According to a
Pew
Research Center poll conducted in 2011, nearly half of all Americans
believe that the issue which animated the Civil War was
states’ rights. Historian
Edward Ayers admits to being surprised by this, pointing out that history books
generally point to slavery as the issue that brought Northern states and
Southern states into armed conflict (
source).
In fact, the Civil War was not solely about slavery, and it
was certainly not about states’ rights.
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| Abraham Lincoln |
If one employs a content analysis of the arguments between
North and South, Ayers tells us, some of the words that are used repeatedly are
“state,” “people,” “union,” “right,” “constitution,” “power,” “federal” and
“amendment.” He argues, based on this analysis, that citizens of the Northern
states were galvanized by the desire to “sustain the justice, power and
authority of the federal government.” The North was not united by opposition to
slavery, because many Northerners were conflicted on the issue, and even those
who opposed slavery were fearful of what might happen if the slaves were freed.
One could assume that, if the North sought to assert a
strong federal government, the South sought to assert states’ rights. However,
as Ayers points out, this is a mistake. Using the same content analysis, Ayers
finds that the Southern lawmakers – most elected officials in the South were
plantation owners – were motivated by the desire to defend the institution of slavery.
Given the benefit of this insight, one may review the evidence and recognize
that, in fact, the Southern states were more than willing to band together
under a federal structure – the Confederacy – to defend their shared economic
interests. And one may infer, reasonably, that the plantation owners were highly
effective at manipulating popular sentiment and rallying people of the South to
their side.
These points are offered to provide a context for discussing
Abraham Lincoln’s views on slavery. Lincoln mobilized public opinion around the
goals of putting down insurrection, restoring the union, and preserving federal
authority; but this does not shed light on Lincoln’s private motivations.
To understand Lincoln, consider his childhood. A friend of
Lincoln by the name of Carl Schurz described Lincoln’s father as a typical “poor
Southern white.” The man was “shiftless and without ambition for himself or his
children” and “always looking for a new piece of land on which he might make a
living without much work.”
Another friend of Lincoln’s, Horace White, pointed
to a biographical sketch by Chester Dewey as providing an apt description of
Lincoln’s background. According to Dewey’s account, Abraham Lincoln was, “a
native of Kentucky, of poor white parentage, and, from his cradle, has felt the
blighting influence of the dark and cruel shadow which rendered labor
dishonorable and kept the poor in poverty, while it advanced the rich in their
possessions.”
Abraham Lincoln himself did not believe that there was
much of note in his personal history. In response to a biographer’s
questions, he said, “The short and simple annals of the poor. That's my life,
and that's all you or any one else can make out of it.”
The view that labor is “dishonorable” emerged from antebellum
Southern culture. Manual labor was scorned by the self-styled
Aristocrats, Patricians, and “cavaliers.” This is no doubt because they had no need of engaging in manual labor themselves. These men had made their fortunes by selling
cotton in the global marketplace.
Tensions between North and South were as much about class as
they were about race.John Brown, after his capture at Harper’s Ferry, complained
that had he acted “on behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the
so-called great, or on behalf of any of their friends ... it would have been
all right, and every man in this Court would have deemed it an act worthy of
reward rather than punishment.” Seeing
the Holy
Bible displayed ostentatiously in the courtroom, he quoted Hebrews 13:3, “Remember them that are in
bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves
also in the body.”
The monied elites of the South regarded themselves as
superior beings. This is implicit in the comments of a stalwart Confederate named
Frank Alfriend, who said,
The North [is] carrying out to its legitimate conclusion the
pernicious doctrine of the Declaration of
Independence, that ‘all men are born free and equal,’ recognizing no
distinction whatever of race, intellect, or character, witnesses in its fullest
development, that never-ending conflict of classes, between the rich and the
poor, those who have accumulated property, and the breadless pauper, the ‘codfish’
element, and the idle, starving sans-culottes.
Alfriend believed that what the South stood for was the
defense of “property and intelligence” against “ignorance and indolence.” He discussed
the Northern Working Class in the same terms that Southerners used to described
people of African origin, as “a class of population noted for its want of
enterprise, intellect, or any quality which could make it a disturbing element
of society, and peculiarly adapted to a condition of absolute subordination, by
a characteristic docility and inability to provide for its own wants when
beyond the control of the superior race.”
Similarly, D.R. Hundley said, in 1860, that the
Southern
Gentleman belongs to an impeccable pedigree; he comes “of a good stock.”
