Articles Of Secession Slavery Quotes

Progressives today are quick to fault “America” for slavery and a host of other outrages. America did this, America did that. As we will see in this book, America didn’t do those things, the Democrats did. So the Democrats have cleverly foisted their sins on America, and then presented themselves as the messiahs offering redemption for those sins. It’s crazy, but it’s also ingenious. We have to give them credit for ingenuity. The second whitewash is to portray the Civil War entirely in terms of the North versus the South. The North is supposedly the anti-slavery side and the South is the pro-slavery side. A recent example is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article about the Confederate battle flag in The Atlantic.3 Now of course there is an element of truth in this, in that the Civil War was fought between northern states and southern states. But this neat and convenient division ignores several important details. First, the defenders of the Confederate cause were, almost without exception, Democrats. Coates cites many malefactors from Senator Jefferson Davis to Senator James Henry Hammond to Georgia Governor Joseph Brown. Yet while identifying these men as southerners and Confederates, Coates omits to identify them as Democrats. Second, Coates and other progressives conveniently ignore the fact that northern Democrats were also protectors of slavery. We will see in this chapter how Stephen Douglas and other northern Democrats fought to protect slavery in the South and in the new territories. Moreover, the southerners who fought for the Confederacy cannot be said to have fought merely to protect slavery on their plantations. Indeed, fewer than one-third of white families in the South on the eve of the Civil War had slaves. Thus the rigid North-South interpretation of the Civil War conceals—and is intended to conceal—the active complicity of Democrats across the country to save, protect, and even extend the “peculiar institution.” As the Charleston Mercury editorialized during the secession debate, the duty of the South was to “rally under the banner of the Democratic Party which has recognized and supported . . . the rights of the South.”4 The real divide was between the Democratic Party as the upholder of slavery and the Republican Party as the adversary of slavery. All the figures who upheld and defended American slavery—Senators John C. Calhoun and Stephen Douglas, President James Buchanan, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, architect of the Dred Scott decision, and the main leaders of the Confederacy—were Democrats. All the heroes of black emancipation—from the black abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, to the woman who organized the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, to the leader whose actions finally destroyed American slavery, Abraham Lincoln—were Republicans. It is of the utmost importance to progressive propagandists to conceal or at least ignore this essential historical truth.

Religious beliefs were instrumental in forming a distinctive Southern sectional identity in the decades preceding the war. This “invested the political conflict between the North and South with a profound religious significance, helping create a culture that made secession possible. It established a moral consensus on slavery that could encompass differing political views and unite a disharmonious South behind the ban ner of disunion.” Slavery was an intractable moral cause for both abolitionists and proslavery partisans. To many people these positions became as much of an unalterable article of faith as the godhead; thus “religious faith itself became a key part of the war’s unfolding story for countless Americans.”29 As Fuller writes of the war’s religious undergirding, “As a moral issue, the dispute acquired a religious significance, state rights becoming wrapped up in a politico- mysticism, which defying definition, could be argued for ever without any hope of a final conclusion being reached.

Even before the Treasury Department was created on September 2, 1789, and Hamilton was confirmed by the Senate as its first secretary on September 11, Congress had passed a tax bill to give the new government the funds it needed to pay its bills. There was no argument that the main source of income was to be the tariff, but there was lengthy debate over what imports should be taxed and at what rate. Pennsylvania had had a high tariff under the old Articles to protect its nascent iron industry and wanted it maintained. The southern states, importers of iron products such as nails and hinges, wanted a low tariff on iron goods or none at all. New England rum distillers wanted a low tariff on its imports of molasses. Whiskey manufacturers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere wanted a high tariff on molasses, to stifle their main competition. Congress finally passed the Tariff and Tonnage Acts (the latter imposed a duty of 6 cents a ton on American ships entering U.S. ports and 50 cents a ton on foreign vessels) in the summer of 1789. But, second only to slavery, the tariff would be the most contentious issue in Congress for the next hundred years. Pierce Butler of South Carolina even issued the first secession threat before the Tariff Act of 1789 made it through Congress.