Historian Philip Leigh responds to Kamron Spivey

Historian Philip Leigh responds to Kamron Spivey

The primary reason the North chose to fight was to sustain their economic prosperity.

(Bombardment of Fort Sumter by the batteries of the Confederate states, April 13, 1861. Source: Library of Congress)

Regarding Kamron Spivey’s article (“Ignorance is Bliss at Lee-Jackson Day” op-ed, Jan. 22): The goal of my “Causes of the Civil War” speech was to pivot attention away from why the South seceded and toward why the North chose to force the cotton states back into the Union.

Among my reasons for the shift is one you revealed when you seemingly suggested that I invented “coercion” as an explanation for the Southerner’s physical resistance to forced reunification. In truth, Southerners commonly used the term during the secession crisis. From the Southern perspective, the Northerner’s “Preserving the Union” mantra was a euphemism for coercion.

A second reason for pivoting was to disabuse students of the false assumption that secession would necessarily have led to war. That did not happen when the Soviet Union collapsed.

A third reason was to give a student pause before reflexively citing the declarations of secession causes as the penultimate basis for the Civil War. Contrary to today’s popular refrain, they were not the only official words contemporary Southerners wrote to describe their differences with Northerners. The Confederate Constitution, for example, outlawed deterrence tariffs, public works spending, and subsidies for private business — all allowed under the U.S. Constitution. 

The primary reason the North chose to fight was to sustain their economic prosperity. That they could not do if a low tariff country were on their Southern border.

A month before Sumter, The Boston Transcript editorialized: “Alleged grievances in regard to slavery were originally the causes for the separation of the cotton States, but the mask has been thrown off, and it is apparent that the people of the seceding States are now for commercial independence.”

It was the North — not the South — that went to war over tariffs. On the eve of the war tariffs on dutiable items averaged 19% but thereafter the victors raised them to an average of 45% for the next fifty years. Northerners worried they would lose their Southern markets to Europeans if a prosperous low-tariff country were on their Southern border.

America’s 1861 tariff collections were $53 million but the market for Northern goods in the South was $240 million. Northern businesses also captured most of the ancillary trading services such as coastwise shipping, insurance, and warehousing, taking the total to over $300 million.

While the Southern states were seceding at least ten Northern states passed joint legislative resolutions explaining their objections to secession. None mentioned a desire to end slavery. After fulminating with terms like “treason” and “rebellion” most emphasized their goal was to maintain the economic benefits of a Union, such as free trade among the states.

Similarly, Northerners were insensitive to the lopsided penalties the South paid to support tariffs. In addition to increasing the cost of imports throughout America they also tended to reduce export prices, of which cotton was the top item. Few modern historians seem to be aware of the tariff’s price depressing-effect on exports.

The following simplified example explains:

• Assume that Britain sends $300 million in manufactured goods to America in one massive fleet. If there is no tariff, the shipper (Great Britain) collects $300 million in proceeds by selling their goods to Americans. The shipper thereby acquires $300 million in US currency with which to buy American exports.

• Next, consider the same transaction with a 45% import tariff. Instead of collecting $300 million, the shipper must pay $135 million (45%) of the sales proceeds to our Federal Government as an import tax. Thereafter he has only $165 million in American currency with which to buy USA exports. To buy the same quantity of American exports as in a tariff-free case, he must reduce his price to the American sellers by 45%. Since Southern farmers were consistently such sellers well into the twentieth century, they were forced to accept prices far below what a tariff-free market would yield. 

Thus, Southerners not only had to pay the same inflated prices for Northern-made manufactured goods protected by tariffs as did all Americans, but they also had to accept steeply lower prices for their export products. (The quantity sold could alternatively be reduced, but the financial impact would be the same: a 45% reduction in the proceeds to Southern farmers and other exporters.)

Similarly, Lincoln and other Northerners admitted they had discriminatory economic reasons for wanting to keep slaves out of the Western Territories. They wanted to withhold the territorial real estate wealth in reserve for free white people.

