Was the South goaded into the War of Secession?

Introduction:

Today, I offer a bit of speculation worthy of serious consideration – that a cabal of politicians and financiers in the northern states conspired to push the southern states into seceding from the union.

If the South had remained in the Union and had never sought secession, there wouldn't have been any way that the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th amendments would have been ratified. The necessary three-fourths of states needed for ratification simply wouldn't have materialized. Essentially? The slaves would never have been freed by amendment. And the concept of state sovereignty would be a greater force today than has turned out to be the case.

Therefore? The South had to be goaded into seceding, even though that would have – in retrospect – worked against their best interests.

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In the decades leading up to the (misnamed) Civil War, there were futurists among northern industrialists and bankers, who were trying to determine in which direction the United States was heading. They were keenly aware of the two separate centers of powers currently in existence, the Northern and the Southern. And the Southern had certain advantages which the Northern did not. The most important of these concerned diversity.

The southern body politic was more unified in its outlook than its northern counterpart. In the big cities of the North especially, there existed diverse (and growing) immigrant communities each of which clamored for its own advantages. In the South, there was more homogeneity of outlook and, therefore, of predictability of voter behavior. The white southerner had a motive in seeking unity with his fellow state citizens, since they all had to worry about the potential for slave rebellions and the anarchy that might ensue.

In addition, each southern citizen had greater political power than did his northern counterpart. This was due to the infamous three-fifths rule in which the Constitution allowed three-fifths of a state's slaves to be counted when determining that state's number of representatives in Congress, even though slaves weren't allowed to vote.

The Northern cabal knew they couldn't command a similar degree of loyalty and sense of unity from their constituents. So they thought about how to neutralize the southern power center, which had the potential for legislatively blocking their agenda for development based on advances in industrial and manufacturing technologies. They were worried that southerners would instead seek to shore up their own economy which was based on agriculture, which in turn was dependent on slave labor.

It was through the abolitionist movement that the northern cabal sought to undermine the southern hegemony and confidence of outlook. If the southern white had to worry about slaves being agitated to act against them by outside influences, they would seek to negate those influences by forming their own union – which came to be known as the Confederacy.

This forward-looking cabal also saw the concept of state sovereignty working against their plans. They saw greater advantage in a strong central government and worked to destroy the states' ability to thwart that government. And it worked. It was the fourteenth amendment which was the effective beginning of the end of state sovereignty. Especially the part that reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” For if a political entity no longer has the ability to make rules to determine who is or is not one of its citizens, that entity can no longer be considered sovereign.

After the War, the South was economically ruined and newly-freed slaves were in a position to actually pose a threat to their former masters. That, in turn, caused southern whites to develop a strictly-local outlook on political affairs. And that gave the northern cabal a free hand to pursue its agenda. And the rest, as they say, “is history.”

Closing statement:

Of course, my thesis is the product of 20/20 hindsight, but it does have at least a faint ring of plausibility about it.

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Steven Searle, just another member of

The Virtual Samgha of the Lotus and

Former Candidate for USA President (in 2008 & 2012)

Contact me at bpa_cinc@yahoo.com