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Civil War Myths
by William E. Quinn
It is good to see renewed interest in that darkest period of our nation’s history during this
Sesquicentennial of the War Between the States. With the exception of the Revolutionary War,
no war has more defined the United States of America. The state of our government and
political systems today are largely the result of the events and outcome of that war.
There are a lot of myths circulating today about the war and causes thereof. There is a
simple explanation for most of them. “To the victor belongs the spoils,” and the spoils included
writing history to show the winner’s point of view. The first text books to emerge in the fall of
1865 represented these views, as they were written and published in the North under scrutiny of
the victorious, Republican-dominated Federal government. Thus was born political correctness
in this country.
U.S. children have been taught since that day that the war was fought to free the slaves.
This moral explanation is to justify 620,000 Americans killed on the battlefield, plus another
60,000 civilian deaths (mostly Southern and not including those who perished during
Reconstruction). The U.S. government spent $8 billion on the war, with $4.3 billion being
financed at 7% interest. This national debt would have bought all the slaves in the U.S. with
money left over. The economic devastation (again mostly in the South) was another $20 billion.
I hope to educate the readers on the most common myths and present the actual facts.
These are facts, not opinions, put forth by many reputable historians who have thoroughly
researched the original documents, writings, and recorded speeches applicable to this great
conflict. But, you won’t find them presented by our school system text books, or in
documentaries produced by the liberal TV media.
Myth # 1 - Civil War
The first myth exists in the title of the war as it is called today – the Civil War. A civil
war is one in which a certain faction of a country strives to overthrow the government by force.
The Southern states did not try to overthrow the U.S. government; they seceded from it
peacefully. War would not have occurred had Abraham Lincoln not tried to reinforce the U.S.held forts at Charleston, South Carolina, Pensacola, Florida, and Galveston, Texas.
When I was growing up, Southerners did not call it the Civil War. Instead, they referred
to it as the War Between the States (most common title), the War for Southern Independence, or
as my grandmother referred to it, the War of Northern Aggression. War Between the States was
also used by those more-or-less neutral on the subject, such as Westerners. The Congressional
Record of Mrach 2,1928 records Senate Joint Resolution No. 41 wherein Congress recognized
the title “War Between the States” as proper.
During and immediately after the war, most Northerners usually referred to it as the
Southern Rebellion, the War of the Rebellion, or simply the Rebellion. But, the history text
books following the war referred to as the Civil War, which has been taught to six generations,
becoming the official title.
Myth # 2 – The cause of the war was slavery
As a former incident investigator for a large southeastern utility I can tell you there is
rarely just one root cause for a major adverse event. In fact, there are usually four or five causes.
In the final analysis of most wars you will find money, greed, and hunger for power as the chief
instigators. The War Between the States (WBTS) was no exception.
The primary cause was protectionist tariffs on imported goods, with the Morrill Tariff of
1860 being the immediate catalyst for the Deep South states seceding. During the infancy of the
country, the U.S. Congress passed tariff legislation as a means of raising revenue to run the
country and was the main source of revenue, up to 95% at one point. There was no income tax
in those days.
It was initially fairly low – in the 5-10% range. By the end of the War of 1812, the cotton
gin had boosted the production and exportation of cotton exponentially. Cotton became the
primary export product. Since cotton was being exported from Southern ports to European
markets, those ships returned to these ports with goods produced in Europe. (Anyone in the
freight business knows the economic consequences of dead-heading, the term for transporting
goods in one direction and returning empty.) So, the South was providing most of the revenue
needed to run the country.
Starting in 1816, tariffs were also used to protect the young manufacturing industries in
the Northeast. Through a series of tariff acts from 1816 through 1828, the rate was raised to
50%. After S.C. nullified the 1828 “Tariff of Abominations” and threatened secession, a
compromise worked out by Henry Clay reduced the rates to around 20%. This is where they
stayed until 1860 when the Morrill Tariff passed the U.S. House of Representatives, calling for a
67% increase in the tariff rates. This would have boosted the South’s share of the total U.S. tax
base to around 90%. With no hope of defeating the tariff in the Senate and President-elect
Lincoln strongly supporting it, the Deep South states chose to secede, rather than subsidize the
industrial North.
