On
Secession Then and Now
I’ve been reading the book And There Was Light, Abraham
Lincoln and the American Struggle (Random House, New York, 2022) by Jon
Meacham. Meacham makes it quite clear that at the beginning of the Civil War,
and to some extent throughout the Civil War, the North was not fighting to
eliminate slavery. Rather, the North was primarily fighting to preserve what
they called “the Union.” By the Union they meant all of the states that were
part of the United States antebellum, before any of them seceded. It was that
way for Lincoln too, at least initially. Lincoln said that if he could preserve
the Union without freeing a single slave, he would. He also said that if he
could preserve the Union by freeing all the slaves, he would. Lincoln’s goal
was to preserve the Union. He hated slavery, but eliminating slavery was not
his primary concern as president. He saw emancipation partly as a moral good
but primarily as a way of strengthening the North in its war with the South,
that is, as a way of preserving the Union.
For the North, the Civil War was not primarily about
abolishing slavery. For the South, that is precisely what it was about, or
rather preserving it was. South Carolina and the other states that followed it
in leaving the Union did so because they believed, probably mostly wrongly,
that if they stayed in the Union, the federal government would find a way to
free the enslaved people who were so important to the southern economy. After
he was elected but before he was inaugurated, Lincoln went to some lengths to
assure the South that he had no intention of doing that. The people of the South,
or at least their political leaders, didn’t believe him. So they opted out of
the Union that the people of the North so wanted to preserve.
Why was preserving the Union so important to Lincoln and to
the public of the North? It wasn’t important to them because only by preserving
it could they free the enslaved people in the South. The consensus, which Lincoln
initially shared, was that the federal government had no legal authority to
abolish slavery. (That, I suppose, is why the ThirteenthAmendment was adopted
after the war). The North was willing to engage in a civil war that cost over 700,000
American lives and an untold number. of physical and mental damages to force
the Union back together. Frankly, that the North was willing to do that has
been puzzling me. I’ll ask again: Why was preserving the Union so important to
Lincoln and to the public of the North?
The only answer to that question I can come up with is that
Americans, at least in the North but probably also in the South, saw themselves
as an experiment in popular sovereignty and democratic government. Those ways
of organizing and running a nation didn’t exist in the world outside the United
States at the time, or at least that’s what most Americans thought (and it
really doesn’t matter whether they were right or wrong about that). The people
of the North, it seems, believed that the Union falling apart would mean that
the country’s experiment in democracy (such as it was) had failed. They must
desperately have wanted it not to fail, for preserving it was, initially at
least, the reason they fought such a horrific civil war against the states that
had attempted to secede from the Union.
But wasn’t it true that the American experiment in democracy
had failed in that way as soon as South Carolina seceded? Didn’t the secession
of the other states of the Confederacy reinforce the truth that the Union had
failed? Slavery shattered the Union, or rather, the southern fear that slavery
might one day be abolished shattered the Union. The powers in the South were
not about to let democracy take away their beloved enslavement of people with
darker skin than the rest of us. The reasons why they were so attached to
slavery were surely economic. The economy of the South, especially the economy
of the cotton producing states, depended on the free labor of enslaved people.[1]
The political and even the spiritual leaders of the southern states convinced
themselves and their people that slavery was a moral good. They said
enslavement was the natural and necessary state of people they considered
hardly to be fully human at all. They insisted that God sanctioned slavery. So
they fought the Civil War precisely so they would never lose their slaves. They
sometimes cloaked that motivation behind a claim that all they were doing was
defending “states’ rights,” but it isn’t hard at all to see through that
smokescreen to the real, economic motivation of the Confederacy in fighting the
Civil War. Slavery was indeed the rock on which American democracy foundered.
Yet actually was no way the North could undo the failure of
the American experiment. It could, and did, reestablish the Union with all of
the states it had before the war, but getting the eleven states of the
Confederacy back into the Union through force of arms was not recreating the
Union as it had existed before the war. Before any state tried to secede, the
union of the states was voluntary. After the war, a significant part of the
Union was there only because the North won the Civil War and forced it back
into the Union. That part of the reconstituted Union was not there voluntarily.
So the Union after the war just wasn’t the same as the Union before the war. Yes,
the North recreated a Union in a political sense. Whether it did so in a moral
sense is a different question.
I doubt that people would get that excited about preserving
the Union today if a state attempted to secede. We’re told that secession isn’t
legally possible. Maybe not, but, speaking for myself, I would be perfectly
happy if the current Union broke up. Why? Because the conservative states of
this country, mostly but not entirely in the Midwest, the intermountain West,
and the South, have adopted policy positions so reactionary and oppressive as
to be completely unacceptable. They finally got Roe v. Wade overturned
and are now happily trampling the dignity and personal autonomy of the women of
their states. They are passing legislation to bash gay and trans people. In
Florida they are trying to keep schoolchildren from learning the truth about
both human sexuality and American history. Worst of all, they imposed Donald
Trump on us for four years of unmitigated political disaster.[2]
They want to take this country back in time not fifty years, not one hundred
years, but back to the era of robber barons of the late nineteenth century. They
want to undo all or most of the progress we have made in the last sixty years
or so regarding the equality of racial minorities, sexual minorities, and
women. Under our federal system of government, they are able to block nearly
all progressive legislation, and they do so with glee.
And, frankly, I’ve had it. In a sense, I wish the North had
let the South go as states seceded in 1860 and 1861. I have one strong
reservation about that wish of course. Letting the slave states go back then
would have meant that slavery remained in force in them for God knows how much
longer. But I dream of living in a nation not controlled by reactionary bigots
the way my country nearly is today. We could make our country and the world
better places if the more enlightened states of the Union weren’t hogtied by
those reactionary bigots. If my state of Washington, along with other more
progressive states like California, Oregon, New York, and several others could
secede from the Union, I would support their doing it. This country is so
divided politically that it would just make sense for it to be divided into two
or more independent nations. I know it’s not going to happen, but a man can
dream, can’t he? I pray that those of us Americans living in the twenty-first
century not the nineteenth can find a way to break ourselves free from the
Donald Trumps and Ron DeSantises of the world. I don’t know how to do it. I sure
wish someone did.
[1]
Free at least in the sense of paying no wages. Most slave owners, I suppose,
inherited their slaves. They didn’t buy them. But human beings were regularly
sold as slaves throughout the South. It has always seemed to me that the price
of slave was a significant amount of money. Buying slaves was expensive, but
hardly expensive enough to get the South to look for some other way to
structure its economy.
[2] I
say those states imposed him on us because Trump never won the nationwide popular
vote. It was the disproportionate power of small population states in the
electoral college, nearly all of them reactionary that made him president.
