One of the sad facts of the American conservative movement is this: we need revisionist historians who are willing to challenge accepted historical narratives, but we cannot locate more than a handful of them. This has been true since at least 1950.
It takes enormous self-discipline to gain these research skills on your own. Those who develop them in grad school learn that their careers will end early if they are perceived as revisionists on issues where political correctness dominates. In any case, very few Ph.D.-holding historians ever are curious enough to pursue revisionist topics.
Most of the people who qualify intellectually and methodologically to do this painstaking work spend their lives defending an obvious myth: "The South did not secede to defend slavery." Yes, it did. The others who might be recruited into full-time service as revisionist historians defend the other conservative myth: "The American Revolution was not really a revolution." Yes, it was.
Back in 2015, I wrote an article on Southern secession. I offered links to, and summaries of, primary source documents. I offered a link to my own detailed study of slavery as the cause of the South's secession. You can get this information here:
I have done my homework.
THREE INDISPENSABLE MEN
Two men produced secession. If they had not done what they did when they did, there might not have been secession. Secession was not inevitable. The so-called irrepressible conflict did not have to produce a war that killed 750,000 men. The third man provided the crucial argument for secession when it really mattered.
One of these men you have never heard of. One of them you have heard of by name, but you know little about him. The third everyone has heard of and knows a lot about.
The first man was Laurence Keitt. The second was John Brown. The third man was Abraham Lincoln.
Keitt. Keitt was crucial. He, more than anyone else, set the terms of South Carolina's secession. He was a Congressman. He was a member of the December 1860 convention -- not a constitutionally legal assembly -- that declared secession. He specifically told the assembled members that they must not list opposition to high tariffs as the cause. He said this would detract attention from the real cause: the defense of slavery. He said this:
But the Tariff is not the question which brought the people up to their present attitude. We are to give a summary of our causes to the world, but mainly to the other Southern States, whose co-action we wish, and we must not make a fight on the Tariff question. . . .African slavery is the corner-stone of the industrial, social, and political fabric of the South; and whatever wars against it, wars against her very existence. Strike down the institution of African slavery and you reduce the South to depopulation and barbarism. . . . The anti-slavery party contend that slavery is wrong in itself, and the Government is a consolidated national democracy. We of the South contend that slavery is right, and that this is a confederate Republic of sovereign States.
His arguments persuaded the convention. This is a matter of public record. I provide the footnotes in my article on why the South seceded. Read South Carolina's declaration of the causes of secession here. Do a word search on the page. Search for this word: tariff. You will not get a hit. Then search for this word: slavery. You will get lots of hits.
At least 90% of the 159 men who attended the convention were slave owners, and over half of them owned more than 20 slaves. That is to say, they were not socially and economically representative of the electorate in South Carolina. But they spoke for the electorate, and the electorate went along with what was an overnight political assembly of slave owners that had no constitutional legitimacy in the state.
If South Carolina had not seceded, it is not clear that the rest of the South would have seceded.
Three other states provided reasons for secession. All three listed the defense of slavery as the primary cause.
Brown. Then there is John Brown. He is known by name, but he is really not understood. There are two great books on Brown. One of them was written by Otto Scott: John Brown and the Secret Six. The other was written by the man I regard as the finest historian of American history whose name almost nobody knows: James C. Malin. His book is titled John Brown and the Legend of Fifty-Six. Sadly, almost no historians know about it, and it is very expensive to locate in a used format. It has not been in print since 1970.
Scott's book is important because it shows that the Northern press was overwhelmingly in favor of Brown's attack at Harper's Ferry in 1859. Scott was a professional journalist. He recognized the power of the new journalism, which was made possible by the techniques of mass printing that had come into widespread use after 1850. Southern leaders believed that Northern abolitionist journalists represented northern political opinion. They did not.
The South in 1860 began to organize local defense militias to protect themselves against what they thought would be a wave of northern agitators coming into the region and fomenting a slave revolt. That is what John Brown said he was doing. That is what the secret six in the North were paying him to do. Southern leaders took Brown seriously, and they took the editorials in northern newspapers seriously.
That was the tinderbox into which Abraham Lincoln tossed his electoral match. His victory in November 1860 triggered the calling of the independent convention in South Carolina. It was not the legally constituted state legislature.
Lincoln. It is common knowledge that Lincoln did not want to abolish slavery in the South. He had said so too often. High school textbooks tell this story. The textbooks usually don't talk about what he was really interested in: collecting tariffs in southern ports, especially Charleston and New Orleans. They claim he was solely motivated by his desire to save the Union. He did want to save the Union, but he was not solely motivated to save the Union. He wanted his tariffs. Tariffs were basic to the Republican Party, just as they had been basic to the Whig Party, out of which the Republicans had emerged in 1854. Lincoln had been a high-tariff politician ever since his first political campaign in 1832. He was open about this.
If you want one mistake above all mistakes in understanding the Civil War, here it is: "Both the North and the South were primarily motivated to fight it out over the same issue." They were not. So, if you adopt that principle interpretation, you will never accurately understand the Civil War. The South seceded to defend slavery. The North invaded because Abraham Lincoln decided to defend the Union militarily in order to collect the federal government's tariffs. Abolitionists in the North fully understood Lincoln's economic motivation, and they were deeply disappointed. But there weren't many of them, so their disappointment didn't have much political impact on events in 1861.
Only in 1862 did he finally decide to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, and only after a major Union military victory. He issued it in January 1863.
Lincoln got his victory at Antietam in September 1862. But let's not forget why he got this victory. Some dolt Confederate officer immediately prior to the battle wrapped three cigars in a paper that had Robert E. Lee's battle plans written on it. Two Union soldiers found the cigars, picked them up, and happened to read the message on the paper. They passed the document up the chain of command. Then the story really gets bizarre. McClellan's advisor recognized the handwriting on the paper. The handwriting was from Lee's adjutant general. What were the odds that McClellan's advisor would recognize the handwriting of Lee's advisor? This personal validation convinced McClellan that the paper was legitimate. He adjusted his battle plans accordingly. If these unpredictable events had not taken place, the North might have lost the battle, and Lincoln never would have issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Such is the unfolding of history. Nobody can accurately predict how highly implausible events will play out.
CONCLUSION
You may have seen articles by non-historians on other sites declare that the South did not secede primarily because of slavery. You may be confused. When gurus disagree, followers get confused. Well, now is a good time to make this a principle of understanding history: Stop following gurus. Follow the footnotes instead.
When you are presented with two radically different arguments about what happened in history, follow the footnotes. Find out how reliable the sources are, meaning how representative they are, and also meaning how accurate they are. Then decide which narrative seems to do justice to the primary source documents. Also, be ready to look at different primary source documents.
Writing history isn't easy. Adopting myths in the name of history is quite easy.
If you want to be a revisionist historian, don't substitute one inaccurate myth for another inaccurate myth. Substitute a more accurate narrative, based on more accurate sources, which presents a more plausible explanation of the sources.
This is not work for wimps. It is also not work for lazy people.
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