Abstract
Drawing upon insights from public choice political economy and an examination of historical records, this paper posits an explanation for the causes of secession by the original seven members of the Confederacy in 1860–1861. Secession is examined as a Hirschman exit, intended primarily to shore up and secure the waning federal subsidies and enforcement expenditures that had been afforded to plantation slavery in previous decades. Fears over the impending decline of these subsidies and protections explain the decision to withdraw from the Union, even though slavery itself was, legally, “much more secure in the Union than out of it,” to quote Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens. The premises of secession are most evident in southern declarations complaining of the non-enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, the instigation of slave insurrections, and the decline of southern political clout. These emphases suggest the perceived threat to slavery was more readily realized in its legal enforcement than in the oft-emphasized territorial question.
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Notes
- 1.
McPherson (1988, p. 241), for example, presents a picture of secession that tends toward frenzied irrationality, pursued in haste and “carried away by an excess of Robespierrian zeal.” A somewhat related thesis emphasizing a destructive turn in the political discourse appears in Varon (2008). An effective and insightful presentation of the “political breakdown” thesis may be found in Holt (1983, 2005).
- 2.
- 3.
It is difficult to understate the sheer uncertainty that shrouded the events of April 1861. Neither the Lincoln administration nor the Confederates accurately anticipated the prolonged conflict that followed Fort Sumter. Gideon Welles, Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy and one of only two cabinet members who remained for the duration of the conflict, candidly conceded in an unpublished 1875 essay that a full “one third of the administration of Mr. Lincoln expired before he had a clear and well-defined policy as to the course to be perceived on important questions affecting the government and the country (Welles 1875, WE 408).”
- 4.
The political dimensions of a Hirschman (1970) exit may be readily witnessed in the secessionists’ actions. Finding an impending diminishment of room for pro-slavery political action within the Union, the original seven Confederate states retreated and attempted to reconstitute themselves as a separate political entity. Ironically, their “exit” action simultaneously deprived the pro-slavery position of its previous near-parity “voice” in the federal government, thereby allowing the same diminishment of political support for the slave status quo that they cited as a reason to secede.
- 5.
The classic book The Slave Power (Cairnes 1862), for example, presents economically grounded variations of both an inefficiency argument around the slave labor system and a containment argument for its eventual demise. These weaknesses were subjected to and modified by the political ascendency of slave interests.
- 6.
Somerset v. Stewart. Lofft 1, 98 ER 499 (1772).
- 7.
The Burns recapture in particular had a pronounced resonance in the abolitionist movement—in Boston, likely more so than the better known Kansas-Nebraska Act of the same year. See, for example, Thoreau (1854).
- 8.
Table 12. Campbell (1970) also documents over 14,000 in federal expenses directly tied to the Burns rendition of 1854 on p. 130.
- 9.
For example Treasury records denote 18,759 in expenses on fugitive slave renditions between 1850 and the Civil War, yet this figure was inconsistently reported between budget cycles and in some years was omitted entirely. Ericson (2011) utilizes estimates from the aforementioned Sims and Burns cases, and a small number of other high-profile renditions, to extend this number by a conservative 100,000. The actual dollar amount, including hundreds of lesser known cases, is buried under a decade of administrative expenses for the marshal service and federal courts.
- 10.
Ericson (2011) in his Appendix C figures includes about 9 million in the better-documented expenses of suppressing the international slave trade. This action limited the growth of the institution, though with some irony it also likely contributed to price increases for slaves already in the United States and fostered an expansive internal slave trade. Ericson also assigns 30 million in expenses from the Second Seminole War on account of its close connection to the recovery of fugitive slaves that were harbored within the tribe, as well as additional expenses tied to slave recovery during the Indian removals of the 1830s. Other major federal expenses included about 1 million in recorded army uses of slave labor between 1828 and 1860, debt assumption expenses tied to the annexation of Texas, and the aforementioned fugitive slave renditions.
- 11.
A telling and intentionally provocative acknowledgement of the enforcement mechanisms required to sustain the slave system may be found in Henry Highland Garnet’s “Address to the Slaves of the United States”: “Let your motto be resistance! resistance! RESISTANCE! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance. What kind of resistance you had better make, you must decide by the circumstances that surround you, and according to the suggestion of expediency. Brethren, adieu! Trust in the living God. Labor for the peace of the human race, and remember that you are FOUR MILLIONS (Garnet [1843]1990, p. 197).”
- 12.
Several incidents from early republic Virginia signify the shifting nature of the color line as a mechanism of slavery enforcement. The gradual liberalization of the state’s manumission procedures in the post-revolutionary era, perhaps best signified by Robert Carter III’s famous 1791 “Deed of Gift,” gave way to increasing legal restrictions around the process in the wake of Nat Turner’s rebellion coupled with increasingly stringent stipulations to prompt the relocation of free blacks from the state by the eve of the Civil War. The early “freedom suit” of Hudgins v. Wright (1806) similarly raised the blurred lines of slavery and indenture in the case an enslaved family of mixed racial and part-Indian lineage. Though the case initially prevailed in state district court, a partial reversal at the appellate level stratified slavery along racial lines in differentiating black and Native American ancestries.
- 13.
Horace Greeley to Margaret Allen, January 6, 1860.
- 14.
See also, Magness (2014). Lincoln’s orchestration of the Corwin Amendment is further affirmed in a letter Duff Green to the editor of the New York World on September 26, 1865, republished in the National Intelligencer, October 5, 1865. According to Green, Lincoln revealed this role to him in a conversation aboard the USS Malvern during his April 1865 visit to the surrendered city of Richmond.
- 15.
On this point, abolitionist Lysander Spooner noted that the Corwin Amendment “was an admission that, as [the Constitution] then stood, it did not recognize [slavery]. And if it did not, blacks were citizens.” Spooner to Henry Summer, November 30, 1866, Special Collections, Bryn Mawr College.
- 16.
Congressional Globe, 36th Congress, 2nd Session, p. 75.
- 17.
For example, Loewen and Sebesta (2011) is an edited compendium of these documents with interpretive notes. The thrust of their argument, however, is premised upon demonstrating the easily sustained point that slavery, as opposed to other “neo-confederate” revisions, was in fact the primary causal instigator of secession. It is nominally correct on this point, but wholly superficial in the sense that it sacrifices the opportunity for a deeper analysis of the particulars of slavery to a retreading of a debate waged largely in amateur and non-scholarly settings.
- 18.
The unpublished Florida document was rediscovered in 2012 by historian Dwight Pitcaithley in the papers of Gov. Madison Starke Perry. It appears in an unedited draft in the State Archives of Florida, Series 577, Carton 1, Folder 6.
- 19.
Amendments Proposed by Senator John J. Crittenden, December 18, 1860.
- 20.
May (2013) makes a strong argument that the late antebellum territorial dispute turned upon southern expansionist designs in the Caribbean, rather than its heavily emphasized interests in the domestic territories of the west.
- 21.
See pp. 52–56 and 133.
- 22.
Abraham Lincoln, “Second Annual Message to Congress,” December 1, 1862.
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Magness, P.W. (2018). A Paradox of Secessionism: The Political Economy of Slave Enforcement and the Union. In: Hall, J., Witcher, M. (eds) Public Choice Analyses of American Economic History. Studies in Public Choice, vol 35. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77592-0_3
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