A Response To Loewen: Shattering The Northern Myths Of Glory

James Loewen's article in the Sunday, January 9, 2011 Washington Post is a grand example of how the high priests of "Civil War" political correctness further their "progressive" political agenda. In this case, however, I believe sociologist Loewen is a victim of the pervading suppression and distortions that have piled up for decades in academia, the media, and with the political consumers of their propagandistic view of history. Given his fame for supposedly exposing the whitewash of American history, I find his article rather ironic.

As to States Rights, it touched every issue related to secession, the war, and reconstruction. The Northern Union had become an oppressive government dedicated to Northern regional dominance and almost exclusively Northern economic prosperity. States Rights were the primary bulwark against this Northern regionalism. Perhaps, Loewen is not familiar with a Confederate general by the given name of States Rights Gist, evidence that the issue had long weighed on the minds of Southern political leaders. The South Carolina Declaration of Causes mentions slavery many times, but Loewen is apparently so blind to their context that he fails to see that South Carolina is building a legal case against Northern breaches of the Constitution and their high-handed willingness to trample South Carolina's States Rights. Loewen is grasping for straws when he tries to separate the overview of States rights from the particular grievances of South Carolina. I will not belabor Loewen's misunderstanding of States Rights more but to say that several of his contentions are a ridiculous manipulation of ideas and words. He is as Lincoln once said, "trying to make a horse chestnut into a chestnut horse."

Dr. Loewen does have a stronger point on the Mississippi declaration, which included an admission of its economic dependence on slave labor—just as some modern American industries have allowed themselves to be increasingly dependent on cheap illegal immigrant labor. However, by over dramatizing this one statement, he completely passes over other issues important to understanding why Southern states felt compelled to separate themselves from a Northern political dominance primarily devoted to Northern interests rather than “the general welfare.” Furthermore, it ignores an enormously critical issue about slavery. Many Southerners, both slave owners and non-slave owners would have gladly rid themselves of slavery, but the vastly important overarching question was how could it be done without destroying the Southern economy, especially the major cotton producing areas—South Carolina and the Gulf States. This concern was also shared by banking and shipping interests in New York. Lincoln and many rational folk, both North and South, wanted to phase slavery out gradually, compensating slave owners for their loss. Many, like Robert E. Lee, also saw the necessity of preparing the slaves to compete in a free economy. Lincoln, however, wanted to encourage freed slaves to relocate to Liberia or the Caribbean. He did not believe the black and white races could coexist in the United States to their mutual benefit.

Slavery was an issue, but it was, for the most part, not an issue in the moralistic and propagandistic way most people conceive of it today. Union armies did not invade the South to free slaves. Most of the slave issue was over the extension of slavery to new states. Northerners did not want slave labor competition for free white labor. Many Northern states, including Illinois, had enacted specific legislation to discourage blacks, free or slave, from settling in their territory. That is why the Underground Railroad went all the way to Canada. Southerners, on the other hand, felt that not being able to take their slave property with them into one of the new states was an unconstitutional restriction of their property rights. Overshadowing all this was a struggle for regional political dominance.

Loewen would do well to familiarize himself with the (Western) Cherokee Declaration of Independence from the United States in October 1861, siding with the Confederacy. It slices right through Northern hypocrisy about the war. He should also read British accounts of its causes. In December 1861. The famous English author, Charles Dickens, who was a strong opponent of slavery, wrote: "The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug disguised to conceal its desire for economic control of the United States." Loewen might also consider what President Woodrow Wilson said when asked how the role of slavery became so exaggerated as the cause of the war: "it was necessary to put the South at a moral disadvantage by transforming the contest from a war waged against states fighting for their independence into a war waged against states fighting for the maintenance and extension of slavery.” Five years after the war, prominent abolitionist attorney and legal scholar, Lysander Spooner, said of the common Union characterization of the war: "All these cries of having 'abolished slavery,' of having 'saved the country,' of having 'preserved the Union,' of having 'established a government of consent,' and of 'maintaining the national honor' are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats—so transparent that they ought to deceive no one." Yet today most people are deceived and apparently prefer to be deceived, aided by the strong arm and chains of political correctness in academia, the media, and government. Other instructive reading on this subject would be Confederate President Jefferson Davis's book, A Short History of the Confederate States of America, originally published in 1890

