By BERRY CRAIG
Defenders of Confederate monuments like the ones coming down in New Orleans and elsewhere commonly argue that slavery had little or nothing to do with the Civil War.
They say the memorials—like rebel flags—represent “heritage not hate” and that the Confederacy was all about “states’ rights.”
By “states’ rights,” the real secessionists meant the right of states to sanction slavery without interference from Washington. The Confederate constitution unambiguously safeguarded slavery in its states and denied the Confederate congress the power to pass laws “impairing the right of property in negro slaves.”
In December, 1860, South Carolina, the first state to exit the Union, officially invited the other 14 slave states to “join us, in forming a Confederacy of Slaveholding [italics mine] States.”
Ultimately, ten other slave states seceded in 1861 for the same reason South Carolina did: they feared Abraham Lincoln and the “Black Republicans” aimed to end slavery.
“The party of which Mr. Lincoln is the representative is based upon one idea alone—that of hostility to African slavery,” Walter N. Haldeman’s pro-slavery and anti-Lincoln Louisville Courier claimed during the 1860 presidential campaign.
Kentucky didn’t secede. But the Courier’s editorializing was typical of slave state papers that demonized Lincoln and his anti-slavery party and demanded secession because he was elected.
The Civil War started in April, 1861, a little over a month after the president was inaugurated. Four upper South states seceded and joined the original seven Confederate states. Much to Haldeman’s dismay, Kentucky went no further than declaring its neutrality, but within the Union.
In hopes of coaxing the Bluegrass State into the Confederacy, the Courier, the state’s leading rebel organ, turned up the white supremacist wick.
The paper sneered that “the abolition of slavery is a portion of the price Kentucky is expected to pay for permission to disunite herself from the other slave States and remain with those who hate her institutions and have no regard for her interests.”
If Kentucky stayed in the Union, “the emancipation of her slaves will follow as a necessary and inevitable consequence,” the Courier warned. “Her two hundred thousand negroes, not sold South, nor sent to Liberia, would become the political equals of the whites; negroes would crowd the free white man at the voting places, black children would take their places in our common schools; free negro labor would be brought into competition with our white mechanics and laboring men; and in the jury box, on the witness stand, and in all political privileges, those now slaves would be the peers of the whitest.”
Thus, the Courier concluded, “If the slaveholders want to be robbed of their property, if the non-slaveholders want to have two hundred thousand negroes made their political equals and brought into direct competition with them in the ordinary pursuits of life, let all join Lincoln and [abolitionist Secretary of State William H.] Seward in maintaining the Union.”
Throughout the secession crisis, Haldeman’s Courier kept up the race-baiting. “If the North shall succeed in their effort to conquer the Slave States, whatever else may happen, it is absolutely certain that slavery will be exterminated,” the paper declared. “Those who now have control of the Federal Government believe [that] slavery is a national sin, . . . [and] ... believe it ought to be abolished wherever it exists.”
In September, 1861, Confederate, then Union, armies invaded Kentucky. The newly-elected pro-Union legislature ordered only the Confederates to leave and authorized the raising of troops for the Yankee army. When Union forces occupied Louisville, the Courier was shut down as treasonous.
Haldeman managed to escape to the Confederate army, then at Bowling Green, Ky. He resurrected his paper and renewed its appeal to racism.
Lincoln and his generals recognized blacks as human beings, not property, the Courier hissed. Should the blue-clad soldiers “obtain and maintain the ascendancy in Kentucky,” they would free the state’s slaves “and confer upon them, as in Massachusetts, Ohio, and other free States, all the political privileges and immunities of free men!”
Slaves would be made “the equals in all respects of the white men, whose wisdom has given laws to the Commonwealth; and whose valor has made the name of Kentuckians forever famous!”
In the end, state political power would thus “pass from the hands of the free white men into those of black ones!” Kentucky would end up the same as Massachusetts and Ohio except that the state “will have a free negro population five times as large in proportion to the whole number of her inhabitants as either of those States!”
The Courier wrapped up with a call to arms: “Unless the free white men of Kentucky are ready to be reduced to equality, and compelled to fraternization with their emancipated negroes, they will answer from the mouths of their rifles,” the Courier taunted.
Berry Craig, a lifelong Kentuckian, is the author of eight books on Kentucky history, five on the Civil War; the latest one, out in January, is on the Courier and the rest of the state’s Confederate press.