southern Democrats that won the entire Deep South, all the original seceding states, as well as North Carolina and Arkansas (Virginia and Tennessee, as well as Kentucky, went for the Constitutional party, attempting to maintain the Union as a priority). None of the Confederate States went for Douglas or the Northern Democrats, thus showing us a unified, localized Southern platform on the issue of slavery expansion. And the 1860 Southern Democrat platform declared (my emphasis):

That when the settlers in a Territory, having an adequate population, form a State Constitution, the right of sovereignty commences, and being consummated by an admission into the Union, they stand on an equal footing with the people of other States, and the State thus organized ought to be admitted into the Federal Union, whether its Constitution prohibits or recognizes the institution of slavery. -Southern Democrat Party Platform 1860

 Their declared goal was that the states themselves decide, not the federal government. They were for the extension of states’ rights, regardless of whether those states adopted slavery as an option for their people.

Whether all the States composing the United States should be slaveholding or non-slaveholding States, neither the Northern nor Southern States ought to have permitted to be a question in the politics of the United States.” -Report of the Committee on Foreign Affairs C.S.A. 1861- Provided by the Abbeville Institute September 4, 2014

So we see we cannot say the South wanted to extend slavery regardless of states’ rights; no, they wanted to extend states’ rights regardless of slavery! Slavery was not the ideal, states’ rights were.

The Confederacy and Slavery

We also see the ideals of the South more clearly in its constitution. That constitution was a reaction to Northern federal intrusion on states’ rights. It aimed to maintain the equality of states within the new confederacy, ensuring that no one section was pitted against another, embraced fiscally libertarian policies and established a decentralized structure that clearly placed sovereignty with the states. It weakened central power and strengthened state control, positioning states above the national government.

Senator Albert Brown of Mississippi had stated prior to the war that “Each state is sovereign within its own limits, and each for itself can abolish or establish slavery for itself,”and so it was in the Confederacy, further regarding new territories that might join the confederacy,  “New States formed out of territory now belonging to the United States, or which may be hereafter acquired, shall be admitted into the Union with or without slavery as the people thereof may determine at the time of admission.” The Confederacy was created inter alia to defend principles such as these.

Also, the Confederate Constitution outlawed the importation of slaves (except from within the United States). Individual states made similar provisions, for example the 1861 Mississippi state constitution reads, “The introduction of slaves into this State as merchandise, or for sale, shall be prohibited.” Georgia’s state constitution says, “The importation or introduction of negroes from any foreign country, other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America, is forever prohibited.” The Alabama secession convention made the following declaration:

RESOLUTION In relation to the African Slave Trade. WHEREAS, the people of Alabama are opposed, on the grounds of public policy, to the re-opening of the African Slave Trade; therefore Resolved, That it is the will of the people of Alabama that the Deputies elected by this Convention to the Southern Convention, to meet at the city of Montgomery on February 4 next to form a Southern Republic, be, and they are hereby, instructed to insist on the enactment by said Convention of such restrictions as will effectually prevent the re-opening of the African Slave Trade.

It is clear that the Confederate States, individually and as a whole, had no interest in reviving the transatlantic slave trade or creating a vast slaveholders empire. Rather, they sought to preserve states’ rights, the union, and liberty free of a centralized despotism by the Republican Party.

“It was clear from the actions of the Montgomery convention that the goal of the new converts to secessionist was not to establish a slaveholder’s reactionary utopia. What they really wanted was to create the Union as it had been before the rise of the new Republican party.”  -Robert A. Divine et al., America Past and Present HarperCollins 1995

The Missing Piece

In all of this, one glaring issue is ignored —an elephant in the room. That is a section of the country that sought to overthrow all others, whether Southern societies or Native Americans, to advance its economic interests. The bankers, industrialists and capitalists, and the Republicans they backed, sought to utilize illegal and unconstitutional federal force and taxation to restructure politics, the economy, and society to foster its industrial, high tariff, internal improvement aims, its land-grants and agricultural colleges, and more, through the entire West and all territories.

Not only did they desire it, they implemented it, and we suffer from it today. We first replaced the Southern master with the capitalist overseer, factory boss, and manager. And now we are all tax slaves to the central government and the illegal and unconstitutional schemes it enforces on us. The actual transformation that the southern vs northern dispute brought was not the end of slavery but of states’ rights, and with it the greatly increased ability of interest groups to manipulate politics, and the country.

“There was finally – and conclusively — the game plan of northern industrialists, who were fighting not for Black freedom, but for the freedom to exploit and develop the American market…The only people who could really say, “Free at Last!” after the Civil War were northern industrialists and their allies.” -Lerone Bennett Jr. Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream Johnson Publishing Company 2000

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org or not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.

Jeb Smith

Jeb Smith (Pen name Isaac C. Bishop) is an author and speaker whose books include Defending Dixie's Land: What Every American Should Know About The South And The Civil War, published with Shotwell Publishing, Missing Monarchy: Correcting Misconceptions About The Middle Ages, Medieval Kingship, Democracy, And Liberty, and Defending the Middle Ages: Little Known Truths About the Crusades, Inquisitions, Medieval Women, and More, Smith has written over 120 articles found in several publications, among them The Libertarian Institute, History is Now Magazine, The Postil Magazine, The Libertarian Christian Institute, Practical Distributism, Rutland Herald, The Vermont Daily Chronicle, Medieval Archives, History Medieval, Medieval Magazine, and Fellowship & Fairydust Magazine, and has been featured on various podcasts.

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