Lost Cause, Lost Minds: A History of the Origins of the Civil War – Part Two

We continue our series on the origins of the Civil War taking a look at the society of the South and the States Rights vs. Slavery Arguments

Transcript

Lost Cause, Lost Minds: A History of the Origins of the Civil War – Part Two

August 2025

“The war...must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks...unless you acknowledge our right to self-government. We are not fighting for Slavery. We are fighting for Independence, and that, or extermination, we will have.”

Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America

“Liberty and equality are captivating sounds, but they often captivate to destroy.” 

John Tyler, 10th President of the United States and the only former President to join the Confederacy as a Congressman

“With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.”

Alexander Stephens

In the first of this series, I addressed two key issues surrounding arguments about the origins of the Civil War.  First, the right of states to secede from the union, and the 2nd, that it was all, ultimately, Lincoln’s fault.  Here, I will address the next two:  that the South was a societal construct worthy of esteem and that Secession was about something other than Slavery.  

The South was Better 

Robert E. Lee is often portrayed as a near-king Arthur-like figure presiding over a round table with Knights such as Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Ambrose Powell Hill, Richard Ewell, J.E.B. Stuart, George Pickett, and the rare non-Virginian, James Longstreet.  I have purposefully excluded other prominent Southern generals, such as Jubal Early, because he did not fit the mold, either in the Army of Northern Virginia’s estimation of a Knight errant, nor in history’s.  Do not get me wrong, Early was initially an effective general, as Lee knew, but unlike Jackson, he was not awarded a lasting epitaph.

Robert E. Lee was serving in the US Army at the time of Fort Sumter, and his going to war on the side of the Confederacy was in direct violation of the oath to protect the Constitution and obey the orders of the sitting President.  Many have noted that he had resigned his commission, a common occurrence among officers.  Yet it was one thing to resign a commission and quite another to take arms against that nation to which one had earlier given one’s oath to protect.  

Although Lincoln’s election was abhorrent to the South, it was legitimate based on the process of the time and constitutionally sound.  Taking arms against one’s country was also different from the Revolution.  Unlike the 13 colonies, the South had representation in the government.  I would argue their representation during the first 80 years of the Republic was the fundamental imbalance in the system.  The first 48 years of the Republic featured Southerners in the presidency in 40 of them.  At different times, Southerners such as John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay were the dominant political figures.  And Andrew Jackson was the most powerful President between Washington and Lincoln.  Of the first five Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, culminating in the Roger Taney’s driving of the Dred Scott decision, three were Southerners. The years are even more lopsided with Southerners as Chief Justices for 50 of the past 60 years before the Civil War.     

For Lee, Jackson, and Longstreet to resign was one thing, but to take up arms against the still-functioning Constitution was another.  These were not patriots, but Southern partisans.  

Societally, the South is often portrayed through the fuzzy lens of nostalgia.  Let’s start with the cinema.  DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation does not feature as its primary hero a hardscrabble laborer trying to eke out a living on 20 acres, but rather the plantation owning Cameron family.  Their domicile is portrayed with the Greek Columns, expansive porticos, and sweeping staircases.  This is the South that scurrilous carpetbaggers, and worse, African Americans will despoil.  

In Gone with the Wind, the same ethos applies.  Wealthy people enjoyed prosperity and an idyllic life until the Civil War and the arrival of Lincoln.  Then there is the real Arlington plantation, Lee’s antebellum home, which lends itself to this ideal, as Lee himself, the son of a Revolutionary War hero and patriarch of a proud family, conveys this stateliness.  The President of the CSA, Jefferson Davis, had a plantation staffed by over 100 slaves; his brother enjoyed an even larger manse. Noting the Davis plantation’s impressiveness, the place had a noble name, Brierfield.  Sounds like something out of British literature about a prominent Earl’s home.  After all, no estate is imposing unless it has its own name.  

Contrast these images with the awkward, prairie Lawyer Lincoln.  Or worse, Lee’s opposite Grant.  A failed shopkeeper and nobody from IL.  Lee was already highly respected in the military that he was offered the overall war command (later declined) by the North.  And even if he had resigned after the Mexican War, he would have spent his days presiding at Arlington. Without the Civil War, Grant would probably have remained a feckless, alcoholic failure.  

