Jeff Sessions: Slavery, not states rights or economic issues, caused the Civil War

[TitanTiger 20,499]

 

Quote

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said slavery and not state's rights or economic differences led to the bloodiest war ever fought on American soil.

Speaking at the Abraham Lincoln Foundation of the Union League of Philadelphia's annual Lincoln Day Celebration, the former Alabama Senator dismissed the idea that the Civil War was more about state's deciding their own destinies than it was about slavery.

"The thing was brewing from the beginning of the Republic," Sessions said. "Though many Southerners try to say otherwise - and I love my people - slavery was the cause of the war. It was not states' rights or tariffs or agrarian versus industrial economies. Those issues were all solvable and would have been solved. The cloud, the stain of human bondage - the buying and selling of human beings - was the unsolvable problem and was omnipresent from the beginning of the country.

"And the failure, the refusal of the South to come to grips with it, really to actually change this immoral system of enslavement led to the explosion," Sessions said. "As to slavery, it had to end. The nation could stand the disgrace no longer."

Sessions, confirmed as AG a year ago this month, has been criticized in the past for his stance on civil rights.

You can see Sessions' comments here.

 

http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2018/02/ag_jeff_sessions_slavery_not_s.html

About time.

[AUDub 11,158]

Yeah, I was gobsmacked when he said this today. Tell him to pass it along to General Kelly and the Donald. 

[alexava 6,973]

wow. He said something not stupid!  He keeps this up and everyone gonna get confused. 

[AuburnNTexas 7,154]

He has always said things like this. He was one of Rosa Parks biggest supporters. The problem is that does not fit many news outlets view of the man.

[HVAU 673]

2 hours ago, AuburnNTexas said:

He has always said things like this. He was one of Rosa Parks biggest supporters. The problem is that does not fit many news outlets view of the man.

It also doesn't reflect many of his boss's supporters' views.  On another Political board, some website that's named after Bengal scat, there were months of discussion rationalizing the reasons for Confederate secession to be anything, but slavery.

[TitanTiger 20,499]

15 hours ago, HVAU said:

It also doesn't reflect many of his boss's supporters' views.  On another Political board, some website that's named after Bengal scat, there were months of discussion rationalizing the reasons for Confederate secession to be anything, but slavery.

It undercuts the insistent views of a handful of ostriches here too.

[Randman5000 4,229]

I've never understood this argument by people...sure it was about states rights, States right to have slaves.

There's no either one or the other

[maxwere 82]

Perfectly consistent.  This is not about historical accuracy, its about reinforcing a modern policy narrative.

"See, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria are wars of moral ideology.  Those evil... plantation owners, Talban, "The Database" (sp), Asad, ISIS... commit crimes against humanity.   Economics, theft, power, confiscation and relocation of whole people groups to support special interest never have anything to do with war.  They hate us for our freedom.  Sacrificing American blood for the security of our union is worth it.  We need strong defense."

...sounds like the (whig) party of Lincoln to me.

 

[homersapien 11,393]

5 hours ago, maxwere said:

Perfectly consistent.  This is not about historical accuracy, its about reinforcing a modern policy narrative.

"See, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria are wars of moral ideology.  Those evil... plantation owners, Talban, "The Database" (sp), Asad, ISIS... commit crimes against humanity.   Economics, theft, power, confiscation and relocation of whole people groups to support special interest never have anything to do with war.  They hate us for our freedom.  Sacrificing American blood for the security of our union is worth it.  We need strong defense."

...sounds like the (whig) party of Lincoln to me.

 

Just so I am clear on whatever point it is you are trying to make, are you suggesting that slavery is not the core cause of the civil war?

[maxwere 82]

2 minutes ago, homersapien said:

Just so I am clear on whatever point it is you are trying to make, are you suggesting that slavery is not the core cause of the civil war?

No I’m not saying that.  But it obviously was not THE core cause.  Modern politicians do not know or care about history, only State mythology that suites their ends.

[homersapien 11,393]

8 minutes ago, maxwere said:

No I’m not saying that.  But it obviously was not THE core cause.  Modern politicians do not know or care about history, only State mythology that suites their ends.

OK, if slavery was not the "core" cause, prey tell what was?

 

[maxwere 82]

Let’s assume the popular myths of 1860s politics are true. (They are in the since of popular opinion.)

The relevant question here is was the northern invasion of the south morally justified by the egregiousness of the existence of chattel slavery?  Or more importantly, is US invasion of any country morally justified by humanitarian causes?  That’s the neocon playbook.

