Corey Stewart seems intent upon sabotaging his long-shot U.S. senatorial bid against Sen. Tim Kaine by questioning the premise that the Civil War was fought over slavery. His recent comments to The Hill — “I don’t believe that the Civil War was ultimately fought over the issue of slavery” — have been met by stupefaction in many quarters, such as, to pick an example pulled randomly off Google, the website Splinter, which documents in a devastating manner how Southern secessionists very clearly drew a link between secession and slavery.
To be clear, I am no fan of Corey Stewart, whose brand of white-identity politics I totally oppose. But I’m no fan either of people who take other peoples’ quotes out of context, and that seems to be what has happened with some of Stewart’s other comments — partially because of Stewart’s inarticulate expression of his thoughts and partially because his foes are so eager to skewer him that they have no more regard for the truth than they claim he does.
Here is how The Hill describes what Stewart said:
In a Monday interview with Hill.TV’s “Rising,” Stewart, who recently won the GOP nomination in the Virginia Senate race, said that not all parts of Virginia’s history are “pretty.”
But he said he doesn’t associate slavery with the war.
“I don’t at all. If you look at the history, that’s not what it meant at all, and I don’t believe that the Civil War was ultimately fought over the issue of slavery,” Stewart said.
When “Rising” co-host Krystal Ball pressed him again if the Civil War was “significantly” fought over slavery, Stewart said some of them talked about slavery, but added that most soldiers never owned slaves and “they didn’t fight to preserve the institution of slavery.”
“We have to put ourselves in the shoes of the people who were fighting at that time and from their perspective, they saw it as a federal intrusion of the state,” he said.
Clearly, it is absurd to deny an association between slavery and the Civil War. U.S. politics in the 1840s and 1850s was defined by the conflict over expansion of slavery to the U.S. territories. “Bloody Kansas” was fought over the expansion of slavery into Kansas. Abolitionists were calling for an end to slavery. John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry sought to spark a slave revolt. The Republican Party in 1860 campaigned on a platform to end the expansion of of the institution to new states (though not to abolish it). In that context, the election of Lincoln precipitated South Carolina’s secession from the union.
Does that mean slavery was the sole reason for secession? No. Southern states, whose economies depended upon cotton exports to Europe, grated against Northern-inspired tariffs that raised the cost of manufactured goods. Southern politicians had different views on the propriety of state funding of public improvements. They also argued in favor of states rights, although it must be acknowledged that such arguments were used as a primarily as a defense of the institution of slavery. Historians can argue over semantics — was slavery the primary cause of the War or merely an important contributor? — but no one can deny that the secession of Southern states was intimately bound with issues relating to slavery.
But that’s not what Stewart really was driving at. It is clear from the context of his remarks that he was addressing not the political and institutional causes of the Civil War but the motivation of the people who fought in the war. He is correct to say that most Southern whites did not own slaves and that many cited other reasons in letters and diaries, such as defense of their homes and states, as justification for fighting.
Overlooked in the 21st-century debate over Civil War statues and other aspects of our national past is the reality that Southerners’ motivations evolved as the war progressed. As their shared sacrifices mounted during four years of total war, the white Southern populace developed a sense, lacking at the beginning of the war, of shared nationhood. To win the war and preserve its independence, the Confederacy adopted many measures such as conscription and heavy taxation that many would have found objectionable before the war. Most remarkably, in 1865 near the end of the war, the Confederate Congress authorized the emancipation and arming of 300,000 slaves to fight in Southern armies — thus decimating the peculiar institution that Southerners had sought at the beginning of the war to defend.
“In the beginning the Confederate South was a cause, the sanctification of the Old South status quo,” wrote Emory M. Thomas in “The Confederate Nation 1861-1865.” “By the fall of 1864 … the Confederacy lived on in the steadfastness of its soldiers. … In the end Southerners themselves decided for emancipation in the vain hope of national survival. … The Confederate experience was a positive attempt to transcend a ‘peculiar’ past in order to achieve Southern self-determination.”
In other words, by the end of the Civil War, the war was not about preserving slavery — it was about preserving the Southern nation. And in that sense, Stewart’s causal remarks were accurate.
It is entirely apt to question why Stewart has embraced this issue. What is his political motive in referring to the Civil War during a 2018 political campaign? And what, other than political self-annihilation for himself and the Republican party, can he hope to accomplish in a state where only a fraction of the population can trace its ancestry to Confederate soldiers? That said, regarding the facts of the matter, he has a point. And to deny those facts is to embrace the very historical illiteracy of which Stewart stands accused.
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