And because of this, the Southern Gentleman is “usually possessed of an equally
faultless physical development. He is on average six feet tall, is graceful and
athletic, and possesses, in all, a physique which unites firmness and
flexibility.” In contrast, the class of Southerner known as “poor white trash”
is bony and lank, with a “sallow complexion, awkward manners, and a natural
stupidity or dullness of intellect that almost surpasses belief (
source).”
Even the slaves, living under the influence of their
captors, derided poor white trash. One folksong that was popular among slaves
carried the refrain,
I had a little dog,
His name was Dash.
I'd rather be a nigger
Than po' white trash.
The reader is referred to Forret’s excellent book on the
Civil War era, Race Relations at the
Margins, where he discusses widespread derisive references to “crackers,” “hillbillies”
and “rednecks.” He makes a convincing case that “poor white trash” occupied a
place in the Southern social hierarchy that was only slightly above that of
African slaves.
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| Poor White Folks, 1845 |
Frederick Law Olmsted traveled in the South in 1862 and,
based on his experiences, wrote a book called The Cotton Kingdom. In this book, he develops the hypothesis that
Southern culture, by extolling the Southern Gentleman, valorized men of
property (and property, according to this view, included slaves), and in doing
so, stigmatized white men who had failed to acquire property. Because Southern
Gentleman did not need to engage in manual labor, men who did were regarded as
inferior. As a result, Olmsted observed, poor Southern whites were indeed
guilty of indolence and lack of enterprise. “They work little, and that little,
badly; they earn little, they sell little.”
Impoverished whites of the South had only one consolation,
according to Olmsted. “From childhood, the one thing in their condition which
has made life valuable to the mass of whites has been that the niggers are
their inferiors. It is this habit of considering themselves of a privileged
class, and of disdaining something which they think beneath them, that is
deemed to be the chief blessing of slavery.”
Olmsted believed that one of the key distinctions between
North and South revolved around divergent views of economics. Money spent on
the upkeep of slaves did not circulate back into the economy, and as a result,
there were fewer jobs available for whites. Southern oligarchs believed that
the only thing that mattered was the price one could fetch for surplus
production; Northerners believed, in contrast, that it is appropriate to
examine how this income is spent.
The truth has been overlooked that the accumulation of wealth
and the power of a nation are contingent not merely upon the primary value of
the surplus of productions of which it has to dispose, but very largely also
upon the way in which the income from its surplus is distributed and
reinvested. Let a man be absent from almost any part of the North twenty years,
and he is struck, on his return, by … the improvements which have been made.
Thus, according to Olmsted, the Northern states enjoyed better
buildings, churches, school-houses, mills and railroads than he saw in the
South. Under the Southern oligarchy, Virginia was “deteriorating, growing
shabbier, more comfortless, less convenient.”
The debates between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas touched on
the question of whether slavery ought to be introduced in newly-established American
territories. The views expressed by Lincoln demonstrate that his opposition to
slavery was motivated, in part, by the effects of slavery on poor whites. Of
these new territories, Lincoln said, “We want them for homes of free white
people. This they cannot be, to any considerable extent, if slavery shall be
planted within them. Slave states are places for poor white people to remove
from, not to remove to. New free States are the places for poor people to go to,
and better their condition.”
Lincoln was also concerned that, if a country accepts the
legitimacy of slavery, it sets a dangerous precedent. This is reflected in
notes written in 1854:
If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right,
enslave B. -- why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that
he may enslave A?—
You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the
lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you
are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.
You do not mean color exactly?--You mean the whites are
intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave
them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you
meet, with an intellect superior to your own.
But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can
make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if
he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.
None of this suggests that Lincoln was indifferent to the
fate of Africans living in America. Instead, it suggests that Lincoln, like
John Brown, was attentive to that Biblical passage, “Remember them that are in
bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves
also in the body.” This point is made clear in the Lincoln Douglas debates,
when Lincoln contrasted the philosophies of equality and aristocracy:
The one is the common right of humanity and the other the
divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops
itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and
I'll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a
king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit
of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another
race, it is the same tyrannical principle.
To honor Lincoln’s memory, be
vigilant when idle aristocrats accuse the poor of being lazy, when we allow
other human beings to toil in conditions that we ourselves would find
intolerable, and when the dignity of manual labor is disparaged. There is no
doubt that Lincoln would have agreed with Desmond Tutu’s credo that, “None of
us is truly free while others remain enslaved.” But do not mistake this
for some esoteric principle; it is, instead, a warning that we’d be foolish to
ignore.
