To the Editor:
A July 5 letter to the editor asserts, “The Civil War was fought over taxation without representation” and urges readers to “look it up” for themselves. Well, I’ve been looking this subject up for over fifty years. As a historian, I have read hundreds of books on the Civil War and slavery, but more importantly, I’ve studied the documents produced in the thick of the controversy. Today, you can google any subject and find whatever answer you wish were true, but that’s no substitute for years spent in libraries and archives.
As with every war, the causes of the Civil War are complex. What is certain is the language the Confederates themselves used to explain secession in response to the 1860 election. Following American Revolutionaries’ example, they wrote their own Declarations of Independence as they launched war against the US.
The Texas Declaration, for example, accuses Republicans of being hostile to the South and “their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery.” It proclaims that Republicans sought the “abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.”
The secessionists insisted that the United States was “established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity” and that the “African race . . . were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.”
Revising the original Declaration of Independence to suit Southern sentiments, they continued, “That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator. . . while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races . . .would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.”
While this document makes only brief mention of the tariff, it proudly declares the state’s commitment to the pernicious doctrine invented to justify and sustain slavery: white supremacy. That, not slavery as a labor or economic system and certainly not the tariff, was the primary cause of the Civil War.
Slavery as a labor system officially ended in 1865, but its underlying rationale continued unabated. In the early 20th century as the Confederate statues were being erected, the infamous Jim Crow regimes were subjugating and brutalizing Black citizens. The South had lost the war, but it was winning the battle for the soul of America. Perhaps to some the statues were merely memorials to lost loved ones, but to others they represented the triumph of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy: white supremacy.
A hundred years after the Civil War, the pillars of white supremacy finally began to crack with the civil rights movement. Predictably, the white South appealed to their Confederate heroes as champions of their “heritage” and defenders of their cause. Most Americans aren’t history scholars, but one group knows its history well: White Nationalists, the Ku Klux Klan, and their various iterations across America. They have studied the South’s Declarations of Causes, the Confederate Vice President’s “Cornerstone” speech, and Calhoun’s “positive good” descriptions of slavery. They love the lore and the lure of the Old South.
I’m confident that the author of the July 5 letter does not share these white supremacy doctrines; I’m sure he would indeed welcome statues honoring civil rights heroes. But tragically, the Confederate cause has long since been co-opted by racist extremists. The men who showed up in Gainesville with their big guns ready to kill any who threatened the sacred cause the statue represents to them have irreparably undermined its more decent defenses. And frankly, I don’t think he will win his argument with them.
Even if to some the Confederate statue is nothing more than a “fancy tombstone,” the place for tombstones is in the cemetery, not on the courthouse square. It’s time for Cooke County to decide which side it’s on in the battle for America’s soul. Do we still want to glorify the legacy of those who declared that only, “All white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights?” That’s precisely what that statue declares to me and to many others.