All of this is a term I see all too often today: nostalgia, the idealization of the past as superior to the present.  But like many history buffs who imagine a better society in the past, they almost always place themselves in the tiny aristocracy, rather than among the vast majority of people with low incomes. Needless to say, the South represented by the likes of Lee and Davis was a tiny minority.  

Census data from 1860 illustrates the profound disparity in land ownership:

• 0.27% of farms were over 1,000 acres.
• 1.04% of farms were between 500 and 999 acres in size.
• 24.91% of farms were between 100 and 499 acres.
• 31.14% of farms were between 50 and 99 acres in size. 

This leaves nearly half of all southern farms with less than 50 acres of land.  

And whereas the South was 84% agriculture, the North was rapidly diversifying.  The South may have grown the Cotton, but they did not convert it.  In 1860, the North produced 17 times more cotton and woolen textiles than the South, 30 times more leather goods, 20 times more pig iron, and 32 times more firearms. 

Only about 40 percent of the Northern population was still engaged in agriculture by 1860, compared to 84 percent of the Southern population. Yet, even in the agricultural sector, Northern farmers were outproducing their Southern counterparts in several important areas, as Southern agriculture remained labor-intensive while Northern agriculture became increasingly mechanized. By 1860, the free states had nearly twice the value of farm machinery per acre and per farm worker as did the slave states, leading to increased productivity. As a result, in 1860, the Northern states produced half of the nation’s corn, four-fifths of its wheat, and seven-eighths of its oats.

About 29 percent of the railroad tracks, and only 13 percent of the nation’s banks, resided in the South. The South experimented with using slave labor in manufacturing, but for the most part, it was well satisfied with its agricultural economy.

And in a Republic, we know the absolutely critical number of population was to the North.  In 1860, the North had 23 million and the South 9 million, but 3.5 million were slaves. To put this into context, let’s examine the population at the time of the founding.  Of the original 13 colonies, the six slave states in 1790 had a combined population (including slaves) of 1.8 million, with Virginia being the largest state in the new Union—the seven free states had a combined population of 1.78 million.  By 1860, the numbers were drastically different, with the same six states in the South having 4.7 million, and the seven original Northern states growing to 9.7 million.  By 1860, Virginia had fallen to the sixth-largest state.  

States Population -1790 Population - 1860 

NH 141000 326000 

CT 237000 460000 

MA 378787 1231000 

RI 68000 174000 

NY 340000 3888000 

NJ 184000 672000 

PA 434000 2906000 

1782787 9657000 

Delaware 59000 112000 

Maryland 319000 687000 

Virginia 691000 1219000 

NC 393751 992622 

SC 249000 703000 

GA 82000 1057000 

1793751 4770622 

There are counterarguments to Northern economic hegemony.  Lee Soltow’s Men and Wealth in the United States, 1850 – 1870, refutes the concept of the South being poorer.  He noted that when individual estimates wealth per capita, Southerners are wealthier than Northerners.  Therefore, we must assume that the Southern economy was superior.  

The problem with Saltow’s estimates is that they are centered on wealth concentration.  If we exclude the wealth of the top 1% from both regions, the southern per capita income quickly drops below that of the North.  And, of course, how are we to estimate the unpaid labor of the slaves, which is part of Saltow’s wealth estimates?  Now Saltow addresses the inequality issue by playing a neat trick.  He uses property ownership: The proportion of men who held real property in the South was slightly higher than the national average in 1850.  However, a society that was 84% agricultural would, by nature, own property and not receive a wage. And, by property, we are not just talking about land here.  I always love that no matter how we debate the Civil War, omitting Slavery is like talking about Mary Todd Lincoln’s experience at Ford’s Theater in April 1865 and never mentioning John Wilkes Booth. 

Let’s instead look at GDP: nominal GDP in 1860 was about $4.4 billion, up from $193 million in 1790.  (It would be nearly $10 billion at the end of the Civil War, but let’s get back to that number until 1880).  Given that 90% of manufacturing was in the North, along with all the other statistics, it is clear that the GDP% % (which we do not have) would skew heavily in the North’s favor.  The South’s population was 9 million. Of that, 3,953,760 were slaves, so essentially 9 million free Southerners were to be counted.  The North was 23 million, or 4 times that number.  Even assuming that 70% of GDP was in the North meant that the per capita GDP in the North would be $135, and what would be the per capita GDP in the South?  $148.  Yet when we add in slaves?  It drops way below the North to $104.  This is why defenders of the South love to play with numbers around the slaves and feature wealth as opposed to income and overall economic activity.

