civil war
In this meeting of the Southern Historical Association great emphasis has been placed upon a re-examination of numerous phases of our history relating to the Civil War. While several papers have dealt with certain forces which helped bring about the Civil War, none has attempted a general synthesis of causes. This synthesis has been the task assumed by the retiring president of the Association.Before attempting to say what were the causes of the American Civil War, first let me say what were not the causes of this war. Perhaps the most beautiful, the most poetic, the most eloquent statement of what the Civil War was not fought for is Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. That address will live as long as Americans retain their love of free government and personal liberty; and yet in reassessing the causes of the Civil War, the address whose essence was that the war was being fought so "that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth" is irrelevant. Indeed, this masterpiece of eloquence has little if any value as a statement of the basic principles underlying the war.The Civil War was not a struggle on the part of the South to destroy free government and personal liberty nor on the part
Let me pause for a moment, in discussing the overthrow of the balance of power, and review for you very briefly just how and why there had been an approximate balance of power established between the slaveholding and non-slaveholding states during the constitutional convention. If the destruction of democratic government by the South and its preservation by the North were not the causes of the Civil War, what then were the causes? The surface answer to this question is that in 1861 the southern people desired and attempted to establish their independence and thereby to disrupt the old Union; and that the North took up arms to prevent the South from establishing this independence and to preserve the Union. Turning to the South which was primarily agricultural we find the situation completely contradictory to what has usually been assumed. Indeed, as far as I have been able to ascertain, neither Dr. Tragically' the American people failed to learn adequately the very lesson that they so thoroughly taught Great Britain: that local differences and attachments were natural, desirable, and formed the very rootbed of patriotism; indeed, that such differences, when given decent recognition, greatly strengthened nationalism and the national state. It does seem clear, however, that political and economic considerations were thoroughly mingled with the moral and religious objection to slavery. While the demand for exclusion was based partly upon what we may call moral reasons, Rufus King and the other northern leaders in this debate were quite frank in asserting that the Missouri debate was a struggle between the slave and free states for political power. Finally, the balance of power was worked out by the technique of counting three-fifths of the slaves in apportioning representation in Congress and in the electoral college. Quickly the political leaders resumed the tone of the Missouri controversy: and thus was launched the so-called antislavery crusade, but what in fact was a crusade against the southern people. The South was so much opposed that it quietly passed out the word that it would never enter a Union where commerce was so thoroughly controlled by the national government unless it were assured a position of approximate political equality in that government. It was the overthrow of the sectional balance by artificial, political methods which caused uneasiness and wrath, for it indicated inter-sectional ill will or gross selfishness. As long as New England was able to dominate the Federal government there was no important opposition to the theoretical balance of power obtained by the three-fifths ratio; but when New England lost her status with the collapse of the Federalist party her leaders immediately seized upon the three-fifths ratio as the explanation. I say this because I do not see anyway save some cosmic cataclysm by which sectionalism can be erased from the political, economic, racial, and cultural maps of the United States. However, theoretical adherence to the democratic principles, as veil we know all too well in these days of plutocratic influences in our political life, is not sufficient evidence that democratic government exists.
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Acceptance Essays