My answer to that question is no.

since, there are more historic atrocities where the US did not intervene than did, it begs the question, “is the core reason we are in the Middle East  right now a result of humanitarian intervention & national security?”  Again, my answer is most definitely “No”.

[homersapien 11,393]

1 hour ago, maxwere said:

Let’s assume the popular myths of 1860s politics are true. (They are in the since of popular opinion.)

The relevant question here is was the northern invasion of the south morally justified by the egregiousness of the existence of chattel slavery?  Or more importantly, is US invasion of any country morally justified by humanitarian causes?  That’s the neocon playbook.

My answer to that question is no.

since, there are more historic atrocities where the US did not intervene than did, it begs the question, “is the core reason we are in the Middle East  right now a result of humanitarian intervention & national security?”  Again, my answer is most definitely “No”.

I have no idea of what you mean by the "popular myths of the 1860's" but the secessionists actual reasons for proposing secession are clearly laid out in their own words in the following book:

 Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. A Nation Divided: New Studies in Civil War History,  by Charles B. Dew.  Because it relies on original documents, this is a mandatory reference anyone who wants to study this topic.  Following is a good book review on it:

Secession, Slavery, and Racism: Confederates vs. Neo-Confederates

This slender volume examines the work of secession commissioners sent from the deep South to other slave states in the winter of 1860-1861. The men were charged with defending secession and urging fellow southerners to follow them out of the Union. Charles B. Dew properly notes that historians trying to uncover the emotions and motives behind disunion have rarely examined the words of these commissioners. The men themselves are commonly ignored by historians entirely or dismissed as minor figures. Dew has speeches or letters from forty-one of the fifty-two men who served as commissioners. They were all slaveowning politicians, with varying experience and partisan affiliations; most were natives of the states to which they were appointed. This is not a complete study of the men or all of their work, but it is an important contribution to the literature on secession and a good introduction to the story of these neglected figures.

Dew evidently intends the book for both academics and a more general readership. The text is barely eighty pages, followed by an appendix and only a minimum of notes, which should make it appealing for classroom use. The prose is clear, jargon-free, and includes enough of the narrative of secession that even beginning students will be able to follow the book. But the material is complex enough, and the representative documents well chosen, so that it should also stimulate discussion among advanced readers.

For the book's primary audience -- non academics and beginning students -- the author's intent clearly is to disabuse them of the (incredibly) still popular notion that secession was not about preserving slavery and racial subordination (and the southern culture based on them), but rather to assert some sort of abstract commitment to states' rights. Academic historians, of course, have long-since concluded that states' rights was the means, not a primary motive, for secession and war. Dew's principal target is the somewhat shadowy "Neo-Confederate" movement, including the League of the South and the patrons of "Neo-Confederate web sites, bumper stickers, and T-shirts" (10). He notes correctly that secessionists themselves "talked much more openly about slavery than present-day-neo-Confederates seem willing to do" (10). The book's first chapter makes clear the relevance of his discussion to recent controversies over the Confederate flag in a number of states and Virginia's Confederate history month, among others. The author writes with some obvious passion. A native southerner he recalls "my boyhood dreaming about Confederate glory," and confesses that he is "still hit with a profound sadness when I read over the material on which this study is based" (2).

Not surprisingly, Dew has little difficulty demonstrating his primary thesis. The secession commissioners repeated the same message wherever they went: Lincoln and the Republicans were abolitionists determined to establish racial equality or promote amalgamation; secession and independence offered white men the only alternative to degradation and cultural destruction. The Republican threat, the men argued, was really three-fold: racial equality, race war, and racial amalgamation. The authors of Mississippi's "Declaration of Immediate Causes," for instance, claimed that the North "advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst" (13). Alabama's Leroy Pope Walker summarized that Republican rule would cost southerners first, "our property," "then our liberties," and finally "the sacred purity of our daughters" (79).

Perhaps the most effective evidence Dew offers is the coarse racism that punctuated many of the commissioners' appeals. Thoughtful and open-minded readers will recognize that the preservation of slavery and racial purity -- of the Ku Klux Klan variety -- were founding principles of the Confederacy. As Stephen Hale, Alabama's commissioner to Kentucky, wrote: Republican victory was "nothing less than an open declaration of war, for the triumph of this new theory of government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans" (54). Dew touts Hale's letter as the best summary of secessionist arguments about slavery and race -- indeed, he quotes the passage cited above on three separate occasions -- and its full text is presented in the Appendix.

