U.S. Civil War, States Rights, and Slavery

A recent article in the Washington Post titled "Texas Officials: Schools should teach that slavery was 'side issue to Civil War" has, once again, shed light on a very old fight taking place on the core issues of the United States Civil War.  Historians almost across the board agree that slavery was the core issue of the U.S. Civil War, those that disagree will normally acknowledge that the "states right" that was being fought over was slavery.  I will touch on that, later in this post, but I first wanted to express in a more general tone why, to my eye, this particular issue on the interpretation of the U.S. Civil War is so critical and is still so violently fought over.

Since the close of the U.S. Civil War in 1865, and with the termination of Reconstruction in the late 1880s, the United States has seen a general move by its southern states, and portions of the northern states, to embrace the U.S. Civil War as a fight over the "Lost Cause."  This is a romanticized view of the U.S. Civil War, a re-imagining of the conflict as a battle fought by an outmatched foe (the South) against an aggressive dominating rival (the North.)  This view of the U.S. Civil War pivots the narrative into one of the Southern states fighting to defend more morally palatable issues for the United States of the 1880s forwards, issues of limited government, Constitutional balance, and yes, states rights.

States rights reaches to the issue of federalism, the balance between the states and the central federal government, and has been an issue of contention in the United States since its founding.  The initial divide between our two political parties reflects this, it is a divide which is rooted in the current debates shaping the United States today.

At its root the "Lost Cause" view of the U.S. Civil War was an effort to remake the war into something more noble.  It was also part of an effort by the north and south to reunify the country and close still strong sectional divisions in the early 20th century.  As part of this effort both sides agreed to a tacit cultural agreement, northern historians and cultural figures would accept the "nobility" of the southern cause and support that position, and southern historians and cultural figures would embrace Abraham Lincoln and the northern actions as necessary if regrettable.  I will admit this is just my opinion but I believe it was this compromise that really put an end to the idea that states had a moral right of secession as a mainstream theory about the U.S. Civil War, most people today may debate the legality of secession and when it could happen, but they've accepted the U.S. Civil War was necessary because it kept the United States a strong nation.

This compromise reached its height, in my opinion, in 1958 with the passage of U.S. Public Law 85-425 which granted the widows of Confederate forces the right to a pension from the U.S. government.  The actual law is limited to just this but it has since been taken in common culture as a taciturn recognition of Confederate veterans as having the same status as veterans of the U.S. armed forces in general.  For the purposes of this post the actual legality of that view is irrelevant, what matters is that since 1958 the accepted image of Confederate veterans in the south is that they were patriots, equal to U.S. veterans, not traitors or criminals.

But was the U.S. Civil War about slavery at its core?  Bottom line, yes, and also state's rights, and also regional power.  To see this though you have to go back to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which dealt with how to handle new states entering the U.S.  The issue was the admission of Missouri, whose residents wanted to own slaves.  The challenge was that the balance of power in the U.S. Senate balanced evenly between slave states and free states in 1820.  This balance of power was considered vital for the southern states because the more populous north dominated the House of Representatives and with the northern states there was growing resistance to slavery.  (Not due to any particularly strong moral issues, although that was part of it, rather to a blend of moral issues with good old-fashioned economic concerns.)

To deal with this Maine was admitted at the same time, as a free state, and the U.S. Congress drew a line across the lands of the Louisiana purchase marking off where slavery would end.  Both sides also understood that newly admitted states would have to maintain the Senate balance of power between slave states and free states.  To offset that balance was unacceptable to both sides - to the north loss of the Senate would make them bound to an unfair "slave power" in the U.S., which had economic interests violently opposed to the growing interests of northern industrial powers.  For southern states loss of the Senate would make them vulnerable to pressures that would harm their economic interests as a trading power engaged in a fiercely competitive global agricultural trade.

This balance remained in place until Stephen Douglas in 1854, in part of a bid to improve his political position in a run for the Presidency, in part to open land for railroad settlement, and also due to his political convictions came up with a new plan - scrap the Missouri Compromise and let the residents of each state decide if they wanted to be free or slave.  Hence the creation, and passage, of the Kansas-Nebraska Act which said "you local residents, you decide among yourselves if you want to be slave or free."

Now if slavery was not, by itself, a burning issue with deep roots to sectional conflicts, state position, and deeply held ethnic tensions in the United States, you might imagine that this would have been settled in a calm, collected manner.  It was not.