Loewen’s dismissal of the Morrill Tariff as an important influence on secession is a colossal historical oversight, but given the overlay of decades of misrepresentation trying to justify the war as a civil rights morality play, he is in the company of a great host of cultivated academic blindness. His knowledge of the Tariff's of Abomination in 1828 and 1832 is also surprisingly defective. Perhaps he should read the Republican platform for 1860 and read Lincoln's inauguration speech more carefully. Loewen should especially read Pennsylvania Republican Thaddeus Stevens' speech to a New York audience on September 27, 1860. A cosponsor of the tariff and one of the most powerful men in Congress, Stevens told the crowd that the extension of slavery to new states and increasing the tariff (from about 18 percent to 47 percent with more items covered) were the two most important issues of the 1860 presidential campaign, but of the two, the tariff was the most important. He went on to justify enriching Northern manufacturing states and impoverishing the South as essential to national greatness and made shocking threats against Southern leaders who resisted. Southern states already paid more than 90 percent of the tariffs but were receiving only about 20 percent of the revenues. The tariff significantly raised the cost of living and business in the South and subjected Southern cotton exports to tariff retaliation and cheaper competition. The Morrill Tariff was a shameless example of partisan regional greed and appalling disregard for the welfare of Southern and some Western states. It was so unfair and onerous that it virtually compelled the cotton states to secede. It is no wonder that its embarrassing memory is suppressed. Not only the disparate impact of the tax, but the very idea that Northern states would enrich themselves by acting in flagrant disregard of the general welfare and Southern states threw a dark shadow over continued union with the North.

There were many causes of secession, but had it not been for the Morrill Tariff, there might never have been a war that resulted in the deaths of over 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers and at least 50,000 Southern civilians. The three best modern books to read on the Morrill Tariff are two by tax accountant Charles Adams: For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes in the Course of Civilization, 1993; and When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession, 2000, and economist Thomas DiLorenzo’s The Real Lincoln, published in 2002.

3. Loewen needs to scratch a little deeper on why Confederate soldiers with no slaves fought desperately for the Confederacy against great odds and why Southern states with relatively few slaves eventually sided with the Confederacy and became hotbeds of resistance to Northern invasion. For one thing, the causes of secession and the causes of the war were not quite the same thing. In my own state of North Carolina, which gave more in blood than any other, secession did not at first pass. This was also true of Virginia and other border states. The real cause of the war and further secessions was Lincoln's call for troops to invade the South. The Border States then voted in overwhelming majorities for secession. Lincoln also got some harsh responses to his call from the governors of Missouri and Kentucky.

4. I agree with Loewen's fourth point. Lincoln did not go to war to end slavery. He stated this several times as did the Union Congress. He also, perhaps inadvertently, makes a point about how the Lincoln government operated. "By 1864, when Maryland voted to end slavery, soldiers' and sailors' votes made the difference." Perhaps Loewen does not realize the implications. The vote was stacked by letting soldiers from Northern states vote in a Maryland election.

5. As to his point that the South might have sustained slavery for a long time, if it had not been for the war, he makes some errors and important omissions in reaching his conclusion. His statement that "Unpaid labor makes for big profits" demonstrates that a cost accounting course was probably not required for his sociology degrees. Whether labor is paid in cash or not, it must still be maintained with food shelter, and clothing. In Southern slavery, the owner was responsible for the slave and his or her family from cradle to grave, 24 hours a day, every day. It took many years to break even on a slave purchase. A slave born in a Southern household might not be a break-even investment for about 20 years. In addition, research on Southern plantations by William Fogel and Stanley Engerman, published in 1974 as Time on the Cross: The Economics of Southern Slavery, indicated that Southern slaves were better fed, better housed, and had better medical treatment that most Northern factory workers. They also had sturdy clothes and shoes. Paying hired labor without cradle to grave maintenance would have been much cheaper. The Fogel and Engerman research is not popular with modern academics, however, because their findings do not fit the politically correct image of Southern slavery.

Another very realistic reason for getting rid of slavery was the danger of slave revolts. Thousands of French civilians were killed in a 1791 slave revolt in Haiti. In 1831, 56 white civilians, mostly women and children, were killed in the Nat Turner revolt in Virginia. Northern support for abolitionist murderer John Brown caused the South to be fearful of similar abolitionist inspired slave revolts and distrustful of Northern politicians. The fear of bloody abolitionist radicalism helped charge secession sentiment but would also have been a continual emotional incentive to ditch slavery. In addition, many independent farmers in Upstate South Carolina, Western North Carolina, East Tennessee, North Georgia, and North Alabama resented competition form the slave-driven plantation economy, but they resented Northern bullying and invasion even more. However, they were not political friends of slavery, and as Lowen acknowledges, made up nearly 75 percent of the potential white Southern electorate. High maintenance costs and the predominance of “fur hat” Democrats over “silk hat” Democrats and Whigs would have spelled the eventual economic and political doom of slavery. Elsewhere in the Americas, nations with far larger slave populations phased out slavery without a devastating, unjust and unnecessary war.

I am glad slavery is gone even though Southern slaves were on the average treated much better than the politically correct image and modern political agendas require. I do not maintain that slavery was good. It was foolishly shortsighted, dangerous, and inherently vulnerable to human abuse. However, insisting that it was much worse than it really was is a disgraceful disservice to rational discussion and tends to perpetuate socially self-destructive grievances and racial hostilities.

Truth is not always fashionable, but burying it never promotes peace and unity.

Leonard M. Scruggs

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Shattering The Northern Myths Of Glory