Another of the book's strengths is Dew's effective juxtaposition of comments made by the same men before and after the war. Through the words of Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens, J. L. M. Curry, John Smith Preston, and others, the author demonstrates that ex-Confederates created the myth of states' rights causation when they wrote Lost Cause memoirs. Before and during the war these men framed arguments for independence and Confederate nationalism in terms of slavery and racism. After the defeat, however, they sang a different tune. Stephens, of course, delivered his famous "cornerstone" speech in March, 1861, and Dew presents a thorough discussion of his remarks. In his 1868 memoirs, however, Stephens insisted that the war "was a strife between the principles of Federation, on the one side, and Centralism, or Consolidation, on the other." Slavery "was but _the question_ on which these antagonistic principles" finally collided (16). After the war Preston defended the Confederacy as a noble defense of "true constitutional liberty," a far cry from his antebellum characterization of Republican "canting, fanatics, festering in the licentiousness of abolition and amalgamation" (75).

For specialists, of course, these themes -- if not specifically the material -- will be very familiar. Many historians of the secession movement will object to Dew's contention that "there is no better place to look [for the "secessionist mind"] than in the speeches and letters of the men who served their states as secession commissioners on the eve of the conflict" (18). Furthermore, probably few would agree that to the commissioners fell "the challenge of providing such an explanation [for secession] -- of informing the Southern people of the dark forces threatening their region and driving their states to seek sanctuary outside the Union" (24). Editors, politicians, and a host of other public spokesmen hammered away at the same themes throughout the 1850s and certainly the 1860 presidential campaign; the arguments to explain and  justify secession had already received full expression when Lincoln was elected.

Dew also does not engage the historiography; his list of "recent" scholarship includes only two books published since 1988 (one of them a collection of essays). More frustrating for some readers will be the lack of attention to how "slavery" conjured different images for different listeners. Some of the most innovative work on secession -- books by Lacy Ford or Stephanie McCurry, for instance -- has considered the various meanings of slavery within the context of southern political culture and secession. The call to protect slavery from Black Republicanism was tied to the preservation of regional equality and honor, personal manhood, the rights of white male property owners and husbands, and more -- in short, the duties and privileges of white men were at stake as well as the actual future of slavery and racial superiority.

None of these objections takes away from the author's primary thesis or the book's effectiveness. In fact, much of the material in the book may make it even more valuable as a teaching tool for advanced students. A careful reading and discussion should force them to engage the notion that many southerners understood "slavery" as more than just the institution itself and racial superiority. For instance, the words of South Carolina's Leonidas W. Spratt, commissioner to Florida, related the importance of masculinity as well as slavery: "We knew that the men of the South were too instructed, and too brave, to submit to the severities of final subjugation" (44). Religious imagery infused the speeches of Mississippi's Fulton Anderson. Northerners were corrupted, he said, by "an infidel fanaticism" that warped men and women into believing "that we are a race inferior to them in morality and civilization." Republicans were determined to wage "a holy crusade for our benefit in seeking the destruction of that institution which . . . lies at the very foundation of our social and political fabric" (63). Numerous passages repeated the ubiquitous terms -- always linked by southern spokesmen -- of "degradation and dishonor." In short, Dew's work should prompt readers to consider the many themes related to slavery that informed the secession crisis and affected how southern men understood the imperative dangers that Republicanism brought home. The inclusion of two full texts in the Appendix is especially welcome in this regard.

Apostles of Disunion should, although it won't, end the discussion of whether or not the South's primary goal in 1861 was to defend its slave-based culture. The book offers all of us who struggle with the irrepressible myth of states' rights devotion an effective way to force students to confront the integral place of slavery and racism in the mind of the Old South and the popular movement for secession.

H-Net Book review, published by H-South@h-net.msu.edu 
http://www.stratalum.org/apostles.html

 

In short,  the only "myth" regarding this subject is the notion that slavery was not the central cause of the civil war.

For more historical perspective on the causes of the Civil War and the revisionist history that followed it, I can recommend the following additional references:

This Mighty Scourge - Perspectives on the Civil War by James M. McPherson

Bitterly Divided - The South's Inner Civil War by David Williams (who obtained his PhD degree in history at  Auburn University)

 

 

 

[Mims44 1,879]

10 hours ago, maxwere said:

Let’s assume the popular myths of 1860s politics are true. (They are in the since of popular opinion.)

The relevant question here is was the northern invasion of the south morally justified by the egregiousness of the existence of chattel slavery?  Or more importantly, is US invasion of any country morally justified by humanitarian causes?  That’s the neocon playbook.

My answer to that question is no.

since, there are more historic atrocities where the US did not intervene than did, it begs the question, “is the core reason we are in the Middle East  right now a result of humanitarian intervention & national security?”  Again, my answer is most definitely “No”.

