Logan Blankenship
An Ethical Inquiry
The American civil war, the war between the states, the war of Southern independence, the war of Northern aggression, whatever one decides to call it, it was a bloody conflict of brother vs. brother, a shockingly brutal war considering that those who fought it had until that point been countrymen. Also, depending on what a person calls the war, they also endorse a certain view of its moral implications. Some believe the Northern cause was noble one, or at least the ends justified the means, while some take the view point that the South was a sovereign nation and had every right to be fully independent. But the eventual conclusion one must come to, if they base their assessment on fair and objective techniques as well as ethical reasoning, is that both sides were in the wrong to such a profound degree, as to render the idea of taking sides in such a conflict, even hypothetically a hundred and fifty years later, as totally morally unjustifiable.
It is commonly perceived by most Americans that the North was entirely “right” in their conception and execution of the civil war, and that the “evil” south had it coming. In reality, the north's war was an act of ruthless and arguably un-American expansionism and subjugation. There are several sides to this, including both reasons based on principle, as well as reasons based on constitutional law.
The first thing that must be known about the North's invasion of the south is that it was not in any way intended as a war to liberate the slaves. Had it been, then saying that the north was “right” would have been quite true, but it is not the case. The blatant truth of the matter is that the North's primary justification for the war as well as it's objective, was to “preserve the union”, as the Senate declared in resolution on July 26, 1861 (Woods, 2004). In 1861, and amendment was even proposed and endorsed by Lincoln that would entrench (make amendments against it impossible) slavery being a state issue in the US constitution forever (ibid). And Lincoln, who explicitly stated in 1858 that he opposed blacks ever having full legal rights (ibid), even said in a letter:
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union (Lincoln, 1862)
With the fact that the United States' invasion of the South was indeed simply a power-play to reestablish federal dominance establish, one must articulate why exactly such is a negative thing. On a very fundamental level, the very idea of the United States invading the Confederate States simply because they were “rebels” is incredibly tyrannical. The underlying principle that seems to exist in that mindset is that a nation is inherently justified in existing in and ruling over all of it's territory, or that all sections of a nation actually have a duty to the nation as a whole, and that any time this is broken down, even peacefully and by the will of the individuals who exist in the section that is leaving, then that moral code is being defied, and that the so-called “rebels” are actually in the wrong and should be stopped. In actuality, this way of thinking is about as rationally and ethically justified as the ideology of the divine right of kings.
The inherent preposterous nature of this ideology, an ideology fully adhered to by the North, is quite obvious. As both the founders of the United States and reason and logic itself would be able to point out, government exists for one purpose and one purpose only; the protection of the individuals who make up a country. When one claims that a nation is justified in and of itself, that is is “immoral” for parts of that nation to break off and exist for their own sake, they are violating this very fundamental concept. They are also violating an even more fundamental attribute of a just government, that is, the principle of individualism, and the concept of the individual's right to pursue his own interests whether or not the collective, the people as a whole like it. The founders understood this concept, that a government doesn't just exist for the people as whole, but for the individual, because of the government existed for the collective, then the state would be nothing more than formalized mob rule, where the individual, the dissident, the minority, is just a pawn, a tool of the collective for their own interests. In this system 51% of the people can subjugate the other 49%..
When the United States invaded the Confederate states, these principles were very much violated. The United States claimed that it was the sole legitimate government by alleging that the federal government had a right to have dominion over the lands of the South. So not only was such an allegation opposed the the common sense ideals of government that the founders had held dear, but it was also hypocritical. If the United States had the right to dominion over the lands of the South, then why wasn't Great Britain viewed by the United States as having dominion over it back when it was fighting for it's independence? Also, why, if the war was for the sake of the democracy as the North claimed, why then, did they so nakedly fight against the will of the Southern people? The fact is, The north's motive for the war, “to hold the union together”, wasn't a noble motive at all, but was actually an ethical abomination, by virtue of the fact that it alleged that the people from one part of the nation had an obligation to serve those in another part of the nation against their will, and flew in the face of the ideological legacy of the nation's founders. In the Gettysburg address, US president Abraham Lincoln claimed that his war was to ensure that union “would not perish from the earth” (Lincoln, 1863), but in fact, by asserting that the majority of a nation has the right to subjugate the minority, he himself did great damage to the rather noble ideological framework of the United States.
Along these same lines, the Northern invasion of the South was of dubious constitutionality. The constitution does not mention secession, but what the constitution was testifies in favor of the south as far as the constitutional question goes. The constitution was a voluntary pact between the states. This has a couple of implications. First of all, that all states should be held as equal under the constitution, as that was the nature of them signing into the contract, but also, the federal government was not a party in the signing of the contract. What this all means is that, though not specifically dealt with in the constitution, if a state decided to secede, then neither any other state, due to the equality of the constitution, nor the federal government, since it was not a party in the contract, would have constitutional grounds to stop that state.
Another piece of evidence against the carefully crafted and deceptive image of the north as a noble force was it some of it's political and military tactics during the war could only be described as barbarian.
One of these first acts was to suspend habeas corpus and other civil rights in Maryland and the other border states (www.cslub.edu), and the arrest of pro-secession Maryland legislatures, who were arrested without warrant and then held without being charged (ibid). In parts of Kentucky, martial law was actually declared (Villamagna, et al, 2003). On some occasion, pro-southern “copperhead” Democrats were actually arrested and sometimes deported simply for their support of the South (ibid). Another rather dubious move on the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Though the proclamation seems very noble, it was, for one thing, purely symbolic, as it only freed slaves in areas not already under union control, not those still in and the union and secondly, rather than actually being an honest and noble attempt to establish human rights, it was rather a purely political move, meant to appease pro-emancipation northerners, appease the British who were threatening to join the fight on the CSA's side, and to cause slave revolts in the south. Lincoln and many Northern politicians cared very little about ending slavery (ibid).