The image above is a "free state" poster regarding Kansas - give it a look - as you can see people were quite touchy on the issue of if Kansas would be a slave or free state.  Both sides on the issue flooded the territory with individuals and the issue was resolved with armed force.  This period was, and is, referred to as "Bleeding Kansas" and it basically pitted "free territory" settlers against individuals from Missouri who came to ensure that slavery would be allowed to expand into Kansas.  The situation wasn't really resolved until 1861 when Kansas was admitted as a free state to the union.  (By which point things had already reached the "Holy Hell" stage with South Carolina already pulling out of the United States.)

Allow me to close with this point - slavery as an issue in the United States from its founding through 1865 was a contentious issue, both on its own merits and for what it symbolized to the people of the United States.  From the 1850s onward though it became probably the central issue of United States politics, for better or for worse.  From the rise of the Republican Party out of the dead remains of the Whig Party, a new political organization with an avowed goal of shattering slavery in the United States ideally and at a minimum containing it in the southern states till it died out on its own against Southern leaders who with the Dred Scott decision made it clear they intended to bring slavery into free states and use the power of the federal courts to make slavery a default acceptable option throughout the United States.

If I had to summarize it I'd say that the U.S. Civil War was about slavery because it was a war about what shape the United States would take, what sort of nation it would be - one with slavery or one without.  Because within that issue was tied a whole host of other issues of what the United States would be:

• Predominately a strong agricultural exporter power with low tariffs or a strong industrial power with high tariffs and limited foreign trade
• A nation with a strictly enforced racial hierarchy empowered by law or one in which the racial hierarchy was more fluid
• A nation in which private property was sacrosanct or one in which the federal government had the right to redefine, seize, and modify property based on Congressional laws
• A nation in which the federal government or the individual state governments would hold the strongest position of power

It is an ugly truth today but in the end it all really did come down to the issue of...slavery

Sources:  Wikipedia articles on Bleeding Kansas, Lost Cause, Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Missouri Compromise

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George Washington's Legacy - Not What People Think

2016 has been an acrimonious year election-wise in the United States and I've noticed a trend in this particular election to generate memes like the one above.  In it we see George Washington scolding the United States population for some sort of vague "make your government more what you want it to be" without actual specifics.  For me, this meme implies that George Washington would find the current United States federal government, and its actions, unacceptable and challenges the citizens of the United States to "step up" and take back their government.  Which to me is taking the actual presidency of George Washington, and its legacy, and corrupting it.  Because George Washington as President faced off against the very sort of action this meme espouses, and he did not take kindly to it at all.

This glorious painting is from 1791 during the Whiskey Rebellion, and the figure on the horse is George Washington leading a combined force of United States federal troops and local state militia units on an expedition to disband an armed rebellion against a tax law passed by the United States Congress.  The Whiskey Rebellion formed in reaction to the high debt held by the federal government after the Revolutionary War, in which the federal government absorbed individual state debt along with its own.  Import duties, it was felt by Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, could not be raised higher and a tax on a domestic product was needed.  Distilled spirits became the target of the new law, it was seen as a "sin tax" and Hamilton, along with Washington, felt that the tax would spark the least anger of any taxed domestic industry.  They did not figure with the anger of farmers living in the western portions of the United States at the time, in particular western Pennsylvania, who felt this tax violated their traditional rights and position.

Distilling spirits was seen by western farmers as a legitimate means of storing surplus grain and generating a valuable product for sale in eastern markets.  Whiskey was also used as a means of currency in the region, so this effort to tax farmers for making whiskey was widely seen as a new form of "taxation without representation."  Rebels in the region rose up, attacked tax collectors, and refused to pay the tax.  Many claimed they were defending the spirit and principles of the American Revolution.  Hell many of them were veterans of the American Revolution.  Washington strongly disagreed and although he sent out peace delegates to deal with the rebels, he also marched out with an army to disperse them.  The Whiskey Rebellion collapsed and the right of the federal government to tax internally was defended, by Washington, against individuals rising up to defend the spirit of the revolution - a.k.a. traditional limited federal government.

But hang on, because evidence is even more present in Washington's economic policies.  Although he attempted in his first term as President to stand neutral between two rival factions, Hamilton and Jefferson, who respectively wanted a larger federal role in the economy and a lesser federal role (Jefferson and his yeoman farmers concept) - Washington leaned in Hamilton's direction.  By his second term Washington fully agreed with Hamilton's ideas about a broader federal government and used his executive powers, along with raising support in Congress, for new laws that expanded the role of the federal government in the domestic economy of the United States.  This included controversial actions like creating a Bank of the United States, strong investments in infrastructure, and tariffs to protect rising domestic industry.  It even involved direct federal investment in the creation of local factories, a level of federal involvement today that makes many scream.

