05/09/24

Several years ago Kathy and I walked into a restaurant for breakfast in North Carolina. On the wall was a floor-to-ceiling plaque bearing a message about the origins of the Civil War. The restaurant’s owner had selected that method to tell patrons that that great conflict had resulted from a disagreement over political philosophy, specifically because of differing opinions about states’ rights.

I had no idea that hundreds of thousands of Americans, probably millions, were such devoted students of political science. The plaque made no mention of slavery – it was all about the federal government’s supposed violation of the 10th Amendment, which reserves to the states, or the people, all powers not specifically enumerated for the feds in the Constitution.

But the author of the plaque has a problem: it’s what the Deep South states—the first to secede—were saying to the Upper South states to persuade them to join the Confederacy just prior to the Civil War.

In late 1860 and early 1861, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana appointed commissioners to lobby other slave states’ public officials on behalf of secession. They referenced states’ rights on occasion, but almost always in connection with the North’s supposed desire to eradicate slavery. Their communications made crystal clear that slavery occupied the center of their rationale.

A few examples:

Stephen Hale, an Alabama commissioner, in late 1860 wrote the Governor of Kentucky, a slave state, a letter that said, in part, that Lincoln’s November election was “an open declaration of war, consigning (the South’s) citizens to assassinations and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.” Secession was the only way to sustain “the heaven ordained superiority of the white over the black race.”

Commissioner Henry Benning of Georgia—later a brigade commander under General Robert E. Lee—told the Virginia Legislature, “If things are allowed to go on as they are, it is certain that slavery is to be abolished. By the time the north shall have obtained the power, the black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand for that? It is not a supposable case.”

Commissioner William Harris of Mississippi said in a speech, “Our fathers made this a government for the white man, rejecting the negro as an ignorant, inferior, barbarian race, incapable of self-government, and not, therefore, entitled to be associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political, or social equality.”
Harris added that Mississippi would “rather see the last of her race, men, women, and children, immolated in one common funeral pyre than see them subjugated to the degradation of civil, political, and social equality with the negro race.”

Other commissioners messaged similar warnings to the Upper South states. Their admonitions bore fruit: by April 1861, when the war broke out in South Carolina, two more slave states had joined the five that sent the commissioners. Four more joined soon after, growing the Confederacy to 11 states strong. 

Only four slave states refused to secede, all of them along the border between North and South. (West Virginia broke off from Virginia and remained in the Union.) 

Fifty years after the war ended, Colonel John Mosby, the “Gray Ghost” of the famed Mosby’s Rangers whose guerrilla attacks had terrorized Union troops in the Shenandoah Valley and elsewhere in northern Virginia, left no doubt: “The South went to war on account of slavery. South Carolina went to war – as she said in her secession proclamation – because slavery would not be secure under Lincoln. South Carolina ought to know what was the cause of her seceding.”

The Iowa Legislature this past session adopted a new law that requires review and revision of what public schools should teach in their social studies and civics classes. The review and recommendations must be submitted to the Iowa Board of Education for its approval by December 31, 2025.

It would be surprising if the Deep South commissioners’ letters and speeches were recommended by the new law as an area for study by Iowa students. Conservatives who dominate the Legislature appear to think that slavery is not a major part of American history. 

Almost all American scholar-historians disagree with that viewpoint.