What the Confederacy Was Not About
To suggest, as the neo-confederates do that the seceding states left the Union to preserve states rights as a principleseparate and apart from the right to maintain slavery in those states, specificallyis absurd. After all, the rights that southern leaders felt were being impeded were specifically those rights tied to the maintenance of the slave system, and its extension into new territories in the West, recently added to the nation as a result of the war with Mexico. Because the Republican Party and Lincoln were free soilersdedicated to banning slavery in the new territoriesthe slaveocracies of the South were convinced that their economic systems would be crippled over time, as they became outvoted in the Congress, and as the nation moved to a free labor system, as opposed to one deeply reliant on enslavement.
That the only states rights being fought for were the rights of said states to operate a slave system was attested to by southern leaders themselves. In December of 1860, Alabama sent commissioners to the other slave states to advocate for their secession. One of the commissioners was Stephen Hale, whose job was to persuade Kentucky to leave the Union. In his letter to the Governor of Kentucky, he asked and answered the question as to which states rights were being violated by the North.
what rights have been denied, what wrongs have been done, or threatened to be done, of which the Southern states, or the people of the Southern states, can complain? he asked. In the very next paragraph he offered the answer, clearly and unmistakably:
African slavery has not only become one of the fixed domestic institutions of the Southern states, but forms an important element of their political power, and constitutes the most valuable species of their property
forming, in fact, the basis upon which rests the prosperity and wealth of most of these states
It is upon this gigantic interest, this peculiar institution of the South, that the Northern states and their people have been waging an unrelenting and fanatical war for the last quarter of a century. An institution with which is bound up, not only the wealth and prosperity of the Southern people, but their very existence as a political community
They attack us through their literature, in their schools, from the hustings, in their legislative halls, through the public press
to strike down the rights of the Southern slave-holder, and override every barrier which the Constitution has erected for his protection.
So too, the conflict was not about trade and tariff issues, as often claimed by the revisionists. Although the South had long opposed high tariffs on goods from Englandwhich had a disproportionate impact on the South because they raised the cost of goods the region needed and which were not locally produced, and also made it more costly for Britain to purchase southern cottonby the time of secession, the tariffs had been cut dramatically. Alexander Stephens, who would become Vice-President of the Confederacy noted as much when he spoke to the Georgia legislature in 1860, explaining:
The tariff no longer distracts the public councils. Reason has triumphed
The present tariff was voted for by Massachusetts and South Carolina. The lion and the lamb lay down togetherevery man in the Senate and the House from Massachusetts and South Carolina, I think, voted for it
(the duties) were made just as low as Southern men asked them to be, and those are the rates they are now at.
The fact is, the worst of all tariffs ever imposedknown in popular lore as the Tariff of Abominationshad been most harshly enforced during the Presidency of Andrew Jackson, a Southerner. Yet no state save South Carolina ever threatened secession over this mother of all tariffs, suggesting that it alone (or others like it, even less harsh) would hardly have been a significant contributor to the rupture of 1860-1861.