Overall Washington was not the man depicted in the first meme at the top of this post, he was actually as President a strong believer in a firm, well organized, fiscally involved federal government that firmly held in its hand a whip to coerce those who would rise in rebellion.

Sources:  Wikipedia articles on George Washington's Presidency and the Whiskey Rebellion

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War of 1812 – Reflections on a Legacy

It is March of 2011 – currently making news around the nation is the hundred and fifty year anniversary of the wave of secessions that sparked the outbreak of the American Civil War – you can fully expect over the next few years to have a regular wave of commentary and news stories about reenactments of the US Civil War, the major events and battles of the Civil War being hashed out again, and of course controversy about the meaning of the US Civil War and the conduct of its key leaders on both sides.  All well and fitting, a good dialogue about the US Civil War will be useful and 2012 – 2015 does neatly fall into that one hundred and fifty year mark, I look forward to commemorative currency releases and modified US currency by private mints – perhaps will see a re-release of Confederate paper money, a fun collectible of many years.  However amidst the wave of excitement over the anniversary of the US Civil War the bicentennial of another, just as critical, US war is being drowned out, the bicentennial of the War of 1812.  There are some local commemorative events being planned, the City of Niagara Falls is putting forward a major commemorative tourist initiative for example, but nationally this is a war which the US has semi-forgotten, which is not surprising considering the conduct of the war but also sad because of its incredible importance in shaping our modern nation.

First off the name of the War of 1812 is an odd one – think about it for a moment, most US wars are named after the antagonists in the war or in the case of multi-combatant wars a catchy summary name is given.  World War I (formally the Great War) and World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the War with Mexico, the Spanish-American War, names that mark with whom we fought or signifying a major engagement.  The War of 1812 we have a date, you have to dig just to find out with whom we went to war.  A more proper, but less tongue rolling name, would be the Second Anglo-American War, this was a conflict between the United States and the Kingdom of Great Britain over a series of unresolved issues from the First Anglo-American War (also known as the American Revolution.)  Of particular import for the newly fledged United States was the impact of policies by the British government upon US shipping – the British navy regularly searched and boarded US ships and seized sailors for service in the British navy, under the argument that said sailors were escaped British seaman being returned to their legal duty.  (Often, honestly, they were not and the British navy was just filling its voracious appetite for sailors.)  There were issues regarding the presence of British military forces in territory that was supposed to have been fully turned over to the United States after 1783 – forces in the upper portions of the modern Midwest that threatened to undermine US political control of the region.  Great Britain was also channeling weapons to native tribes in the area as well, fomenting resistance to the rule of the United States over its newly acquired territories.

But this war came in the midst of a period of overall major changes for the United States and it helped redefine how our nation handled itself and it represented some incredibly close calls for the United State as a nation – some historians have called it the Second American Revolution and in many ways their catchy label is a valid one.  During this war the United States faced serious internal divisions over the war, politically waging it was a charged issue and many in the United States felt disconnected from the war, especially in the (at the time) populous and economically important New England states.  This discontent led to a threatened secession by many of the New England states in 1815, the news of the signing of the treaty ending the war forestalled what might have lead to a collapse of the United States as a nation in 1815.  From 1812 to 1815 the United States saw serious armed invasions on its shores, including in 1814 a major assault upon the territory of the United States from three directions – through upper New York southwards, along the coast line against Washington D.C. and against Baltimore, MD, and from the south against New Orleans.  In fact the capital itself was burned by the British after their successful routing of US military forces protecting the capital, an event that scattered the national government and put local authority in control of the war effort temporarily.

The War of 1812 also is filled with stirring stories as well – such as the defense of the Great Lakes by a US admiral commanding a fleet of ships built on-location and defeating the British Navy on station on the lakes, a victory critical to the future economic development of the United States.  All the commerce that flows along the Great Lakes today, including through the St. Lawrence canal to the Atlantic Ocean, all of that is because the United States gained control of the Great Lakes.  The War of 1812 also shifted the United States away from the ideal of a decentralized nation with a minimal federal government to one in which the central government had more authority, more resources, and more power.  It even profoundly impacted how the United States addressed issues of national defense and the role of the military.

Over the next few months I’ll be writing a series of posts on this war – both its impact and some of the major interesting events that occurred during the War of 1812 – in the hopes of bringing people’s awareness of it up.