Another major catalyst to the 7 Deep South states seceding was the election of Abraham
Lincoln in November, 1860. He ran on a Republican platform, of which he was the principal
architect, which would expand the role of the Federal government into a strongly centralized unit
with complete autonomy over the states. The Southern states had always believed in the
sovereignty of the states. Another plank in this platform called for the federal government to
subsidize companies in order to complete massive public works projects such as railroads and
canals, with the vast majority of these projects in Northern states. Naturally, this would take a
lot of money, and that money would come from tariff revenue paid by the Southern states. The
Republicans also called for a national bank that could print money whenever it saw the need.
(We can see how that works today.)
Most Americans today think Abraham Lincoln was a popular President elected by a
majority of the people, a myth unto itself. The opposite is true. He received less than 40% of the
popular vote in a 4-way race for the office. He didn’t win a single Southern state, but managed
to pull a majority of the electoral vote by winning the heavier-populated Northern states. So,
Lincoln was strictly a sectional President, representing the Northern states.
The South saw Lincoln’s election as not only financial doom, but also an end to
principles they had stood for since the birth of the nation as spelled out in the founding
documents. They had fought the continual encroachments on their constitutional liberties for
decades, but now they saw their political power slipping away. As the Declaration of
Independence stated they saw it “…necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands
which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the
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separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” They
seceded from the United States of America and formed the Confederate States of America.
Cultural differences between the two regions of the country were another root cause for
the WBTS. These differences were recognized as early as 1775 during the Second Continental
Congress when a number of attendees discussed forming “two grand Republics.” The cultural
differences were religious, demographic, geographic, and professional.
New England was settled by Puritans from England and remained mostly “pure English”
until after the war. Although many immigrants arrived in the North during the two decades
preceding the war, they landed mostly in New York. New Englanders were the original
“Yankees” and tended to look at the rest of America west and south of the Hudson River as
inferior. You might say they had a “holier than thou” attitude.
That attitude is best displayed by Noah Webster, the Massachusetts author of the Webster
Dictionary, when he wrote in his diary, “O New England! How superior are thy inhabitants in
morals, literature, civility, and industry.” Another example is the first American geography book
written in 1790 by Jedediah Morse, a Connecticut Puritan preacher. He depicted America
outside of New England as inhabited by lazy and ignorant Germans and Scotch-Irish in the
Middle States and weak morally-depraved Southerners in the South.
In the early part of the 19th century, the “Age of Enlightenment” swept across the Atlantic
from Europe and landed on the Northern shores. Puritanism soon gave way to
Transcendentalism, Unitarianism, and Abolitionism. Northerners of these persuasions constantly
railed against the Southern people as barbaric, uncivilized, and uneducated. Apparently they
missed the fact that Charleston was the most cultured city in the country, at one time having
more theaters, literary societies, and charitable organizations than any city in the U.S.
The Southern states were composed of immigrants from not only England, but also
France, Ireland, Germany, Spain, and other European countries. Their religion was mostly
orthodox Protestant – Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, etc. There were also Catholic
and Jewish citizens. Although the demographic makeup of the two regions has changed
considerably over the last 150 years, particularly in the Northeast, in 1860 the South was a much
more diverse culture. The Southerners were also much more understanding of other religious
backgrounds. Judah Benjamin, a Jew, became a member of the Confederate Cabinet. This is in
stark contrast to Ulysses S. Grant’s policy of not allowing Jewish soldiers in the Union ranks.
The Northern states were fast becoming industrialized and heavily populated, with the
population concentrating in cities. In 1860, the Northern population was around 20 million. The
South remained an agrarian society, relying mainly on agriculture as its economic base. In 1860,
their population was around 9 million including 4 million slaves. It is a fact of nature that people
who live in close proximity look to the government for more protection, oversight, and control
while people living in more sparsely-populated areas prefer to be left to their own devices and
resist government controls. Thus was the situation in 1860 with the Northern states pushing for a
stronger, more centralized Federal government, while the South held on to their beliefs of the
less government the better, and what government was necessary should be controlled by the
people at the lowest levels, commonly referred to as states rights.
