"Ashokan Farewell"
"The Real Causes of The American War of Secession"
by Doug Casey
"I wish to disabuse you of something you’ve probably believed since you were ten years old. Only a third of you have been subjected to the American public school version of history, but that version has permeated throughout the world. After all, the winners get to write the history books. What Americans are taught about their so-called "Civil War" is, in good measure, a fairy tale.
Let’s start by getting the terminology right. It wasn’t a "civil war." A civil war is a conflict in which two or more factions fight for control of the same government. That’s not what happened. The South wasn’t trying to take over the North. Their sole objective was to leave the Union. That made it a war of secession. Calling it a civil war is propaganda - framing Southerners as rebels and insurgents rather than people who simply wanted to go their own way. Some call it the War of Northern Aggression, a name which might have stuck if the Confederacy had won. I prefer to be neutral, so I will call it the War Between the States.
The standard narrative holds that the noble North, led by the saintly Abraham Lincoln, fought the evil South to free the slaves. Full stop. Now, more than any time in the past, that’s the whole story as far as most Americans are concerned. It’s on a par with believing that Spain blew up the battleship Maine to start the Spanish-American War, or that World War I was fought to "make the world safe for democracy." I’ll reserve comment on more recent wars. But good propaganda always contains a kernel of truth, even while truth is always the first casualty in a war.
So, what were the causes of the War Between the States, which started April 12, 1861, with the bombardment of Ft. Sumter in Charleston harbor, and ended April 9, 1865, with the surrender of Lee at Appomattox? Slavery was certainly a major element of the conflict. But reducing the bloodiest war in American history - 700,000 dead, which in per-capita terms would be about seven million today - to a single cause is not just intellectually lazy and dishonest. It’s dangerous.
So let me walk you through what happened. I think you’ll find it’s far more interesting than the storybook version - because it involves economics, power politics, exploitation of one part of a country by another part, and international intrigue.
In the country’s earlier days, Americans saw themselves as citizens of a state, not the US. Even so, by 1860, the United States was no longer one country in any meaningful economic sense. It was two countries with diametrically opposed economic interests that happened to share a flag and a constitution.
The North had industrialized, with about ten times as many factories as the South, and a growing urban working class fed by massive immigration from Ireland and Germany - people who would work for next to nothing. Northern industrialists were accumulating enormous wealth and, more importantly, enormous political power. They wanted protection from foreign competition. They wanted high tariffs to keep cheap British-manufactured goods out of the American market.
The South was the opposite. It was an agricultural export economy. Cotton was the big commodity - by the 1860s, cotton alone accounted for almost 60% of all US exports. The fiber mainly went to Britain’s mills in Manchester. The South was plugged into the global economy in a way that the North was not, and Southern planters wanted what any export economy wants: free trade. Low tariffs, open ports, and the ability to buy manufactured goods from whoever offered the best price, which was usually Britain.
Half of the country wanted protectionism, and the other half wanted free trade. This wasn’t a minor policy disagreement, but a fundamental conflict of interest that had been building for decades. Alexander Hamilton versus Thomas Jefferson. Industrial mercantilism and protectionism versus agrarian free markets. Like philosophical arguments here in Argentina.
Tariffs: How the North Looted the South: In 1828, Congress passed what Southerners called the Tariff of Abominations, with duties as high as 50 percent on imported manufactured goods. Southerners could no longer buy British tools or cloth at the world market price. You’re forced to buy inferior Northern-made versions at an inflated price. Meanwhile, your cotton exports are damaged, since Britain now has less income with which to buy them. Worse, Britain considers counter-tariffs on cotton imports. Worse yet, Britain sees it should diversify the sources of its imported cotton, destroying your market, which is exactly what happened during the war. You’re being taxed to subsidize your economic competitor. It’s a transfer of wealth from South to North, administered by the federal government.