Economically, the industrialized, capitalistic North was superior to the South, but let’s get back to the society.  

Another refutation of Southern nobility is spelled in a single word, Andersonville.  The most prominent prisoner of war camp in the South was commanded by Captain Henry Wirz, who was tried and executed after the war for war crimes. The prison was overcrowded to four times its capacity, and had an inadequate water supply, inadequate food, and unsanitary conditions. Of the approximately 45,000 Union prisoners held at Camp Sumter, the official name, during the war, nearly 13,000 (28%) died. The chief causes of death were scurvy, diarrhea, and dysentery. 

Prisoner of War camps are never pretty, and given the resource limitations of the South, it makes sense that any food should be sent to often hungry, ill-supplied Confederate troops rather than POWS.  But Wirz was something extra.  Even before the war, Wirz, in 1847, was sentenced to four years in prison on charges of embezzlement and fraud in his native Switzerland.  

Some Wirz apologists have even suggested he deserves no blame at all, perhaps even a statue honoring his service.  But the trial of Henry Wirz left little doubt that he was a cruel man who threatened and berated prisoners.  Moreover, the record shows that with little provocation, Wirz sometimes ordered prisoners shot, sometimes shot them himself, or left it to his hounds to do the job.  Again, Wirz could have been the fall guy for much of the South, and especially as a POW camp superintendent would have been convenient.  However, the evidence from eyewitnesses suggests that there was guilt.  

And finally, let’s address the Camelot, Band of Brothers, noble fighters in a noble cause grouping. 

Braxton Bragg was described as a “merciless tyrant” who had an “uncanny ability to turn minor wins and losses into strategic defeat.” I have mentioned that Early, one of the architects of the “Lost Cause” narrative, was disliked by many of his fellow generals.  

I will not go through a complete description of these incidents, which can be mirrored by debacles from the North, particularly during Sherman’s march through Georgia, Sheridan in the Valley, Shelton Laurel, or the actions of Eleazor Paine, but that proves my point: the South was not some hallowed, noble place and time.  

• 40 Unionists hanged in Gainesville, Texas, for opposing the CSA.  
• Centralia Massacre, Missouri, 1864, featuring William “Bloody Bill” Anderson
• Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Fort Pillow Massacre (and I find it especially discouraging how many pro-Confederate celebrators celebrate Forrest).  
• Champ Ferguson’s massacre at Saltville
• Robert Cobb Kennedy, a Georgia-born Louisianan, tried to burn New York City.
• And the assassination of Lincoln

In an antebellum, the description of the real South, not the Brierfield or Arlington one, but the one occupied by the other 80% of the free population, is provided by George Washington Taylor, who in 1835 began keeping a journal to which he contributed for the next 20 years.  Taylor, who lives on Rutherford Road farm near the South Tyger River in South Carolina. “His daily life consisted of plowing, seeding, hoeing, rail-splitting, hauling, whiskey-distilling, and reaping, depending on the season.” And later in life, he acquires a half dozen slaves for his farm, and one to look after his children after his wife dies. Another diary consists of a Virginian Elliott Story.  Less prosperous than Taylor, Story soon finds himself in deep debt because he cannot make his farm profitable.  My final point for this section is that the South was not some Edenic society portrayed by the Lost Causers, such as Early, Bedford Forrest, and plantation owner William Elliott.  It was a society divided into a tiny elite class, a middle class that struggled to expand, poor whites, and black slaves.    

The Civil War was about Slavery, not States’ Rights

There is no better way to put this.  Discussing the origins of the Civil War and leaving out Slavery is like a breakdown of the sinking of the Titanic and never mentioning the ice berg.  But it was not just Slavery, but the question of what would happen if the blacks were freed?  The voices of the South on that question are clear.