The North also engaged in barbarous military practices. The biggest is the unfortunately common but always terrible practice of conscription (http://www.u-s-history.com), an idea so radically opposed to the notion of good government and human rights, not to mention the foundation of American beliefs, as it alleges that the individual is entirely the property of the collective and the state. It is indeed a form of slavery. Also, the North made the system corrupt by allowing people to pay a $300 (roughly $15,000 adjusted for inflation) “commutation fee” to escape conscription (ibid). Also, the North introduced the ideas of what we now call “total war”, a concept that many people today unfortunately take for granted, but back then was still appropriately considered barbarous by most civilized societies. The prime example of this type of warfare was Union General William Sherman's march to the sea, where he pillaged civilian land and destroyed civilian property (Woods, 2004). Another frightening example of this type of warfare was manifest in the actions of Gen. Benjamin Butler of the Union, who, when angered by the insults thrown by Southern women in New Orleans, issued an order stating that any lady of New Orleans who “by word, gesture or movement insult or show contempt for any officer of the United States she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.” (ibid). What this meant is that any women who insulted any Union soldier in anyway would be considered a prostitute and therefore could be raped.
One might think from all this evidence against presented here against the character of the North's invasion of the South, that the South may have indeed been the more ethically advantaged of the two, but this actually, is not the case. The South, before, during, and after the war, proved themselves to be worthy of at least as much contempt as the North.
The most basic and the most obvious moral scar on the South was their ownership of slaves. The very idea of owning another human and having complete and total power over their life is an idea incredibly opposed to the concept of individualism and human rights. Those same principles of good government that condemn the North for believing it had a right to force people to stay in their government, also clearly condemn the South, for believing themselves morally justified in owning other people and completely abusing them for their own purposes. Slavery is perhaps the greatest evil of all, as it above any else, is in direct opposition to the principle of self-ownership, which is the foundation of all human rights. This also has effect of making the South entirely hypocritical and making their arguments against Northern aggression totally worthless, since the philosophical justification of secession just happened to be the same as that which condemns slavery!
Also, the South as well as the North instituted a draft, starting in 1862. Not many men were drafted, as for most of the war, there were plenty of volunteers, but as the old proverb goes, it's the though that counts. The fact that South reserved the right to institute a draft is just as bad as if they'd drafted tons of people. What's more, there is a patent absurdity in the notion of a nation fighting for independence instituting a draft, as revolutions are supposed to be based on the intrinsic inspiration of the people, not facilitated by force. This has the effect of absolutely negating the idea of a revolution, as now it's becomes just a war fought by people who do not even want a part of the war, that's no revolution.
During the antebellum period, the South also instituted it's fair share of human rights violations beyond slavery and the legal suppression of blacks. By 1836, all Southern states had outlawed abolitionist material, had polices where the mail would actually be checked for such material, and even asked Northern states to outlaw the printing of it. Pro-Southern president Andrew Jackson even tried to get abolitionist material outlawed nationally and when that failed, to he made an executive decision for the national authority to check mail for it (Ingelhart, 1987). These acts were no only tyrannical, they were indeed unconstitutional (even though the first amendment did not extend to the states, every state at the time had free speech clauses in their state constitutions).
If you ask a typical Southern white about the Confederate struggle for freedom, the number one thing that they will mention is States' rights, as having been the main Southern cause during the war. This is the truth, however, the Southern states, like many states' rights advocates now, missed the entire point of states' rights. They made the error of believing SRs were justified in and of themselves, that the states having rights was the right thing to be, and that's why they existed. But in truth, the virtue in SRs is that when power is decentralized, government has less of a chance of becoming too powerful and destructive to the will of the people. States themselves are governments, and therefore, they, like the federal government, exist only for the sake of their population., not, as some advocates of States' rights will tell you, for their own sake. Therefore, when states become destructive towards individual freedom, then states' rights loses its moral justification, and this is what the South failed to understand.
So as it turns out, despite a century and a half of various arguments and popular conceptions, neither the Union, nor the Confederacy, possessed real moral justification in the civil war. Both partook of practices and institutions of a most inhuman nature, and indeed both were a shame to the legacy of the founders of America, and the tradition of individual self-determination they left behind.
Works Cited
Woods, T. E. (2004). The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. Washington, DC: Regenery Publishing, Inc..
Lincoln, A. (1862, February 22). Lincoln to Greeley. Retrieved March 5, 2009, from The University of Virginia: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/LINCOLN/greeley.html
Lincoln, A. (1863, January 1). Emancipation Proclamation. Retrieved March 5, 2009, from United States National Archives and Records Administration: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/emancipation_proclamation/transcript.html
Smith, C. R. (n.d.). Lincoln and Habeas Corpus. Retrieved March 5, 2009, from California State University, Long Beach: http://www.csulb.edu/~crsmith/lincoln.html
Villamanga, G., Armstrong, S., & McBride, E. (2003). AP US History. McGraw-Hill Professional.
(n.d.). The Draft in the Civil War. Retrieved March 5, 2009, from : http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h249.html
Ingelhart, L. E. (1987). Press freedoms: a descriptive calendar of concepts, interpretations, events, and court actions, from 4000 BC to the present. Greenwood Publishing Group.