South Carolina nearly seceded over this in 1832 - thirty years before Fort Sumter. Vice President John C. Calhoun developed the doctrine of nullification, arguing that a state could refuse to enforce a federal law that it considered unconstitutional. President Andrew Jackson - who was a Southerner himself - threatened military force. They worked out a compromise, but the fundamental issue was never resolved. And the principle Calhoun articulated - that the federal government could become an instrument of sectional plunder - became the intellectual foundation for secession.
Now here’s the detail that most historians conveniently skip over. December 20, 1860, and June 8, 1861, following Abraham Lincoln's election, South Carolina was the first to secede, followed by six other Deep South states by February 1861. After the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, four more states joined, totaling 11 states in the Confederacy. In March 1861 - before the war started, before anybody fired a shot - Congress passed the Morrill Tariff. This raised duties back to their highest levels since the Tariff of Abominations. It passed because Southern representatives of seven states had already left Congress following their secession. Think about the timing. The South walks out, and the very first thing the North does is jack up tariffs to benefit Northern industry. If you’re a Southerner, that tells you that the moment you lose your political voice, the Northern majority will use the federal government to loot you. Which is, of course, exactly what Calhoun had warned about thirty years earlier.
The Morrill Tariff also shaped how the rest of the world saw the conflict. Many British observers - and remember, the British were passionate free-traders at this point - looked at the American war and saw not a moral crusade against slavery but a trade war. The protectionist North was trying to force the free-trading South back into an economic arrangement that served Northern interests. We’ll come back to the British angle, because it’s crucial.
It Wasn’t Only Tariffs: Tariffs were the most visible grievance, but they were far from the only one. The federal government had become, in effect, a machine for transferring wealth and power from the South to the North. And I use the word "transferring" deliberately, because this was not an accident. It was policy. Since there were 23 million citizens of 23 Northern states, and only 9 million (including 3.5 million slaves) in the South, there was no question about which region future legislation would favor.
Federal spending on internal improvements - roads, canals, harbors, railroads - went overwhelmingly to the North. Southern tax revenue, collected largely through those tariffs on imported goods that Southerners consumed, was building infrastructure in Northern states. When the transcontinental railroad was authorized, it followed a northern route. Federal land grants went to Northern settlers and Northern railroad corporations. The Homestead Act, which Republicans championed, was designed to populate the western territories with small free-soil farmers aligned with Northern political interests - not with large-scale agricultural operations that might complement the Southern system of plantations.
The banking system was controlled by Northern financial interests. Southern planters were perpetually at the mercy of New York bankers and cotton factors who set the terms of trade. If you were a Southern cotton grower, you shipped your product through Northern ports, insured it with Northern companies, financed it through Northern banks, and bought your manufactured goods from Northern factories at tariff-inflated prices. The wealth extraction was systematic.
Consider this from the perspective of someone sitting in Charleston or Richmond in 1860. You’re looking at a federal government that spends your tax money on somebody else’s infrastructure, gives away the western lands to people aligned against your interests, and runs a banking system designed to extract your wealth. Many Southern writers explicitly compared their situation to the American colonies under British rule. The structural dynamics were remarkably similar. The South was being treated as an economic colony of the North.
I know some of us here tonight have done business in countries where the central government exists primarily to serve the interests of one region or one class at the expense of everyone else. You know what that looks like. You know how it feels. And you know that people don’t tolerate it forever.
The Lincoln Myth: What He Actually Said and Believed: Now we come to Abraham Lincoln, who may be the most successfully mythologized political figure in American history. And I say that as someone who considers most political figures to have feet of clay. The popular version of Lincoln is the Great Emancipator—a man who went to war to free the slaves because it was the right thing to do. The actual historical record tells a very different story. I’m not going to give you my interpretation here. I’m going to give you Lincoln’s own words, because they’re rather devastating to the myth.
Look at his First Inaugural Address, March 1861, with seven states already out of the Union: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." That’s not exactly "free at last" rhetoric.
