The Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) wrote the book on blocking the removal of Confederate statues-quite literally. In 2016 the SCV put out a “Heritage Defense” manual for use in defending Confederate memorials. You can find the manual here.
Heritage-Defense-Manuel-2016-1 (1)
I will discuss the manual’s strategies for keeping the statues up in a later post, but first I want to talk about the SCV’s version of “history” on display in the manual. According to the SCV, this is how the Civil
War started:
When asked for the cause of the war, a member should first address the mythology. Those who are bigoted against the South feverishly try to lead the public to believe the war was “over slavery.” You must first dispel that wording. To say it was “over” slavery implies the people of the Northern states sent their children to the South to die for the freedom of the slaves. Nothing could be further from the truth….
Those debating the war period today will frequently focus on the issues causing the South to declare its independence. Some say it was to “protect slavery,” thus justifying their position that the war was “over” slavery. This is patently untrue. Many of the largest slave owners did not support independence. Slavery was both legal and constitutional. To have changed that status would have taken constitutional amendments which could have never passed with all states in the union. The Southern view, as related by UCV spokesman Captain Sam Ashe, was quite simple. It was caused by anger and fear.
Anger
The anger in 1860 concerned the recently passed Morrill Tax, which took money from the South at a greatly disproportionate rate. This was patently unfair but was passed by a majority in the US House which had become weighted in favor of the Northern, industrial states. This anger was primarily felt by the rich, who paid most of the tariffs, but was felt to a lesser degree all over the agriculture belt, primarily
the South. The Robert E. Lee Camp 1640, SCV, posted a video to Facebook which succinctly explains the tariff.
www.facebook.com/149308815083112/videos/1208207915859858/?fref=nf
Fear
Fear, on the other hand, was felt by everyone and slavery was squarely the reason. In fact, it was the precipitating reason for the independence movement. It is also the issue left from most American history books because it makes reasonable a declaration of independence. During the decades prior to the war, a group called “Abolitionists” grew in the New England area. The group wanted slavery abolished, unequivocally and immediately.
They were religious in nature and radical in their efforts. They rejected the purchase of freedom for the slaves, as Britain had done, and demanded immediate emancipation. This ran contrary to the feelings of most Northern politicians, as previously mentioned, who favored sending the slaves back to Africa. It was also infeasible in the South for purely economic reasons. In 1860, in middle Georgia, if a farmer owned two thousand acres of land and two slaves, the slaves were valued at twice the value of the land. Slave owners had enormous capital invested in the slaves and to simply free them, would devastate the capital infrastructure.
Into this tension came a book, The Impending Crisis, by Hinton Helper. This book hit the US capital like a “bombshell.” It was written by an Abolitionist and was being printed and smuggled to slaves across the South. It seemed to be calling for the slaves to rise up and begin a revolution. Since only about nine percent of Southern adults owned slaves, that left 91 percent who had nothing to do with it but who
would be targeted in such an uprising.
Recent history at the time is what caused the immediate fear. During the 1790s, the slaves on the western part of the island of Santo Domingo rose up and slaughtered nearly every white person in the former French colony. (The slaves formed a country now called Haiti.) Again in 1831, a slave revolt in Virginia, led by Nat Turner, caused hundreds of deaths of men, women and children. That uprising had to be stopped by the military. People remembered the carnage of that revolt. The very idea that millions of slaves
might be brought to slaughter millions of Southerners, the vast majority of whom had no slaves, was frightening and enraging. The period from 1855 to 1859 was a cauldron of agitation and hatred for this specific reason.
In many revolutions, there is one single action which precipitates the conflagration. Ours was no exception. On October 16, 1859, abolitionist John Brown of Kansas, gathered a group of Abolitionists and launched a raid into Virginia. Their purpose was to ignite and lead the slave insurrection and slaughter which had been so feared. To say this was an earth quake across the South would be an understatement. Militia units began to be formed and drilled; politicians began demanding independence. They began to feel there was no possibility of living in peace with the Northern states. A declaration of independence followed. The rest is well known history…
So, did you get that? The war wasn’t “over slavery” it was over “Fear.” Fear of not being paid for slaves emancipated by the Northern Abolitionists and Fear that the slaves would exterminate the white people of the South. Read through those paragraphs and try to explain to yourself how even in the SCV’s telling of the story, the Civil War was not started over slavery.
By the way, the nonsense about the Morrill Tariff (misnamed the “Morrill Tax” in the SCV’s manual) being a major cause of the Civil War is not based on the secession documents issued by the Southern secession conventions in 1860 and 1861. Those documents universally cite the preservation of slavery as the reason the states that started the Confederacy seceded.
By the way, the “Captain Sam Ashe” cited as an authority by the SCV manual, was a Confederate captain from a slave-owning family who opposed Reconstruction after the Civil War.
[The feature illustration shows the Sam Ashe monument on the grounds of the North Carolina capitol in Raleigh.]
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I will pen up my personal views to this at a more opportune time.
My thanks to the Admin for encouraging the study of this piece of history.
They know they’re spreading falsehoods. It’s a reprehensible group.
I know you have been researching this for years Al.