Bombardment of Fort Sumter, 1861 (Currier and Ives)

THOUSANDS and thousands of books have been written about the American Civil War, more accurately called the “War Between the States,” and vast legions of scholars have spent their entire careers immersed in it. Ordinary people have also devoted immense, independent labor to studying it. Gee, it’s intimidating to discuss. I am not remotely an expert, not even one of those highly informed amateurs. Let’s say, I’m an amateur’s amateur.

But it interests me. And it’s important to discuss it.

The War Between the States led to an oppressive form of federal government that remains with us today. The ongoing rhetoric about the war is deliberately inflammatory, unnecessarily divisive and involves systematic defamation of Southerners. It distracts from today’s entrenched, despotic system of debt slavery, a bondage shared by black and white. We are living everyday in the war’s aftermath. I plan to highlight intermittently some myths about the conflict as food for thought and as inspiration for your further study. I remain open to correction. Bear in mind, the American Founding itself, despite many noble principles and provisions, established a form of secular government that was not ideal, based as it was on rationalistic, “Enlightenment” ideas.

It is often said that the South started the war. According to this view, the South was the aggressor, first, by seceding from the United States and, secondly, by firing on Fort Sumter near Charleston in 1861.

Was the South unwise in seceding? Probably it was, given the outcome of the war. But it had every right to do so under the terms of the Constitution, which established the united states not the united state. The Founders deliberately avoided the word “national” in the founding documents, preferring federal. They were establishing a federation of sovereign entities. The federal government was not authorized by the Constitution to prevent states from leaving.

As Philip Mericle writes in a review of Adam Miller’s books on the war, which I highly recommend:

The Republican Party was originally a sectional party predicated on furthering Northern interests, and it was the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860 that precipitated the secession of several Southern States. Before this time different States, some of them Northern, had threatened to secede over various issues, and there was no doubt as to the legality of such an action. Just that year (1860-1861) Congress had even tried and failed to pass a law that would have officially outlawed state secession.

Many at the time knew that the federal government simply did not have the legal capacity to prevent States from seceding. The Constitution granted no such federal authority. Despite this legal framework, despite the Constitution, and despite the wishes and intentions of the founding fathers (expressed through letters, the Federalist Papers, and the Second amendment and the Bill of Rights) Lincoln retaliated with war.

The seceding states had no intention of conquering the North. They sought to be left alone. Leaving the issue of slavery aside, the South had cause to secede in the economic war launched years before by the North against the Southern economy in the form of punishing tariffs on cotton sent to textile mills in England. Furthermore, the revenue from those tariffs were apportioned by Congress overwhelmingly to the benefit of the Northern states.

In his book Liberty, the God that Failed, author Christopher Ferrara states the conventional Northern view about secession. He argues that secession by Southern states were revolutionary acts:

If Virginia had the right to secede from the United States because a group of people within the state no longer wished to be subject to the federal government, and if West Virginia had the right to secede from Virginia because a group of people in the western part of the state did wish to be subject to the federal government, then why not further subdivisions of Virginia via secession down to the smallest town or even group of citizens with a town? (Liberty the God that Failed: Policing the Sacred and Constructing the Myths of the Secular State, from Locke to Obama, Angelico Press, 2012; p. 371)

To which I say, why not? Personally, I would have liked to have seceded in 2020. Ferrara continued:

What besides sheer force prevents an infinite regression of secession movements?

Prudence prevents it. Communities tend to amalgamate for personal defense, the sharing of natural resources and trade. The problems with too much consolidation include cultural stultification and the loss of justified liberty, which is exactly where we are today, especially in the aftermath of the COVID power grab.

If the South had been successful in its effort to leave, conflict over trade and resources with the Union would have been inevitable, but not necessarily disastrous. What would have resulted would have been less power and profit for those with most influence over the federal government. From a Catholic perspective, author Gary Potter writes:

What if the South had succeeded in establishing its independence? At least there would have been an American nation in the mid-nineteenth century marked by a strong Catholic influence. Further, the children sent to Southern Catholic schools by leading families would have grown up and taken their positions as leaders of society; slavery doubtless would have ended; the waves of European Catholic immigrants at the end of the century and beginning of this one would probably have washed onto Southern shores instead of flooding Northern cities, possibly neutralizing or even submerging the “Teutonic Puritanism of the New England textile manufacturers” embraced by too many in the South; and there could have arisen an English-speaking Catholic nation in North America.

What about Fort Sumter? Few American school students are given the full facts about this episode. Mericle writes:

When Abraham Lincoln took office in January of 1861, he inherited the Fort Sumter crisis. For months federal soldiers had held Fort Sumter. Already one disguised supply ship had tried to deliver soldiers and ammunition to the Fort, but had been turned back by Southern warning shots. This attempt to give logistic support to those soldiers was a blatant violation of promises made towards the South. Lincoln would prove himself no more honest.

To bring the Fort Sumter affair to a peaceful conclusion, several prominent Southern commissioners were dispatched to Washington D.C. with due juridical evidence of State ownership of the Fort and a genuine desire to arrive at a peaceful outcome. Indeed, several state ordinances passed in 1805 stipulated that ownership of such properties was only ceded to the government under highly specific conditions. Additionally, under Lincoln’s predecessor an armistice had been signed between the Federal Government and the seceded State of South Carolina agreeing that such Fort would not be reinforced.

While these peace envoys were waiting, Lincoln dispatched a military convoy to nearby waters.

While the Southern commissioners were still waiting in good faith to be heard, Lincoln and his administration set in motion more plans that would escalate the situation and force the South’s hand. A military convoy of 12 ships, outfitted with supplies, ammunition, 2400 soldiers and 230 heavy cannons, was sent from Northern ports to rendezvous off the coast of Fort Sumter. An invasion fleet had been dispatched.

The idea that the South started the war is contradicted not simply by the economic aggression against the South, but by these hostile military actions. Miller writes in his book The North, the South and Lincoln’s War Policies (Tower of David Publications, 2014):

Thus, the firing on Fort Sumter was not made until after the offer of negotiation and peaceful arrangements had been rejected, and not until the United States government had mobilized and launched a sizeable armed military force.

Moreover, Miller contends, the “first shots” were not fired at Fort Sumter, but during the massacre of Southern civilians in 1856 by John Brown, who was financed by figures in the North.

Though no one was killed at Sumter, thus began a war that would kill hundreds of thousands soldiers and civilians. Mericle, again:

Cannons roared, but strangely the fleet stayed anchored outside the harbor, offering no assistance to the desperate Fort. The next day, the Confederate general – seeing that the Northern fleet was offering no assistance to the Fort – ceased fire and once more asked the Fort to surrender. The Northern commander, seeing that he was receiving no help from his promised reinforcements, accepted. In one of history’s strange ironies not a soldier died during this exchange of fire. The bloodiest war in American History opened with a “battle” wherein no blood was shed.

to be continued

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