During the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Lincoln said explicitly that he was not in favor of social and political equality between white and black people. He opposed blacks serving as voters, jurors, or officeholders. He supported colonization - shipping freed blacks to Africa or Central America. He continued to explore colonization schemes well into his presidency. By modern standards, Lincoln’s racial views were appalling. But they were mainstream for a Northern politician of his era, or the typical man in the street, which tells you something about how "anti-slavery" the North actually was in practical terms. Slavery was a subject of moral debate in both the North and the South. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s "Uncle Tom’s Cabin" was published in 1851 and was a runaway Best Seller, with 300,000 copies sold in the US and a million in Britain just during its first year. It became the largest-selling novel of the 19th C. The fanatical abolitionist John Brown, then featured in the "Battle Hymn of the Republic", also served to give a psychological boost to the importance of slavery.
Lincoln was not an abolitionist. He was a moderate Republican whose income came from railroads and banks, whose philosophy was that of Hamilton, and whose primary commitment was preventing the expansion of slavery into new territories - not ending it where it existed. His reasons were as much economic as moral. Free-Soil Republicans didn’t want slavery in the territories primarily because they didn’t want to compete with slave labor. They wanted the West reserved for white free laborers. It was an economic program wrapped in moral language.
The South could see that slavery was uneconomic and on its way out. Fighting a bloody civil war to maintain slavery never made sense, and no other country fought a war to abolish slavery. It would have died of its own dead weight. Brazil was the last major country to abolish it, peacefully, in 1888.
Note the date of the Emancipation Proclamation. January 1, 1863. With only 87 words, it’s well-crafted and seen as a great moral thunderbolt. But it should be read carefully. It freed enslaved people only in states that were in rebellion. It did not apply to slaves in Washington, D.C., border states that stayed loyal to the Union, or parts of Confederate states already under Union control. The Proclamation was a military measure, not a moral one. Lincoln said so himself. His letter to Horace Greeley in August 1862 is the Rosetta Stone of Lincoln’s priorities: "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."
Lincoln acted as a veritable dictator during the war. He suspended Habeas Corpus, he imposed an income tax, instituted a draft, and suppressed free speech, arresting many thousands and shutting down 300 papers for things like criticizing the war effort. His priority was preserving the Union and the federal government’s power - not liberating enslaved people, nor preserving citizens’ liberties. Which brings us to what I think is the most fascinating part of the whole story.
Britain - An Underrated Element: This is the part they definitely don’t teach in American schools, and it may be the most important part of the whole story. Perhaps for the same reason that the importance of the French Army and Navy aren't recognized in winning the Revolutionary War.
Great Britain in 1861 was the world’s superpower. The Royal Navy controlled the seas. The British Empire spanned the globe. And the British textile industry - the engine of the world’s largest economy - ran on Southern cotton. About 80 percent of the cotton feeding British mills came from the American South. When the Union Navy blockaded Southern ports, it was like cutting off Britain’s oxygen supply. Hundreds of thousands of British textile workers faced unemployment. The economic pressure on the British government to do something was enormous.
But it wasn’t just about cotton. The British had excellent strategic reasons to want the United States broken in two. Think about it from London’s perspective. The Americans had been getting increasingly uppity - the Monroe Doctrine, expansionism, challenging British influence in Latin America and the Caribbean. The United States was becoming a serious rival. Better to have two weaker nations, one of which - the Confederacy - would be dependent on British trade and goodwill. From a pure realpolitik standpoint, British interests pointed strongly toward supporting Southern independence.
And they came very close. In November 1861, a Union warship stopped the British mail steamer Trent and seized two Confederate diplomats. Britain was furious. Troops were dispatched to Canada. The Royal Navy mobilized. Britain and the United States came within inches of war. Lincoln backed down and released the diplomats, but the episode showed just how eager elements of the British establishment were to intervene.
Now here’s the problem the British government faced. Britain had abolished slavery in 1833, and the British public - especially the middle and working classes - took enormous pride in that fact. Anti-slavery sentiment was a powerful political force in Britain. So while the government had every economic and strategic reason to support the Confederacy, doing so openly would mean allying with a slave power. That was politically toxic.
