Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 26: An Irish look from 1862 at the causes of the American Civil War

Today I’m taking a look at another book on the “Slave Power,” this one from 1862, still early in the Civil War. It was written by classical political economist John Eliot Cairnes (1823-1875), the namesake of today’s J.E. Cairnes School of Economics at the University of Galway, Ireland, where he also taught.

As Cairnes wrote, the Confederacy had initially made some attempt to official minimize the role slavery played in secession. But that was always bogus, as he explains:

I have been at some pains to show that the question at issue between North and South is not one of tariffs—a thesis prescribed to me by the state of the discussion six months ago, when the affirmative of this view was pertinaciously put forward by writers in the interest of the South, but which, at the present time, when this explanation of the war appears to have been tacitly abandoned, cannot but appear a rather gratuitous task.¹

Cairnes’ description of the incredulity of the English public when the learned about secession had its echoes in the wake of Trump’s attempted coup of January 6, 2021:

The first announcement by South Carolina of its intention to secede from the Union was received in this country [England] with simple incredulity. There were no reasons, it was said, for secession. What the constitution and laws of the United States had been on the eve of Mr. Lincoln's election, that they were on its morrow. It was absurd to suppose that one half of a nation should separate from the other because a first magistrate [the President] had been elected in the ordinary constitutional course.

The January 6 zealots of 2021 in the US were and are also absurd. But that’s a much later story.

Cairnes explains that, initially, Englanders were inclined to think that there must be some commercial differences or some kind of fiscal policy causing it. He describes what he took to be the prevailing initial English view, which actually bears a strong resemblance to the later Lost Cause type of argument:

The North fancied she had an interest in protection; the South had an obvious interest in free trade. On this and other questions of less moment North and South came into collision, and the antagonism thus engendered had been strengthened and exacerbated by a selfish struggle for place and power-a struggle which the constitution and political usages of the Americans rendered more rancorous and violent than elsewhere. But in the interests of the two sections, considered calmly and apart from selfish ends, there was nothing, it was said, which did not admit of easy adjustment, nothing which negotiation was not far more competent to deal with than the sword.

It was polite of the English public, I guess, that they were willing to take such forgiving view of the obsessive greed for power of American slaveowners. Naïve, surely, but polite.

He proceeds to describe how Englanders viewed the idea of slavery skeptically as a cause of secession:

As for slavery, it was little more than a pretext on both sides, employed by the leaders of the South to arouse the fears and hopes of the slaveholders, and by the North in the hope of attracting the sympathies of Europe and hallowing a cause which was essentially destitute of noble aims. The civil war was thus described as having sprung from narrow and selfish views of sectional interests (in which, however, the claims of the South were coincident with justice and sound policy), and sustained by passions which itself had kindled ; and the combatants were advised to compose their differences, and either return to their political partnership, or agree to separate and learn to live in harmony as independent allies.

Yeah, they really were naïve.

But British views of the Confederacy were never unanimous or fixed in stone. The British workers movement of the time was able to create substantial political pressure on the government to not formally recognize the Confederacy, for instance.

And, not unlike many banks and businesses in the American North, many British companies were making considerable amounts of money on the cotton business fed by the South’s slave economy. So the British business elite was far more receptive to normalizing its relations with the slave South, even though that would have meant helping the slaveowners to win the Civil War.²

Cairnes didn’t mince words. He was writing before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was issued. But he didn’t have trouble seeing what led to civil war. And this is a very good brief summary:

But what has been the career of the Slave Power since [the Missouri Compromise of 1820]? lt is to be traced through every questionable transaction in foreign and domestic politics in which the United States has since taken part  - through the Seminole war, through the annexation of Texas, through the Mexican war, through filibustering expeditions under Walker, through attempts upon Cuba, through the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 through Mr. Clay's compromises, through the repudiation of the Missouri Compromise so soon as the full results of that bargain had been reaped, through the passing of the Nebraska Bill and the legislative establishment of the principle of " Squatter Sovereignty," through the invasion of Kansas, through the repudiation of "Squatter Sovereignty" [the doctrine advocated by Northern appeasers of slavery like Stephen Douglas in the 1850s] when that principle had been found unequal to its purposes, and lastly, through the Dred-Scott decision and the demand for protection of slavery in the Territories - pretensions which, if admitted, would have converted the whole Union, the Free States no less than the Territories, into one great domain for slavery. This has been the point at which the Slave Power, after a series of successful aggressions, carried on during forty years, has at length arrived. lt was on this last demand that the Democrats of the North broke off from their Southern allies-a defection which gave their victory to the Republicans, and directly produced the civil war. And now we are asked to believe that slavery has no vital connexion with this quarrel, but that the catastrophe is due to quite other causes-to incompatibility of commercial interests, to uncongeniality of social tastes, to a desire for independence, to anything but slavery.

But we are told that in this long career of aggression the extension of slavery has only been employed by the South as a means to an end, and that it is in this end we are to look for the key to the present movement. " Slavery,'' it seems, "is but a surface question in American politics." The seeming aggressions were in reality defensive movements forced upon the South by the growing preponderance of the Free States; and its real object, as well in its former career of annexation and conquest, as in its present efforts to achieve independence, has been constantly the same-to avoid being made the victim of Yankee rapacity, to secure for itself the development of its own resources unhindered by protective laws. [my emphasis]

And he proceeds to explain that slavery as a “surface question” was a sloppy argument to make. Even in 1862.

1. Cairnes, J[ohn] C[airnes] (1862): The Slave Power: Its Character, Career, & Probable Designs. London: Parker, Son, & Bourn. In: Reprint Edition (2010). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2. See: British Support During the U.S. Civil War (n/d). Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (LDHI). <https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/liverpools-abercromby-square/britain-and-us-civil-war> Accessed: 2024-25-04).