These cultural differences were a continual source of strife between the two regions.
They added fuel to the fire in arguments within the chambers of Congress, in newspaper articles
and written correspondence, and in public speeches, finally reaching a boiling point in 1860.
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Slavery was also a root cause of the war, but not as significant as the others. I would
assign it as a contributing factor, except for the fact that the Deep South states seceded partly
because they mistakenly believed Abraham Lincoln would be persuaded by the abolitionists to
abolish slavery.
Lincoln did eventually issue his Emancipation Proclamation halfway through the war,
but it was not because of abolitionist pressure. It was purely a political and military move. Up
until he issued the proclamation, he continually supported the right to own slaves. In his first
inaugural address he stated, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the
institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I
have no inclination to do so.”
When Lincoln drafted the proclamation in late summer of 1862, the Federal armies had
been on the defensive for months. In the Virginia theater, Lee and his Army of Northern
Virginia had pushed the Union Army of the Potomac from within five miles of Richmond to
defending their own territory and capitol on the north side of the Potomac. In Tennessee, the
Confederate Army was recovering from spring losses at Ft. Donelson and Shiloh and was trying
to retake all of Tennessee. Sentiment for the South was strong in England and it was looking
like that nation would soon recognize the Confederate States of America and possibly lend its
navy to ending the blockade of Southern ports.
Lincoln issued his proclamation in late September after the Union army stopped Lee’s
northward advance at Sharpsburg, Md. He hoped to accomplish two things – keep England out
of the war because they were anti-slavery, and create a slave uprising on the Southern
plantations. England did remain neutral, but no slave revolt took place. Plus, the proclamation
did not free the first slave as it only targeted slaves in Confederate states where Lincoln had no
jurisdiction.
Myth # 3 - The Southern states started the war by firing on Ft. Sumter
Here are the events leading up to the firing on Ft. Sumter:
December 20, 1860 – South Carolina secedes from the Union. They immediately
communicated with President James Buchanan, assuring him they would not try to take over the
U.S. forts in S.C. as long as the U.S. government did not try to reinforce them or otherwise
change their status.
December 26, 1860 – Major Robert Anderson, commander of the U.S. garrison at Fort
Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island moved his men to Ft. Sumter, immediately in front of Charleston
harbor. This move was not authorized by Washington, but nether-the-less shocked the South
Carolinians.
On the same day, a delegation from South Carolina arrived in Washington to seek
removal of Major Anderson’s garrison, negotiate a settlement of federal property within the
state, and make an offer to pay South Carolina’s portion of the federal debt. News of Anderson’s
move terminated the negotiations, as this was interpreted as a hostile threat on the part of U.S.
A few days later U.S. Secretary of War, John B. Floyd, resigned his position when
President Buchanan did not order Anderson back to Fort Moultrie and restore the former status.
Early January, 1861 - The US government attempted to reinforce and provision Ft.
Sumter utilizing the civilian merchant ship Star of the West. South Carolina fired on it when it
entered the harbor and the ship reversed course and left.
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January 31, 1861 – Isaac W. Hayne, S.C. Attorney General, is sent by Governor Francis
Pickens to Washington to negotiate a peaceful transfer of Ft. Sumter to S.C. and settlement of all
questions related to property. Even after an offer to buy the fort, he received no satisfactory
response from President Buchanan.
January through mid-April, 1861 – Mayor Anderson and his men received food, mail,
and other provisions from Charleston.
February 1 – Texas becomes the 7th state to secede. All Deep South states have now
seceded and convene on February 4 to adopt a constitution and form a national government.
Jefferson Davis is elected president on February 9 and inaugurated on February 18.
March 4 1861 – Abraham Lincoln is inaugurated as President of the U.S. By now the
Confederate States of America are fully functional with a constitution, an elected Congress,
President, Vice-President, and Cabinet.