But - and this is the key - as long as Lincoln said the war was about preserving the Union and not about slavery, the British could frame potential intervention as supporting Southern self-determination. The Times of London took exactly this line throughout 1861 and into 1862. The South was fighting for independence, just as the Americans had fought against Britain in 1776. It was about self-government, not slavery. Unless Lincoln made the narrative about slavery, the British had political cover to intervene.
The Emancipation Proclamation destroyed that possibility. The moment Lincoln made abolition an explicit war aim, any British government that supported the Confederacy would be supporting slavery against freedom. And no British politician could survive that. The British working class, despite the devastating unemployment caused by the cotton shortage, rallied to the Union cause. There was a famous meeting at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester - textile workers who were literally starving because of the cotton blockade voted to support Lincoln and emancipation. It was one of the most remarkable moments in British labor history.
Think about what actually happened here. Lincoln played the slavery card not primarily because of moral conviction, though he had serious moral objections to slavery. He played it because it was his single most effective weapon to prevent British intervention. Without the Emancipation Proclamation, it’s possible that Britain would have recognized the Confederacy, broken the blockade, and changed the outcome of the war. Britain’s interests pointed directly toward supporting the South. The breakup of America would have served British strategic interests beautifully. Cotton supply secured. A rival power permanently divided. The only thing that prevented it was the moral weight of the slavery question, which Lincoln exploited with extraordinary political skill. The Proclamation was a geopolitical masterstroke disguised as a moral declaration.
States Rights: Now Just a Euphemism: In polite American society today, the phrase "states’ rights" is treated as code for racism. It was certainly used that way during the civil rights era. But the constitutional questions at the heart of secession were real, and dismissing them as mere cover for slavery is intellectually dishonest.
The United States was founded as a federation of sovereign states. The Constitution was ratified by state conventions, not by a national vote. The Tenth Amendment (now effectively a dead letter) reserved all undelegated powers to the states. For most of American history, the dominant constitutional theory - not just in the South, but across the country - was that the Union was a voluntary compact. States had joined voluntarily, and they could leave voluntarily.
New England Federalists discussed secession during the Hartford Convention of 1814. William Lloyd Garrison, the most famous abolitionist in America, advocated for the North to secede from the South, calling the Constitution a "covenant with death." The idea that secession was constitutionally permissible was a mainstream position with adherents in every region of the country. The Constitution says nothing about secession one way or the other. It was an open question.
The war settled that question - by force, not by argument. The Union won, and the victors wrote the legal and historical narrative. But secessionists were not wrong as a matter of law. It’s not unlikely the war might have never broken out, ending as a Mexican standoff, if the Confederates hadn’t foolishly fired the first shot at Ft. Sumter. At that point, Lincoln raised 75,000 men for a three-month enlistment and felt it necessary to use them, which he did at First Bull Run on July 21.
"The question of whether a political subunit has the right to withdraw from a larger entity is never simple. Most countries are artificial constructs, with artificial borders, mashing together different tribes, religions, and cultures. That’s true of every country in Africa, highlighted by secession movements in Nigeria, Congo, and Sudan. Every country in the Middle East and Western Asia is an unstable multicultural domestic empire; most will break apart. It’s true that many places in this continent, such as Brazil and Bolivia, have this problem. It wasn’t simple in the America of 1861, and it isn’t simple now. Ask the Scots, the Catalans, the Quebecois, and most recently the Albertans. It's an open question whether the United States will have secession movements or a civil war in the years to come. What are the chances that young Chicanos in Los Angeles will want to pay 20% of their income in Social Security to support old white women in Massachusetts? These are legitimate political and economic questions. Quashing them with shouts of "racism" doesn’t make them go away.
Putting It All Together: So what actually caused the War Between the States? Everything I’ve described is operating simultaneously and reinforcing each other. That’s the honest answer, and it’s a lot more interesting than the fairy tale that it was a crusade to end slavery.
The economic divergence between North and South created fundamentally incompatible interests on tariffs, trade, banking, infrastructure, and western expansion. The war would likely have happened even in a world where slavery didn’t exist. The tariff question convinced Southerners that the federal government had become a tool of Northern economic exploitation. The passage of the Morrill Tariff in 1861, the instant Southern representatives left Congress, was the confirmation of everything they’d feared.
