Lincoln, slavery, the Civil War and how did so many people get it so wrong.

February 13th , 2022

Happy 213th birthday Mr. Lincoln. I’m sorry that I missed it yesterday. I hope you accept “Better late than never.”

A lot of people seem to have no idea that the Civil War was fought over only one reason: To preserve slavery. According to Pew Research and the Southern Poverty Law Center, approximately 40% of Americans, including school teachers, hold the belief that the war was about states’ rights or commerce. Slavery played a role, but only a minor one. Quite a few people have apologized to me for not knowing the true version of our history. But the truth is they learned what they were taught, so no apology is necessary. According to historians and history professors, who have done their own informal surveys, they place that number closer to 90%.

I myself used to talk about Black history and racism and dismiss the talk of slavery with “No one alive today ever owned slaves.” Sound familiar? I’d bought into the same argument used by white supremacist. “Ahhh…slavery is old news and has nothing to do with today, so let’s not talk about it. Or any of this untrue nonsense about the existence of racism.” But it has everything to do with today.

In his famous Cornerstone speech, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stevens proclaimed that the new government would stand by “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.” You can believe him because he would have been an expert on why he was leading the Confederacy in rebellion.

Five of the 13 states who seceded from the United States penned a quick letter explaining their reasons for doing so. The letters became known as the “Declarations of causes” for succession and were all similar. Texas wrote “We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race ... that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race.”

Mississippi’s delegation stated that its position was “thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.” Virginia, Georgia and South Carolina each made similar declarations.  Confederate state after state confirmed the true reason for secession and war. At Alabama’s Secession Convention in January 1861, the need to secede was explained in clear and simple terms: “The question of Slavery is the rock upon which the Old Government split: it is the cause of secession … to protect, not so much property, as white supremacy.”

So there you have it straight from the mouths of those who were actually involved.  For a great and easy read about how this misinformation came about, check out this article in the magazine Facing South.

According to leading Civil War historian, and friend Dwight Pitcaithley, that although yes, many countries and continents engaged in slavery, including Africa, as white people so often seem to need to point out to me thereby making slavery in the United States not so bad really, only in the Americas was the justification for slavery based on the supremacy of one race over another. Only in America.

Why does it matter though? Now deceased James Loewen, acquaintance, historian and bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America put it this way, “Concealing the role of white supremacy makes it harder for students to see white supremacy today. After all, if Southerners were not championing slavery but states’ rights, then that minimizes southern racism as a cause of the war and it gives implicit support to the argument that slavery was a benevolent institution.”

In other words, by believing and promoting all that nonsense, a direct line can be drawn to where this country stands today in its stalemate to actually end the racism and inequity that was supposed to be ended in 1865 by the Civil War; in 1871 with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution; in 1954 with Brown v Board of Education; in 1964 with the passage on the Civil Rights Act; in 1965 with the now-gutted Voting Rights Act; and in 1968 with the Fair Housing Act.  

So circling back to Mr. Lincoln, with information gained from Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson: “In Lincoln’s day, fabulously wealthy enslavers had gained control over the government and had begun to argue that the Founders had gotten their worldview terribly wrong. They insisted that their system of human enslavement, which had enabled them to amass previously unimaginable fortunes, was the right one. Most men, they believed, were dull drudges who must be led by their betters for their own good. As South Carolina senator and enslaver James Henry Hammond put it, “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal.’”

In the 1850s, on a fragment of paper, Lincoln wrote out the logic of a world that permitted the law to sort people into different places in a hierarchy, applying the reasoning he heard around him. “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?” Lincoln wrote. “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.”

Lincoln saw clearly that if we give up the principle of equality before the law, we have given up the whole game. We have admitted the principle that people are unequal and that some people are better than others. Once we have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, we have granted approval to the idea of rulers and ruled. At that point, all any of us can do is to hope that no one in power decides that we belong in one of the lesser groups.”

Sound like anything that’s going on today? Wondering about all the hubbub about voting suppression and voting rights? Democracies today are not usurped with bullets and tanks, but at the ballot box.