I appreciate the efforts by local citizens to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the Record-Bee”s coverage of the process. The Civil War, also known as the War Between the States, was the most momentous conflict to have ever occurred in the history of this conflict, one in which more Americans died than in all the other wars we have been involved in combined. Approximately as many Americans died on each side as were killed in World War II totaling almost three quarters of a million deaths.
The problem with the analysis presented by our local roundtable is that it echoes the attitude reflected in much of the centennial celebrations of the Civil War that occurred 50 years ago when I was a child, a narrative that sought to downplay the role of race and slavery in this conflict, which was, as Ulysses S. Grant explained in his memoirs, while not the only issue involved in this great conflict, the central and principal one, one that undergirded all else including states rights as the right these states sought to maintain was the right to keep up to one-third of their population who were African-Americans deprived of their most basic human rights to dignity and personal freedom to ensure the profits and privileged lifestyle of the plantation aristocracy.
Our esteemed local experts talk about tariffs and the Morrill Tariff as provoking this great conflict as part of a provocative course of conduct by industrial interests based in the North. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wikipedia tells us the Morrill Tariff was enacted in March 1861 after secession and that a low tariff favored by the Southern states passed in 1857 was in effect prior to that time. Consistent with that, little mention was made of tariff issues in the vitriol espoused by secessionist spokespersons at that time; rather it was that peculiar institution slavery, the polar opposite of freedom that was at the heart of their diatribes.
Rather than a power play by free soil interests, the crisis leading to this conflict was provoked by a power grab by pro-slavery interests, which had hegemony, meaning dominance, over the federal government up to that time. This occurred first through the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War, which expanded the reach of slavery into new territories that King Cotton”s depletion of the soil required, something Congressman Abraham Lincoln denounced at the time as a blatant act of aggression.
In the wake of the odious Compromise of 1850 and its Fugitive Slave Act and an upsurge in racist pro-slavery violence against abolitionist and free soil activists, the ostensible balance of power was further threatened to the detriment of non-slaveholding interests by the introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which sought to expand slavery into the Western Plains states under the guise of popular sovereignty, as if freedom and basic human rights of people can be nullified by the votes of others. These issues were clearly explained by Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in his classic speeches “The Crime Against Kansas” and “The Barbarism of Slavery” oratory that got Sumner almost beaten to death on the floor of the Senate by a South Carolina Congressman.
Walt Whitman stated that it would take centuries to place the events of the Civil War in their proper context given the magnitude of their import, which he felt were worthy of comparison to events described in the Old Testament. Having said that, Lincoln was not a perfect man and functioned as a pragmatist in navigating these perilous events. Nonetheless, after the promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation in late 1862 Lincoln described the conflict as a “revolutionary war” of liberation. His attitude on all this was aptly summarized in his Second Inaugural Address delivered on March 4, 1865 shortly before his death when he stated:
“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope-fervently do we pray-that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man”s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to address this issue. Those who are interested in exploring this important part of our history have many resources to turn to, one of which is an ongoing series in the Washington Post online accessible at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/artsandliving/civilwar/.
Tom Quinn
Lower Lake
