So what caused the Civil War? Somebody said "slavery."
Can I hear a "states' rights?" Can I hear a "conflicting civilizations?"
Can I hear "unctuous fury?" Can I hear "fanaticism?"
Can I hear "fear?" Can I hear "stupidity?"
Can I hear "Goddamn Yankees?"
Or Jefferson Davis may have captured the kind of toxin that was in the air, around southern secession, in late 1860 and into this "distracted, sad year," as Whitman called it, of 1861.
Jefferson Davis, soon to be the first president--only president--of the Confederate States of America; senator--former senator--from Mississippi; former commandant of West Point; former Secretary of War.
He tried to capture what the South was doing with secession with a certain dignified reserve here. This is at the very end of 1860, before Mississippi had seceded, but it's not far away. He said, the South now, quote, "is confronted by a common foe. The South should, by the instinct of self-preservation, be united. The recent declarations of the candidate and leaders of the black Republican Party,"--and southerners made no--missed no opportunity to rename the Republican Party a thousand times, "The Black Republican Party."
At any rate, "The recent declaration of the candidate and leaders of the Black Republican Party must suffice to convince many who have formerly doubted the purpose to attack the institution of slavery in the states. The undying opposition to slavery in the United States means war upon it, where it is, not where it is not." That is, the Republicans did not simply oppose slavery in the territories, they opposed slavery in the slave states, and they would not stop until they had obliterated it. "And the time is at hand when the great battle is to be fought between the defenders of the constitutional government and the votaries of mob rule, fanaticism and anarchy." Yes. Davis seemed to think a little bit was at stake, for the South, in 1861.
However, after the war, Jefferson Davis wrote what is probably the longest, most turgid, belabored, 1200 page defense of a failed political revolution in the history of language. 1,279 pages is his memoir, entitled The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.
And by the time he wrote that, or published it, in 1882, he was arguing everywhere, on storied, famous, legendary tours of the South, the war had absolutely nothing to do with slavery. Listen to just one passage of that 1200 page defense of his Constitutional Movement.
"Slavery," said Jeff Davis, by 1882, "was in no wise the cause of the conflict but only an incident. Generally African-American"--excuse me--"Generally Africans were born the slaves of barbarian masters, untaught in all the useful arts and occupations, reared in heathen darkness, and sold by heathen masters. They were transferred to shores enlightened by the rays of Christianity."
Now he goes on, and I quote him. Blacks, said Jeff Davis, had been, quote, "put to servitude, trained in the gentle arts of peace and order and civilization.
They increased from a few unprofitable savages to millions of efficient Christian laborers.
Their servile instincts rendered them contented with their lot, and their patient toil blessed the land of their abode with unmeasured riches.
Their strong local and personal attachments secured faithful service.
Never was there happier dependents of labor and capital on each other.
The tempter came, like the Serpent of Eden, and decoyed them with the magic word, freedom.
He put arms in their hands and trained their humble but emotional natures to deeds of violence and bloodshed, and sent them out to devastate their benefactors." Now I could go on and on with this particular, incredible passage.
What you have there in that 1882 passage is the core, the life blood of the Lost Cause tradition. In 1861--and you've read Charles Dew's book on this--in 1861 southern leadership, at least until after Fort Sumter, argued every day and every way that they were about the business of preserving a slave society--a civilization based on slave labor, a racial system ordered by slavery--now threatened by these anti-slavery black Republicans.
In the wake of the Civil War, however, so much energy will be exercised, not only by Southerners, over time, to try to convince the American people and the rest of the world that this event was not about slavery.
In a speech in 1878--like many other speeches he gave in the last third of his life--Frederick Douglass was at that point, 1878, already fed up with Lost Cause arguments about what the war had been about. He was also already, early in the process, fed up with the ways in which Americans were beginning to reconcile this bloody, terrible conflict around the mutual valor of soldiers, and in his view forgetting what the whole terrible thing might have even been about.
And at the end of a magnificent speech he gave at a veterans reunion he said this:
"The Civil War"--this is Frederick Douglass--"was not a fight between rapacious birds and ferocious beasts, a mere display of brute courage and endurance, it was a war between men of thought, as well as of action, and in dead earnest for something beyond the battlefield."
He went on and on and on then to declare that the war had been about ideas, and he described the difference between those ideas, as he put it, was the difference between, quote, "barbarism and civilization."
Now, I'm going to spend this lecture just reflecting with you on, first, secession, because I left you hanging in the air about the various explanations of secession, interpretations over time; and I want to re-visit that at least briefly. And then I want to take you through a little quick survey of the interpretations of Civil War causation over time. It's fascinating to understand how in the past, now nearly a century and a half, Americans have gone through this topsy-turvy, twisting inside out, changing view of what caused that war.
But back to secession.
I left off with saying I was going to offer you five different explanations. I don't think they're all equal, necessarily, but they're there. In some ways they kind of fold into one another. And I'd already talked about how the preservation of slavery, a slave society, a society ordered by slave labor and so forth, was a principle, if not the principle, purpose of this secession movement, at least in the Deep South, where it succeeded.
Remember now, there are still eight slave states that have not seceded from the Union. As of March 1861, when Lincoln was to be inaugurated, the majority of the slave states are still in the Union, not out; only South Carolina over to Texas, the whatever-color-that-is of the Deep South, was the Confederate States of America.
Had it remained only those seven states it's hard to imagine exactly how the Confederacy would've mounted a war effort, conducted and created a foreign policy, and managed if the Lincoln government decides on war--or coercion as the South will call it--it's hard to imagine how the Confederacy would've survived, as long as it did.
The four states that will join it--we'll come to this on Thursday--do not secede, of course, until after Fort Sumter.
Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, in their initial secession legislatures or conventions, either did not--chose not to vote, or voted secession down, which Virginia decisively did--before Fort Sumter.
And it's only after the firing on Fort Sumter in April of '61 that Virginia will vote secession; and it's crucial, of course, given it's--that it's Virginia, and the size of Virginia, the significance and symbolism and power of Virginia, the geographical location of Virginia and so on.