During March, US Secretary of State Seward, communicating through US Supreme
Court Justice John Campbell, repeatedly assures the Davis Administration that Ft. Sumter will be
evacuated.
That same month, CSA President Davis sent three commissioners to Washington to seek
recognition of the Confederate States as a sovereign nation, establish friendly relations between
the two countries, and to negotiate the transfer of Southern forts and other property to the CSA.
Lincoln refused to meet with them. Lincoln also refused to meet with Napoleon III, who offered
to act as an independent negotiator between the two parties.
April 8 - Lincoln notifies Governor Pickens of SC that a naval expedition would arrive at
Ft. Sumter to supply the fort, by force if necessary.
April 11 – CSA General Beauregard gives Major Anderson one last chance to surrender
the fort.
April 12 – Early that morning the US fleet of 8 warships with 26 guns and 1400 soldiers
are sighted entered Charleston Bay. General Beauregard gives the order to fire on Ft. Sumter
and the bombardment began. The Federal fleet remains safety out in the harbor. War has begun.
Now I ask you, who started the war? In answering that question I ask you to reflect back
to 1962 when the Russian fleet was sailing toward Cuba with nuclear missiles and President
Kennedy established a naval “quarantine” around the island. (He used the less antagonist word
quarantine instead of blockade, which was an internationally-accepted act of war.) Had the
Russian fleet not turned back, Kennedy was prepared to start WWIII rather than have foreign
missiles that close to our shore. Now you understand the situation the South was in.
Myth # 4 – The Southerners were traitors
Whether or not the people of the South committed treason depends on whether it is illegal
for a state to secede, with legality resting in the Constitution. Unfortunately, the Constitution is
not explicit on this subject. The word secede does not exist in this document, not even within the
Bill of Rights (first 10 Amendments). However, the Constitution does not forbid it either.
Southerners felt that Amendment IX and X gave them the right of secession.
Amendment IX states: “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be
construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people,” and Amendment X, called the
states right amendment, states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the
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Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the
people.”
Until the WBTS, it was generally believed by most Americans that the states had the
right to secede. Since the 13 colonies had successfully seceded from England, with those rights
declared in the Declaration of Independence and later confirmed by the Articles of
Confederation, it was understood those rights still existed under the Constitution. Three states –
New York, Virginia, and Rhode Island - had the foresight to explicitly reserve the right to leave
the Union when they ratified the Constitution.
Even Abraham Lincoln upheld the right to secession in 1848 when he stated, “This is a
most valuable, a most sacred right…Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people
of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may
revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.” That was before
he became the leader of the Republican Party with grand designs for expanding the role of the
Federal government and the pocketbooks of Northern businessmen.
Secession was threatened by various states on many different occasions during the first
seventy years of the nation’s history, four times by the New England states. The first time was in
1803 over the Louisiana Purchase, which they considered a dilution of their political power.
President Thomas Jefferson’s reaction to this threat was “If any state in the Union will declare
that it prefers separation to a continuance in union…I have no hesitation in saying, ‘let us
separate.’” Jefferson was the political opposite to the New Englanders. New England again
threatened to secede in 1807 over a loss in trade caused by the Embargo Act. In 1814, those
states went as far as convening the Hartford Convention to vote for secession, which failed by
two votes. The last time they tried it was in 1845 over the annexation of Texas.
Proof that secession was an accepted right lies in the fact that not a single Confederate
was tried for treason after the war ended. Jefferson Davis was captured by the Union army and
languished in a Federal prison for two years and finally released. The Federal government knew
they didn’t have a case against him, but they didn’t mind violating his constitutional rights by
holding him that long without a trial.
Myth # 5 – All Confederates were slave owners
Now I realize the vast majority of East Tennesseans know this is not true. But you would
be surprised at the number of people in other parts of the country who know little about the
South think it is. After all, wasn’t that why they went to war! The truth is only about 20% of
white Southerners owned slaves. Another truth is not all slave owners were white. There were
free blacks and Native Americans (mainly Cherokees) who owned black slaves.