John C Calhoun, in addressing disparities between North and South: “In one thing only are we inferior—the arts of gain; we acknowledge that we are less wealthy than the Northern section of this Union, but I trace this mainly to the fiscal action of this Government, which has extracted much from, and spent little among us.”  It seems a bit rich for the representative of states’ rights to complain about a lack of investment, especially when controlling so much federal power, as I have noted above.  Andrew Jackson was vehemently opposed to the Second Bank and not a fan of fellow Southerner Henry Clay’s American System of federal infrastructure.  The reality was not that the South was flailing because all of the revenue was going to northern investment, but rather the retardation of a slave economy upon Southern growth.  

Historically, Southerners were able to control either one branch or often all three branches of government enough to prevent any federal anti-slavery action from happening. As noted above, of the first 16 presidents, nine were Southerners, and three more — Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan — were all Southern sympathizers.  Martin Van Buren was from New York, but he was never going to buck his patron, Andrew Jackson, on such an issue. To be fair to Van Buren, most who went against Jackson lost.   Even John Quincy Adams, later an abolitionist, did not become one until after his presidency.  Of all the presidents between Washington and Lincoln, only John Adams was openly opposed to Slavery, but he had many other issues on his hands.  And yet even with this overwhelming Southern power, slave compromises had to be brokered in 1820, 1850, and 1854.  It was not a tariff question, but rather a slavery issue that pushed the Dred Scott decision to the forefront.  The core of the Douglas-Lincoln debates was the concept of Slavery.  

One of the arguments against Slavery as the issue is what appears to be a relatively small group of actual slave owners in the South, but there is a catch.  The Confederacy’s 11 states had 316,632 slave owners out of a free population of 5,582,222. This equals 5.67 percent of the free population of the Confederacy who owned slaves. As La Mackey noted in a 2020 piece for the Study Civil War trust notes, “That, however, does not tell us the extent of slave ownership. To better understand the extent of slavery’sSlavery’s impact, we need to realize that a slave owner was the one person in a family who legally owned slaves. That person was usually the patriarch. There would be a spouse and sons and daughters who directly benefited from the family’s slave ownership and who stood to inherit enslaved people.”  However, they are not counted in that 316,000 number.  

So, according to the Census of 1860, 31 percent of free families in the Confederacy owned slaves. That means that every third white person in those states had a direct commitment to Slavery.

Okay, but that means that 70% did not.  But for a society that was 84% agricultural, imagine the concern of the average hardscrabble southern farmer on the thought of over 3 million people who could not own land or earn a living as a farm hand, all of a sudden having the opportunity to do both.  Today, we are concerned about immigrants depressing wages.  At most (and it is a lot), immigrants comprise about 15% of our population today, and millions of these are computer programmers or Elon Musk.  Slaves represented 37% of the total population of the South, with nearly all of them in agriculture or domestic roles.     

There was an economic concern surrounding the freeing of slaves, both from the loss of labor to the larger landholders and from competition for the smaller ones.  But another argument was based simply on racial concerns.  Arguably, the most powerful Southerner of the era was not a president but Vice President and Senator John C Calhoun, who noted in 1837:

“I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good. I feel myself called upon to speak freely upon the subject where the honor and interests of those I represent are involved. I hold then that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other. Broad and general as this assertion is, it is fully borne out by history.” When Lincoln’s election threatened Slavery, the first Northern President who would truly oppose Slavery, something new in the Republic, it was not economics involved, but ‘honor’ on the part of Southerners.  

And even before this well-quoted passage, Calhoun notes, “Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually.”  Calhoun believed himself quite the historian, citing Rome and Bourbon France, but any history of the Ghana, Mali, or Songhai Empires seems to have quite escaped him. 

He later notes of Slavery, “It came among us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and in the course of a few generations it has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions, as reviled as they have been, to its present comparatively civilized condition. This, with the rapid increase of numbers, is conclusive proof of the general happiness of the race, despite all the exaggerated tales to the contrary.” There was, of course, a simple expedient.  Let them vote themselves either to remain in Slavery or to become free.  Calhoun never mentions this because, in his estimation, Africans lacked the mental capacity and judgment for such responsibilities.  Convenient.  