 

That's some roundabout logic, The CAUSE of the Norths "invasion" into the south was the Souths secession. The REASON for the Souths secession was the threat of slavery being ended.

 

And comparing moving troops to a rebellious part of your country to quell the rebellion is a much different task than seeing wrong being done across the world and going to set it right.

[maxwere 82]

I’m conceding the point.  Not debating “facts” of history.  My point is about political theory.  The only thing that matters in the context of Sessions.

does slavery or succession justify a policy of  invasion or military intervention?  (My answer is no)

 

[alexava 6,973]

34 minutes ago, maxwere said:

I’m conceding the point.  Not debating “facts” of history.  My point is about political theory.  The only thing that matters in the context of Sessions.

does slavery or succession justify a policy of  invasion or military intervention?  (My answer is no)

 

what measures would have worked better? 

[TitanTiger 20,499]

I would say that when it’s a humanitarian crisis within your own country, then yes.  The South believed it had the right to just leave the Union over slavery on their own with no discussion of just compensation to the country they were leaving (or even really a thought of such). The North disagreed. But I don’t think you can equate it with us charging into some other nation halfway around the world over internal disputes there. 

[homersapien 11,393]

3 hours ago, maxwere said:

I’m conceding the point.  Not debating “facts” of history.  My point is about political theory.  The only thing that matters in the context of Sessions.

does slavery or succession justify a policy of  invasion or military intervention?  (My answer is no)

 

Again, it was the South who initiated hostilities. Once the war was begun, invasion of the South was inevitable.

I would also point out the conflict was more about Southern intentions to expand and establish slavery into new territories/states than it was about maintaining slavery where it already existed.  While Lincoln often expressed his moral objection to slavery, he was willing to allow slavery to end peacefully through gradual emancipation and voluntary colonization, unlike the abolitionists who proposed it should end forcefully.  Lincoln did not consider himself an abolitionist and never intended to directly threaten slavery where it already existed in the South.  

Nevertheless, the South - or more accurately, an oligarchy of rich Southerners who relied on slavery  - saw Lincoln's opposition to the expansion of slavery as a direct political threat to their own practice of slavery. 

They felt that without political expansion, all slavery would be at risk.   Secession was thus sparked by Lincoln's election and the South seceeded to preserve their right to expand and maintain slavery as a national institution. 

Lincoln engaged in the war as a response to the secession of Southern states, not to end slavery in them.  He was more interested in keeping the country together than he was to forcibly ending slavery in the South. 

So bottom line, while I think you are morally wrong in your answer, the more important point is the question is not strictly relevant in considering how the war started. 

 

 

[Proud Tiger 4,261]

17 hours ago, Mims44 said:

 

That's some roundabout logic, The CAUSE of the Norths "invasion" into the south was the Souths secession. The REASON for the Souths secession was the threat of slavery being ended.

 

 

Ah hah we finally get there. You are absolutely right. The cause was seccession, the reason was the threat of slavery being ended by the Northern hypocrites who owned slaves themselves, and the issue it all boiled down to and started the war was.........STATES RIGHTS.

[maxwere 82]

Woah?  Expansionary slavery Homer?  That’s news to me.

[maxwere 82]

7 hours ago, TitanTiger said:

I would say that when it’s a humanitarian crisis within your own country, then yes.  The South believed it had the right to just leave the Union over slavery on their own with no discussion of just compensation to the country they were leaving (or even really a thought of such). The North disagreed. But I don’t think you can equate it with us charging into some other nation halfway around the world over internal disputes there. 

So this justifies overstepping the 10th amendment?

also, slavery was an institution globally (still is in fact) for centuries.  Does that qualify it as a humanitarian crisis?

[maxwere 82]

8 hours ago, alexava said:

what measures would have worked better? 

Do nothing.  Economic forces at play emancipate 80% of southern slaves by 1875.  Without violence.

[Proud Tiger 4,261]

4 hours ago, maxwere said:

Do nothing.  Economic forces at play emancipate 80% of southern slaves by 1875.  Without violence.

Correct. Thank you. I would only add that the South could let the holier than thou people in the North set an example by freeing their slaves and see how that worked out.

[homersapien 11,393]

6 hours ago, Proud Tiger said:

Ah hah we finally get there. You are absolutely right. The cause was seccession, the reason was the threat of slavery being ended by the Northern hypocrites who owned slaves themselves, and the issue it all boiled down to and started the war was.........STATES RIGHTS.

QFT

[homersapien 11,393]

5 hours ago, maxwere said:

Woah?  Expansionary slavery Homer?  That’s news to me.

Read up.  The focus of conflict - political and otherwise - was in Kansas and Missouri prior to secession.