Generally, the slave owners in the Confederate army were the officers (not meaning all
officers were slave owners). Since slave owners were the wealthier and most educated segment
of the population, many of them having attended military schools, it was natural for them to be
voted in or appointed as officers. Plus, many of them provided the funds to outfit a company or
even a regiment. I had ten ancestors in the Confederate army and not one of them owned a slave.
None of them rose above the rank of sergeant. But, they were all independent farmers of modest
income and basic education.
Myth # 6 – Only Southerners owned slaves
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When the American Revolution started in 1776, slavery existed in all 13 colonies. At
that time the number of households owning slaves in Connecticut was one out of four, about the
same as South Carolina in 1860. After the Revolution, slavery gradually diminished in the
Northern states, mostly in a north to south direction, so that by 1860 it only existed below the
Mason-Dixon line. New Jersey was the last state to abolish slavery, and many historians contend
the trend would have continued into the border states, whereas Delaware and Maryland would
have abolished it within a few more years, followed in a few more by Virginia, Kentucky, and
Missouri.
The reasons the Northern states abolished slavery were mostly economic. There weren’t
many large farms that required a considerable amount of labor. And with the rising immigration
in the North, free labor was becoming more readily available at extremely low wages. It came to
the point that it was cheaper to free the slaves and hire the labor when needed than to feed, cloth,
and house them. Also, with the Age of Enlightenment which started in New England and spread
west and south, attitudes toward slavery changed.
Another fact that disproves this myth is not all slaves in the South were owned by
Southerners. Many wealthy Northern businessmen owned cotton plantations in the South. Most
of these also owned textile mills in the North, so it was good business for them to grow their own
cotton. A good example is the cousin of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
who owned a plantation in Louisiana. In fact, she later admitted after the book was published
this was the only plantation she ever visited. She also patterned her character Simon Legree after
her cousin’s overseer. In Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, he exempted twelve parishes in
Louisiana from the proclamation. That was because so many of the plantations there were
owned by Northerners.
Myth # 7 – The Rebel Flag is a symbol of racism and hatred
The Confederate Battle Flag, commonly called the Rebel Flag, is a Christian symbol
representing the Cross of St. Andrew, patron saint of Scotland. When the apostle Andrew was
crucified, his executioners didn’t bother to dig a hole and place the cross upright. Instead, it was
laid on its side and propped up. That’s why St. Andrew’s cross is diagonal. This symbol was
used in the flag to express the Christian views of Southerners, and easily recognizable because
many Southerners were of Scotch or Scotch-Irish descent.
It is unfortunate that some racist organizations in the South, such as the KKK, have used
this flag as a symbol of defiance. While these groups only represent a very small fraction of
Southerners, the media has tried to depict them as representative of white Southerners in general.
The liberal movie media constantly portrays the flag in negative scenarios, such as on the back
window of a pickup truck used in a hate crime.
It is also unfortunate that many Southerners are ignorant of their history and abuse the
Confederate Flag by putting motorcycles, burlesque female figures, and even swastikas in the
center of the flag. The latter to me is the grossest violation of the flag, especially considering
Adolph Hitler studied Abraham Lincoln’s attack on states rights as he designed his plan for
dissolving the German states and establishing the Third Reich.
There are many other myths associated with the WBTS and the South in general and I
could write a book on them. But, I only wanted to educate the readers on the most common and
widespread ones. I hope I succeeded.
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Bibliography
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2000.
Aiken, Dr. David. The Better Men and Women of the Antebellum South; Confederate Veteran
Journal, Volume 68, No. 6. Columbia, TN; Sons of Confederate Veterans. May/June, 2011.
Articles of Confederation, Article II.
Cisco, Walter Brian. The March to Secession; Confederate Veteran Journal, Volume 69, No.3.
Columbia, TN: Sons of Confederate Veterans. May/June, 2011.
Congressional Record, March 2, 1928.
DiLorenzo, Thomas J. The Real Lincoln. Roseville, CA: Prima Publishing, 2002.
Foote, Shelby. The Civil War – A Narrative. New York, NY: Random House Inc., 1958.
Kennedy, James Ronald. Lincoln, Federal Supremacy, and the Death of States Rights;
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