Here is the South Carolina Declaration of Secession, which initially maintains that leaving the union was based on a lack of representation for taxation:

“Citizens of the slaveholding States of the United States! Circumstances beyond our control have placed us in the van of the great controversy between the Northern and Southern States.”

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.”

And later in the South Carolina declaration, after taxation, of course, comes this. “Responsibility follows power; and if the people of the North have the power by Congress, “to promote the general welfare of the United States,” by any means they deem expedient–why should they not assail and overthrow the institution of Slavery in the South?”  The leaders of South Carolina certainly believed that Slavery was a critical issue, even if they tried to downplay that fact. 

And Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the CSA, who we heard from before, noted. “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, 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. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

And I began this podcast with John Tyler, the 10th president, who was elected to the Confederate Congress, questioning the value of liberty and equality, well, at least for certain people.  Other supporters include James Polk and James Buchanan. As early as 1826, Buchanan, a Pennsylvanian, declared in the House of Representatives that he believed Slavery to be “a great political and a great moral evil,” but “an evil at present without a remedy.” He was afraid that the slaves would become “the masters if set free and that they would massacre the high-minded and chivalrous race of men in the South.”

Let’s not quibble here.  Blacks were believed to be an inferior race, as Calhoun, Tyler, Stephens, and Buchanan clearly state, and they were never going to be given equal rights.  Now, Calhoun’s opinions, though (hopefully) odious to us today, were not exactly groundbreaking in 1837 or in 1860. I realize a host of Northerners in ante bellum days would concur with the concept of white supremacy, and no less than Lincoln wished to deport the black populations back to Africa.  And Slavery in the 18th century was practiced everywhere from Africa to India, from China to Russia, and of course in the East Indies.  But there was a sea change – literally.   The Enlightenment concept of individual rights and liberty, enshrined in the Declaration, made the millennium concept of Slavery something to be dispensed with. The British 1830s blockade effectively ended the slave trade. Abolitionists in the North, fully understanding what freedom would mean, were virulently opposed to Slavery.  

As noted in my previous podcast, the thought of a lack of representation on the part of the South during the first 80 years of the Republic was ludicrous.  However, by 1860, the 23 million free Northerners, compared with 5.5 million free Southerners, portended a critical change in the makeup of the federal government of the Republic.  It was not a lack of representation, but instead having that representation become regional and a minority.  And once a minority, there was going to be the inevitable dissolution of Slavery.  

And of that counter argument that the North was racist as well and did not wish to give blacks the vote, I would cite the latter 15th amendment (which meant that black MEN could vote, but white WOMEN, nor black ones, could not).  There were enough people in the North willing to do so, unlike the South.  I do not wish to engage in presentism, which is the application of today’s mores and ethos to people of the past.  The fact that Jefferson and Washington both owned slaves does not diminish their incredible work, and slave owning was common in the world before and in the 18th century, as I have noted.  Yet why would Washington free his slaves upon his death if he believed in the institution or thought, as Calhoun claimed, they were happier in that state?  Or why would Jefferson call it a “cruel war against human nature.”  

Now, let’s assume that many Southerners went to war against the North based on issues other than Slavery.  Many choices could have been made without leaving the Union or resorting to violence.  The Southern states could have aligned with new states like Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa to fight tariffs, as these states also wished to export their surplus crops.  

They could have aligned with New England to oppose greater federal taxation, a point that was never a high point for the Yankees. It was New England who, in 1814, first raised the specter of Secession on the precept that the War of 1812 was unduly harming the economic interests of New England.  In other words, the South could have played politics.  

Yet the one thing the South could not do in the 1860s, as a regional but no longer national power, was keep its slaves.  They realized that after the compromises of 1820 or 1850, the votes were against them, and no Northern or Western state was going to cut a deal anymore. The trends born out of the enlightenment, culminating in the British slave blockade of the 1830s, to cite just one example, meant that Slavery as an accepted, common institution, which it had been for 4700 years, was going away, and the South did not have the votes to stop it.  

And we get to my final point, made in the first podcast, but it needs to be repeated here.  The North had 11.1 million men (women could not vote).  The South had fewer than 3 million men, who were thus eligible to participate in voting.  We can discuss Lincoln, the nobility of the South, and states’ rights all we want.  It was all a matter of demographics, and the demographics spelled the end of Slavery.