When Congressman David Wilmot proposed in 1846 that slaves be banned from the lands acquired from Mexico after the Mexican War he announced, “I make no war upon the South, nor upon slavery in the South. I have no squeamish sensitiveness upon the subject of slavery, nor morbid sympathy for the slave. I plead the cause of the rights of white freemen. I would preserve for free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.”

These Wilmot remarks show that banning slaves in the territories was not a noble gesture, but your article accused me (not Wilmot) of minimizing the enormity of the congressman’s disregard for slaves. 

Wilmot may, however, be credited with pioneering Popular Sovereignty as a way of handling the spread of slavery into the territories by a local popular vote option. In the 1860 Presidential election only Lincoln’s party insisted upon a total slavery ban in the territories. Both Democrat Douglas and Southern candidate Breckinridge agreed to let the territories choose for themselves.

Their two plans were somewhat different, but Kansas rejected slavery in an 1858 local option vote by a five-to-one margin. Thereafter, it was unlikely that any territories north and west of her would join the Union as a slave state. States above Kansas were too cold and those to the west were too arid.  The Republican Party’s blanket ban was unnecessary. Insistence upon it led to the Civil War. Slaves could have been kept out of the territories by Popular Sovereignty. Nearly everybody realized that slavery was doomed to die if it could not grow. 

* * *

While public polling may reveal a new truth on an opinion matter when showing a 70% consensus, when it is 99% you may metaphorically be in North Korea. In the latter case, new fiction might be the best way to disrupt the status quo enough to allow authors and students to voice and discover previously censored opinions, while remaining truthful to the overarching facts.

Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels radically reformed Confederate General James Longstreet’s reputation. Similarly, Harriet Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin novel put intense focus on slavery.

More recently Cold Mountain’s three million copies disclosed the evils of Confederate conscription enforcement, especially late in the war. London Spectator columnist, Lionel Shriver, claims she changes more minds with her novels than with her regular political columns.

* * *

Regarding your remark that “Leigh failed to acknowledge Southern secession threats before the war,” you overlooked two points.

First, to the contrary I said “secession was a remedy that geographically isolated political minorities repeatedly considered from 1789 to 1861 … It was popular in New England when Virginians were President. Conversely it tempted Southerners when Northerners controlled Washington.”

Second, by 1861 the South was too far behind in both the House and Senate to ever restore a geographic power balance. That’s why they moved forward with secession in 1861. In contrast, the North never had to resort to secession to escape the penalties of perpetual minority status. 

Your quip that my audience members “were ignorant about slavery and the black experience” is presumptive. You cannot know that. Even if some obtained knowledge through family lore, such awareness is likely more informative than the legends of Northern families who rarely lived among blacks.

Although two-thirds of Southerners did not own any slaves, nearly half of those who did, owned five, or fewer. They worked side-by-side during the day. They attended integrated churches on Sundays and shared transportation facilities. Each tended to be a merged family unit, albeit one with clear lines of subordination, but not segregation.

The Deep South was 40% black, the Upper South 20% while the so-called free states averaged around 1%. When French tourist Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1830, he observed that race prejudice was most obvious in the states that had abolished slavery.

At the start of the Civil War, slaves were America’s largest asset class, valued at $3 billion. Despite such an enormous sum and decades of intersectional arguments, Congress never put forth a plan for compensated emancipation as Britain had done 25 years earlier in 1835 and Russia started doing with her serfs in 1861. American abolitionists continually insisted upon immediate and uncompensated emancipation, which would cost Northerners nothing and require the Southern gentry to economically destroy themselves. 

Finally, in reply to your critique that “[Phil] knows his history, the history he wants to be true,” I turn to Will Rogers for a response: “If I don’t see things your way, well, why should I?”

Philip Leigh

[The opinions expressed in this magazine are the author's own and do not reflect the official policy or position of The Spectator, or any students or other contributors associated with the magazine. It is the intention of The Spectator to promote student thought and civil discourse, and it is our hope to maintain that civility in all discussions.]