I was dismayed to read Washington Post columnist Ruben Navarrette’s column “Haley wrong; so are some of her critics” (Friday) chastising Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley and her critics for oversimplifying the cause of the Civil War.
In the course of his comments, he makes the outlandish assertion that “saying that slavery was the main cause of the Civil War is not accurate.” He cites a list of other “factors,” such as the cotton gin and the issue of nullification but scratch the surface on any of these topics and you come across the institution of slavery.
His comments, like Haley’s and those of others, deal in generalities — terms like “freedom” or “the role of the government” — leaving open the issue of which freedoms and which role of government.
As a retired history teacher, I want to offer my own take on the subject.
Southern states seceded in the immediate aftermath of Abraham Lincoln’s election. His Republican Party proposed to prohibit the admission of any more slave states into the Union. Lincoln and others viewed the institution of slavery as antithetical to the nation’s broader egalitarian principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence. They believed that by putting an end to any further slave states they would put slavery on the road to extinction.
The South’s political elite, most of them slaveholders, understood very well that the Republican Party’s agenda threatened their investments in human capital. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857 insisted that slaveholders had the right to take their “property” into the territories, but this was not sufficient.
It needs to be understood that the slave states were police states. The institution of slavery could only exist in a political regime where it was protected. White Southerners were in constant fear of slave revolts — such as Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 that killed 55 to 65 white people and about 120 African Americans. And then there were the many runaways fleeing their masters.
White Southerners were perfectly aware that their enslaved field hands and house servants were not content with their lot. Southern states introduced a variety of measures to maintain vigilance over this “troublesome property.”
Enslaved persons were not allowed to own weapons, to be out after curfew, to gather in groups, or even learn to read. Local governments maintained slave patrols. White men — slaveholders or not — were required to monitor their communities, stopping any African American off the plantation to demand to see his pass.
White Southerners expected the federal government to do its part in upholding slavery. It was to assist in the return of fugitive slaves. It was to cease the delivery of abolitionist literature through the mails. They wanted a federal slave code for the territories. And, of course, they looked to federal troops to protect them in the case of another massive rebellion.
Ultimately, the South’s slaveholding political elite did not feel the federal government could be trusted to have their back once it fell under Republican rule. They believed their massive investment in human beings was better protected if they went their own way. Many advocates of secession did not suppose that the North was prepared to make the heavy sacrifices it did to keep them in the Union.
The pronouncements set forth by Confederate governments to justify their decision to secede made it clear it all boiled down to the institution of slavery. The Texas Ordinance of Secession denounced the Republican Party for propounding “the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men.” It further asserted that “the servitude of the African race … is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator.”
After the shooting started at Fort Sumter, S.C., a Texas newspaper summarized the matter very succinctly: “The question of slavery is the only question between us, all others are incidental and subsidiary. … It is the Negro and the Negro alone that underlies our undying hostility.”
The causes of the Vietnam War or the American Revolution? Complicated. Civil War? Not so much.
John Reynolds is a professor emeritus at The University of Texas at San Antonio, where he taught courses on American politics.
A version of this op-ed appeared in the San Antonio Express-News.