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Overheard Misuse of History – Opinion

Yesterday while walking around the city I overheard two young students engaged in a debate over their ideal visions of the role of the US government in the lives of its individual citizens.  What struck me in this classic debate was the comment made by one student, a young man dressed in sweat pants, sweat shirt, and ball cap, that in his ideal vision of the United States: “the federal government would let me live my life they way I wanted to live it, let me do what I wanted, like in the 19th century, before the US government became all Socialist in the 20th century.”  It is a rare moment in my life when I want to walk up to a fellow human being and smack them on the nose with a rolled up newspaper while exclaiming “Bad human, tell me who taught you this drivel so that I may strike them as well.”

The problem with this young man’s outlook on the role of the federal government in the 19th century is that it is, quite simply, incorrect on many levels.  First off there is no ideal period in the 19th century in which the US government on a federal level did not pass legislation that directly impacted or curtailed elements of an individual citizens “freedoms” – doubly so if that citizen was from a minority segment of the population or female in gender.  A simple examination of the major ideological battles of this period refutes the young man’s argument, the controversy over slavery, in fact the very institution of slavery, negates the idea of minimal federal involvement in the lives of individual citizens.  (For example the admission of new states to the Union was fraught with controversy and federal action to maintain the Free/Slave balance of power.)  The institution of the National Bank of the United States, in its various incarnations, was seen as a direct force intervening in the daily lives of citizens across the nation and was directly linked to the US federal government.

Even the “golden” period of non-intervention in private lives by the federal government from the late 1860s through the 1890s, the Gilded Age, actually featured regular federal statues regulating immigration, interstate commerce, and direct intervention by the federal government in numerous labor disputes and moments of civil insurrection.  In fact this period featured a US effort to suppress anarchists movements and insurrections throughout the United States, as well as federal regulations prohibiting the distribution of pornographic or dangerous materials through the US mail system, a direct assault on freedom of speech and publication by the federal government.  (To remind people this was the period in which the US government directly prohibited the distribution of educational material on contraception and the distribution of contraceptive devices through the US mail.)

Never mind the fact that the period of late 1860s through the 1880s was also the height of Reconstruction, a period of incredible direct intervention by the federal government in the lives of southern US citizens.  When Reconstruction ended the Progressive movement was gaining influence among the citizens of the United States, leading to reformist (or probably for this young man “Socialist”) legislation such as the various Anti-Trust Acts, Food and Drug Purity Acts, and regulations to curb the abuses of industry throughout the United States.

But from other comments that I overheard this young man making I quickly gathered that his comment centered upon the institution of federal income tax, collected by the federal government and redistributed/spent by the federal government.  This young man wished to return to period when the US government did not directly tax the personal income of its citizens, and in that regard he is mostly correct.  Efforts by the federal government to impose an income tax in the 1860s to finance the Civil War were ended in 1872 and future efforts to impose federal income tax in the 1880s through the 1910s were blocked by the Congress or the Supreme Court, on the grounds the power to impose such taxes was not Constitutionally permitted to the federal government.  This argument ended in 1913 with the ratification of the 16th amendment.

But this young man fails, in his understanding of history, to understand the system by which the US government raised revenue from the 1860s through the 1910s, excise taxes and import tariffs.  Excise taxes are taxes imposed upon the consumption of items by private citizens and import tariffs are taxes imposed upon items imported into a nation that are manufactured abroad.  Import tariffs are particularly critical to this equation because they artificially raised the cost of imported items that were cheaper to manufacture then US domestically produced items to give US produced items an artificial market parity or even edge over cheaper foreign imports.  What this meant was that the federal governments tax structure directly impacted your fiscal freedom in the 19th century in a manner incomprehensible to most modern Americans – imagine going to a store and finding that each pair of shoes, made in the US or abroad, cost roughly the same amount.  No competitive forces to lower costs and allow your money to go to the most efficient producer, instead efficiency in manufacture is not rewarded, the ability to bribe legislatures to impose duties is rewarded.  This issue was highly controversial in the 19th century and remains highly controversial today.  Excise taxes hold the same bane today, we argue about taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, in the 19th century citizens argued about taxes on recreational facilities, chewing gum, and heavy taxes on alcohol.  As well in the 19th century it was felt that excise taxes and high import tariffs hurt the poorer members of our citizen base more then the rich and a fairer system of revenue collection was needed.


What our young man sought was a system that simply did not exist in the 19th century and, honestly, has never existed in US history.  The nature of personal intervention into average citizens lives held by the US government has changed over the last two centuries, as well as the level of direct intervention, but there has been no time in which the hand of the federal government of the United States has not directly touched some or all of its governed population.

Source: US Treasury Department Fact Sheet on Income Tax History

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