Having recently received my BA in History from my beloved Winston-Salem State University, and not having had much luck on the job hunt (yet), I decided to put my stellar education to work here at my blog. Actually, this idea popped into my head as I was watching America’s History Teacher, Scourge of the Progressives Glenn Beck talk to a couple of writers about the Civil War. What interested me was their discussion of the role that slavery had in the War, and how deeply ingrained it was into the minds of the Confederates. Their conclusion was that despite what some Lincoln-bashers think, or the neo-Confederate apologists think, slavery was at the heart of the rebellion, not just a desire to protect the rights of the states to self determination.

As a Southerner (by the grace of God!), I have always had a tendency to lean towards the Confederacy in their fight; maybe it was the awful glory of fighting to the bitter end for “The Lost Cause”; maybe it was the bravery and cunning of Confederate leaders like Lee and Jackson; or maybe it was simply the belief handed down in a million ways in the South that we were the victims of Yankee aggression. Whatever the reasons, I have had a bit of a fascination with the Civil War and a bit of a soft spot for my Southern people in that epic struggle. Now, I never wanted to see the Confederacy triumphant, because that would have been bad for my forbears, but I have always been partial to the Southern-held arguments that slavery was not the major factor in the war. I suppose it was just more comfortable to believe in state’s rights as the driving force, since it made it easier to absolve my fellow Southerner’s of the sin of slavery in my beloved America.

However, after hearing that bit of the Beck show, and starting out furiously to prove that slavery was not at the heart of the Confederacy, I had to stop and consider the hard fact that slavery was the very heart and soul of the Confederate States of America. That was a bitter pill to swallow, but like any good medicine, it makes you feel better even if the taste is awful.

The argument that most neo-Confederate apologists like to fall back on is the idea that there was nothing in the Constitution that prohibited the States from simply leaving the Union whenever the mood struck them. That argument would be a strong one if the United States had still been operation under the Articles of Confederation, which basically treated all of the states as independent nation-states. But our Founders saw how poorly that system would work once it was out into practice, and devised a federal system that created a strong central government and severely restrained the autonomy of the various states. True, the states were given great power by the Constitution in the ways that the document limited the federal government, and the Tenth Amendment specifically reserved to the various States and the people those rights not specifically enumerated to the federal government; however, the States understood that by ratifying the Constitution, they were giving away their rights to act as sovereign nation-states. By creating a federal government with broad powers, and by assenting that the Constitution and any laws flowing thereof were the supreme law of the land (Article VI, Clause 2), the States gave away any pretense of constitutional justification for their secession from the United States. Furthermore, Article IV, Section 4 should put to rest any lingering doubts about the position of the States vis-à-vis the federal government when the States agreed to make the federal government the guarantor of the promise that “every State in this Union” would have a “Republican Form of Government.” If that is not an acknowledgement that the states were no longer sovereign entities, I don’t know what is. What sovereign nation-state allows an outside entity to determine the type of government to be practiced within that nation-state?

However, the most convincing evidence to the centrality of slavery to the Confederate cause is found in the Confederate Constitution that was adopted in 1861. It is true of the United States that the clearest example of who and what we as a nation strive to be is found in the words of our Constitution, and I would hazard a guess that such was the same for the founders of the CSA. Both Constitutions have at their hearts the desire to create and protect free societies from the encroachment of rapacious federal governments, and both speak eloquently the language of freedom in most respects.

It must be acknowledged, however, that despite the often lofty rhetoric of freedom in the documents, slavery is enshrined in the documents as well. Article I, Section 9, Clauses 1-2 of the Confederate Constitution mirrors Article I, Section 9 Clause 1 of the United States Constitution using nearly identical language to set an ending to the international slave trade, while standing silent on the internal slave trade and the very practice of slavery. Further, both Constitutions contain Fugitive Slave laws (Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 USC; Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 CSC) that forced any non-slave state to return to slaveholding areas any escaped slave in the “free” states. This had the ultimate effect of making slavery the de facto law of the land, which has been an ugly blot on our national character that some of us are still struggling to come to grips with.

As bad as those parallel passages may be, and as much as they may seem an indictment of the United States, they pale in comparison to two passages of the Confederate Constitution that made slavery a virtual requirement for admission to the Confederate States.

Article IV, Section 2, Clause 1 of the Confederate Constitution reads as follows: “The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States, and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of the Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.”[Emphasis mine.] Let your mind slowly digest that statement again…………..and I bet it still doesn’t seem quite real to you. Here were the supposedly “noble” Confederate leadership enshrining the soul rotting practice of slavery as one of the privileges and immunities of the citizens of the newly formed Confederate States of America.

As bad as the “privileges and immunities” clause was, it gets even worse. Read on dear readers.

The piece-de-resistance of the Confederate Constitution can be found in Article IV, Section 3, Clause 3 which states: “In all such territory [new states]the institution of N**ro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.”  Just marinate on what that means, people! The Confederate States of America decreed that their Congress must protect the institution of slavery in any new state added to the Confederacy! Does that leave any doubt about the centrality of slavery to the formation of the CSA? It doesn’t for me, not anymore.

None of the reasons that are used to justify the secession of the Southern states carries any real weight when weighed against the words written into the Confederate Constitution. The Civil War was about many things, but just taking the Confederacy at its (written) word, there can be little doubt that the animating force behind the Confederacy was the protection and propagation of the South’s “peculiar institution.”