Comments Elsewhere

Jamie:

This song is nothing but about the conquering of us Southrons and the pervertion of our Christianity.

Come off it. Here is what the “Christianity” of the Southern secessionists meant:

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, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states [Texas Declaration of Secession]

With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. … It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made “one star to differ from another star in glory.” The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. (Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy)

The sooner that such “Christianity” was perverted and destroyed, the better.

Lydia:

I would be willing to concede that the leaders of the initially seceding states probably didn’t think slavery was “all that bad,” and furthermore that it was one of the specific issues in which, they suspected, the curtailment of states’ rights would begin.

There’s no need to speculate about this matter. The secessionist leaders were quite clear. Four of the seceding states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas) issued Declarations of Secession which explicitly cite the protection of slavery and white supremacy as their primary reasons for seceding. (South Carolina and Mississippi mention no other reason at all.) There are voluminous notes from secessionist conventions and speeches from leading figures such as Alexander Stephens which state that “all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists amongst us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization … was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution” and that race slavery was to be the “cornerstone” (Stephens) of their new government. The primary reasons mentioned are (1) the increasing defiance of federal fugitive slave laws in the Northern states, (2) attempts by Northern states to emancipate slaves that were carried into their borders by slaveholders, (3) the federal government’s restrictions on the expansion of slavery into the territories, (4) the growth and spread of abolitionist sentiment, (5) fear of slave uprisings inspired by Northern abolitionism, (6) the victory of Lincoln and the Republicans in the elections of 1860, which believed would worsen (1)-(5). Issues such as the tariff and abstract concerns about growing federal power vis-a-vis the several states were mentioned, but hardly portrayed as the chief reasons for the break and rarely discussed in any detail until the former Confederates began to write their post-war, post-Reconstruction memoirs in the 1870s and 1880s. If you look at the statements they were making at the time, however, these issues drop distinctly into the background. (The most the tariff receives in any of the declarations, for example, is three paragraphs; South Carolina’s and Mississippi’s secessionists were so far from giving a hoot about abstract principles of states’ rights that they complained about the “nullification” of federal Fugitive Slave Laws by Northern states as one of the reasons they gave for seceding.)

(Note that none of this means that Lincoln went to war to free the slaves. He clearly did not. But that does not mean that the secessionists did not secede in order to protect slavery from the alleged threats posed to it by the Northern states and the federal government.)