The American Civil War: The Root Cause and the Lost Cause

Ta-Nehisi Coates

It's rather predictable that neo-Confederates are rallying to the Lost Cause. I've written about Virginia's travails before. Now, South Carolina, where secession began, is having its travails.

Monday in Charleston, the Sons of Confederate Veterans held a "secession ball" to celebrate the onset of the bloodiest war in American history. This is not hyperbole: 600,000 people were killed in the Civil War -- some 2 percent of the American population. More Americans died in the Civil War then in World War I, World War II and Vietnam combined. At Gettysburg alone, there were more combined American casualties than in the Revolutionary War. I would like to think that no one in South Carolina would celebrate mass slaughter, so perhaps they were celebrating the cause that so many South Carolinians bravely died for.

"We're celebrating that those 170 people (who signed South Carolina's ordinance of secession) risked their lives and fortunes to stand for what they believed in, which is self-government," Jeff Antley of the Sons of Confederate Veterans recently told the New York Times. "Many people in the South still believe that is a just and honorable cause. Do I believe they were right in what they did? Absolutely. There's no shame or regret over the action those men took."

Antley is not wrong so much as he is avoiding the question. Self-government is, necessarily, a portion of secession. Thus, claiming that the South seceded for "self-government" is akin to claiming that you bought a house so that you could be a homeowner. Antley references the 170 signers of the state's ordinance of secession. South Carolina also issued a declaration of secession, which anyone who is curious about the cause of secession is free to read. Part of it reads as follows:

"A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the Common Government, because he has declared that the 'Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,' and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. ...

"The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy."

South Carolina's delegates were not unique in citing slavery. Mississippi's declaration of secession, for instance, reads:

"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery -- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun."

As the fight over the Civil War gins up, media is mostly examining the issue through a partisan conservative/liberal lens. It's true that most neo-Confederates tend to be conservative, but I doubt that, at least north of the Mason-Dixon line, most conservatives tend to be neo-Confederates. At some point there has to be some reckoning with the actual documents and the words within. Either South Carolina's brief against secession cites slavery as the cause, or it doesn't. Either Mississippi's declaration claims its "position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery," or it doesn't. And either Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said that the country he sought to erect was founded "upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race-- is his natural and normal condition," or he didn't.

Facts do not have a Northern bias. To paraphrase "Daily Show" comedian Larry Wilmore, citing slavery as the cause of the Civil War is not politically correct, it's correct-correct.

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Civil War: The Root Cause and the Lost Cause - American History