After the Civil War, it became common for ex-Confederates to downplay the role slavery had played in secession. With slavery dead and no bloody orgy of vengeance from the ex-slaves, former rebels found it embarrassing that they had fought and lost such a horrid war for such an ignoble a goal as keeping other people in bondage. So they constructed the legend of the Lost Cause in which defending slavery had no part. Instead, they had been fighting to defend their homes against a Yankee invasion, for honor, states’ rights, etc. To the limited extent African Americans had a part in the Lost Cause narrative, it was as faithful servants, subordinate companions, and deferential southern patriots who knew their place and kept it.
Before and during the Civil War, white Southerners did not experience the same embarrassment about slavery and proved more candid in describing their war aims. An excellent example comes from the December 16, 1861 issue of Richmond’s Daily Dispatch. Writing from Fairfax, Virginia, on December 8, an unnamed correspondent related a supposed conversation between Gen. George McClellan and a Confederate prisoner, Redmond Burke. Burke had been captured by federal troops on September 23, while scouting for J.E.B. Stuart. Imprisoned in Washington, D.C., he managed to escape and make it back to Confederate lines, where he related to the Richmond correspondent the story of his supposed conversation with Gen. McClellan.
The conversation boiled down to slavery and its relationship to the war. According to the Daily Dispatch it started with McClellan asking:
‘ “I desire to know what you want — what you are fighting for, and what you intend to do?”
‘”But the Constitution says that in the time of rebellion it may be suspended.”’
Whether the supposed conversation between Burke and McClellan actually took place is irrelevant. It became a vehicle through which a prominent newspaper in Confederate capital could remind its readers the reason for secession, which clearly arose from slavery. Southerners might speak of Northern despotism, but from Burke’s words they themselves were fighting for the right to be despots over their slaves. They also believed, that from the beginning of the war, the North aimed to destroy slavery. Which might not strictly speaking be true, but given Northern actions dating from Gen. Benjamin Butler’s contraband policy certainly gave credibility to the notion and over the course of the war became true.
Source: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2006.05.0349%3Aarticle%3Dpos%3D21
Despite evidence to the contrary, many Southern sympathizers still deny that they sought for the right to keep human beings enslaved and try to clothe it in more eloquent goals. As your article points out, the actual evidence is to the contrary.
Nice post! I’m sure that there must be some rather blustering newspaper editorials in the South at the time that will prove the point even if the conversation cannot be verified! Thanks for posting!
For a record of the time, it’s great although i sincerely doubt the conversation took place. Somehow, it doesn’t sound like McClellan (one point needs to be made; at that time there was no Supreme Court decision on habeas corpus. Before the current federal court system was created, Supreme Court justices were assigned to circuits and acted as lower court federal judges. Chief Justice Taney, not surprisingly, assigned himself the circuit that included his home state of Maryland. In was in that capacity that he ruled on Ex Parte Merryman.).
Hi Margaret. Nice points on Ex Parte Merryman and whether the alleged conversation ever took place. As I indicated in the piece, it is doubtful the conversation ever took place (I can’t imagine McClellan letting himself be lectured by a Confederate scout), but it is a succinct and eloquent statement of Confederate motives for secession that flies in the face of later denials by ex-Confederate soldiers that they were fighting for slavery.
What Southern leaders feared, probably rightly, was that the avowed purpose of Lincoln and the Republicans to limit the expansion of slavery into the territories and new states would inevitably lead to the eventual death of slavery. New free states would mean greater anti-slavery representation in Congress. For them it was all about protecting slavery, as their own documents justifying their secession clearly say.