Years ago I had a friend from Dallas named Bert, whom I met through work. He was a big burly man with a deep gravelly voice and an even deeper Texas accent. When he first met me his first question was, “Barbara are you a Yankee or a damned Yankee?” I asked what the difference was and he answered, “A Yankee is a Northerner who comes to visit us, and a damned Yankee comes to stay.”
It was my first inkling that the Civil War has never really ended.
Today, April 12th, marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. At 4:30 a.m. Confederate forces at Fort Moultrie unleashed a barrage of artillery fire at Fort Sumter, a federal military installation in Charleston harbor. More than 38 hours later Fort Sumter surrendered. Except for a mule, there was no blood shed in this first action of the war, prompting former South Carolina Senator James Chestnut to boast that the Confederate forces were so superior that only a thimble full of blood would be spilled before the Union surrendered. The war lasted four years and caused over 620,000 casualties before the Confederates finally surrendered.
But the war didn’t really end with General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. The era of Reconstruction, which included Federal occupation, increased taxes and carpetbaggers who bought land for pennies on the dollar, lasted until 1877. After Reconstruction the South fought back with the KKK and Jim Crow laws. They lost their last battle when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
I have participated in many Civil War forums over the years, and I’m still amazed at the number of people who continue to deny the true cause of the Civil War. I’ve heard everything from states’ rights to high tariffs all the way down to Lincoln was just an evil dictator. I have never heard a Southern apologist admit that the war was about slavery.
In fact, slavery was the cause. And the Civil War didn’t really start on April 12, 1861. It started in 1787 when the Constitution was ratified where in Article I Section 2 it outlines the apportionment of representatives “among the several states according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons.” All other persons referred to slaves.
In the 74 intervening years the Southern slave holding states threatened to secede several times trying to protect that 3/5 clause and their equal representation in Congress. To maintain the Union, Northern congressman appeased them with one compromise after another. But when Lincoln, who said that he wished to restrict the territorial enlargement of slavery into the new west, was elected to the presidency, the Southern states seceded one after another. The era of compromise was over.
That “peculiar institution” of slavery was the basis of the Southern agrarian economy, and if they didn’t have political equality in Congress their ability to sustain slavery as an economic institution was doomed.
There is no article in our Constitution that forbids secession of any state. So the argument that the slave holding states had a right to secede is plausible. But they were seceding to protect the right to own slaves. There were cultural and social issues involved as well, all stemming from the institution of slavery, but the “states’ rights” argument is an easy way to gloss over the moral issue of slavery by claiming that they had a right to secede, thus claiming that Lincoln had initiated a war of “Northern Aggression”.
Lincoln had been thinking and speaking about the future of slavery for years prior to his presidency because he believed that the thoughts and ideals of human equality expressed in the Declaration of Independence outweighed the strict limitations of the Constitution. In his “House Divided” speech to the Illinois state senate in 1858 he proclaimed his belief that “this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”
Lincoln was right. And it took much more than just a thimble full of blood.
Ironically Bert and I became very good friends. I sent him postcards and a bullet from Gettysburg and he sent me a huge box of shrapnel from Vicksburg. Though he never would admit that the war was about slavery, and he always called me Yank, we overcame our sectional and political differences. Bert passed away a while ago and I miss him. But he can rest in peace knowing that I’ll never be a damned Yankee.
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