Lincoln’s actual position on slavery was pragmatic and politically calculated. He was willing to tolerate slavery where it existed to preserve the Union, and he adopted emancipation as a war aim primarily for strategic reasons - above all, to prevent British intervention. Britain’s role was far more significant than the standard narrative acknowledges. The threat of British recognition of the Confederacy was one of the most powerful forces shaping the war’s moral framing. The Emancipation Proclamation was a diplomatic weapon as much as a moral declaration.
Slavery sat at the center of all of this - but in far more complex ways than the simple story suggests. Slavery was the foundation of the Southern economy that generated the tariff disputes. Slavery was the most prominent states’ rights issue, though not the only one. Slavery was the lever Lincoln used to reshape the war’s international dimensions. And slavery was the moral question that prevented Britain from tipping the balance.
Why Any of This Matters: Let me wrap up by telling you why I think this matters - and not just as a historical curiosity. Simplistic narratives produce simplistic thinking. And simplistic thinking about why nations go to war yields more wars. Oddly, the War Between the States has become more controversial than ever in recent years. The atmosphere in the U.S. has become increasingly racially charged, and the war is now seen as a "good guys versus bad guys" situation. Monuments to Southern soldiers have been taken down, and displaying the Stars and Bars is considered "hate speech".
Fault lines are developing in the US. Economic divergence between regions and classes is different from that of the 1850s but is arguably much more severe. The federal government was a relatively trivial influence when it controlled only a few percent of the GDP, but now it controls about 40%, in addition to creating currency and credit at will, complex laws, and massive regulations. It’s become a self-perpetuating machine for transferring wealth to the politically connected. Constitutional questions about the limits of federal power are more urgent than they were in the 1850’s.
I’m not predicting another war of secession with conventional armies; the country is way too integrated, and battle lines aren’t drawn on state lines so much as by who controls individual cities. But the US increasingly seems on the cusp of a genuine civil war - different factions fighting for control of the same government, violence over who gets to wield power. That’s far uglier than secession, and the underlying forces are not relics of the past. They’re permanent features of political life, and they’re very much in play right now. Red people and Blue people can’t even have a civil conversation about more than the weather and the state of the roads. And not even about the weather…
That’s one reason for international diversification. It’s an insurance policy against political instability, including in the American government. The men who founded the United States understood that governments are dangerous. They tried to craft a Constitution with enough checks and balances to constrain that danger. Things broke down in 1861. Since governments always grow, accumulate power, and always serve the interests of those who control them at the expense of everyone else, it’s not unlikely the US will experience another period of severe unpleasantness.
The War Between the States is actually just Exhibit B; it wasn’t America’s first experience with overt war between citizens. Exhibit A is the Revolutionary War of 1775-83. It was both a War of Secession (Americans from Britain) and a civil war, because everyone was legally British. But about 1/3rd of them wanted to take over the government and change it, and a different 1/3rd saw that third as treasonous rebels and wanted to maintain the status quo. That war was neighbor against neighbor, much more brutal and far-reaching than just some battles between Red Coats and Continentals.
The 700,000 men who died in the unpleasantness of 1861-65 fought for many different reasons, but very few did it to preserve slavery; 50% of Southern whites owned no slaves. Some fought for abstract principles of union or self-government. But most were simply caught up in forces beyond their control, which is what happens to ordinary people when governments go to war. Understanding the full truth about why they died is the least we owe them. And it’s the best protection we have against repeating similar catastrophic mistakes."
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Full screen recommended.
"'My Very Dear Wife' -
The Last Letter of Major Sullivan Ballou"
"A soldier's heartfelt words to his spouse, penned days before the Battle of Bull Run, express profound love and patriotism. The video uses historical images to enhance the emotional impact of this powerful message. Sarah was only 24 years old when Sullivan was killed at Bull Run. She never remarried. She lived to 87. When she died, she was buried next to Sullivan."
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