“If there is to be a separation, then God bless them both. And keep them in the Union if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better.”
…Thomas Jefferson on the New England Hartford Convention of 1814.


This is Charlie Lee with Springtime of Nations talkin Dixie today. I would like to make clear from the beginning that this will NOT be a defense of the Confederate States of America of 1861-1865. The purpose of this video is, like the rest in our series, to cover a distinct nation that is or has struggled against a larger state to achieve independence. The nation we will be covering is the American Southerner or Southron. The so called American Civil War or as professor Walter Block has pointed out the Southern War for Secession, was not the first or the last outcropping of nationalist fervor among this People. So what is the history of the Southerner? Why did he fight the Union, and why is there a newfound interest in breaking from the United States in the last 20 years?

The tale of the southerner begins with the beginning of the tale of the United States, in 1607. The private Virginia Company was chartered with the right to develop and govern a large section of the eastern seaboard of North America (this would later be significantly divided up into other colonies). The first settlement, Jamestown, endured incredible adversity and famine to become the center of the southern American colonies, which by 1632 included the province of Maryland, by 1663 Carolina, by 1712 South Carolina, and 1732 the province of Georgia. All of these colonies, though they had plenty of internecine differences, had a great deal of similarity in their religion (primarily Anglicanism before the first Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s), their economy (mostly engaged in cash crops such as tobacco, indigo and rice with much of the work undertaken by indentured servants and later slaves), and even ethnic makeup: In contrast to the corn producing, Low Church New Englanders who came primarily from East Anglia, Southerners came broadly from, coincidentally, rural south England.

Virginia became the largest and most important colony of the South, and provided a number of the most important voices for independence in the 1760s and 1770s including Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and James Madison. Once the American War for Independence got going, your very own Charlie Lee headed the defense of Charleston, South Carolina against a British fleet in 1776. Guerilla outfits like Francis Marion’s, Thomas Sumter’s and Andrew Pickens’ harassed the British as long as they occupied the Southern states during the war, inflicting significant losses against the British before fleeing into the interior swamps of Carolina. General Cornwallis, the commander of the British Army in America lamented that “all of upper South Carolina was in ‘an absolute state of rebellion, every friend of Government has been carried off, and his plantation destroyed.’ and had to evacuate north, where the Americans and French encircled him at the decisive siege of Yorktown in 1781.

Once American independence had been secured, the country divided politically broadly between an industrializing, centralizating north and an agrarian, decentralist south. Southerners generally believed in a Jeffersonian classical liberal conception of government where the State, not the federal government, was the main guarantor of liberty and public works projects should be undertaken by that state, not funded by federal tariffs or worse, direct taxes. While Jefferson articulated a policy of free trade, the North followed Alexander Hamilton and his later acolytes such as Henry Clay who thought tariffs were necessary to bring the United States onto the global stage as an industrial powerhouse. During the first half of the 19th century, the trade issue was a large part of the split between North and South, culminating in the 1832 Nullification crisis where South Carolina, citing the famous decentralist Principles of 1798 made by Jefferson and Madison, declared that the tariffs signed into law by the Jackson administration were unconstitutional and would defy them. An angry Jackson threatened to send federal troops into South Carolina, and the state sheepishly relented.

Now that we are at the second half of the 19th century, we must talk about slavery and what role it played in the secession of the Southern States in 1861. I will be drawing much of this from the excellent series Historical Controversies by Chris Calton published by the Mises Institute. While the tariff question was certainly part of the tension between the northerner and southerner, it was ultimately not why the 7 deep south states, the ones with the biggest investment in chattel slavery, seceded. The slave states, having long enjoyed an advantage of power in the senate, were finally starting to see the end of the line while the population of the north was booming and heading west, creating more and more free states (and with them, more free senators). The failure of the south to capture Kansas as a slave state in the 1850s bleeding Kansas conflict followed by the Election of moderate abolitionist Abraham Lincoln in 1861 convinced the Deep South that the only way to preserve slavery was to make sure that the federal government could not be used against them. In the secession declarations of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas, their intent to rescue slavery from the “radical abolitionist north” is crystal clear.

But this was not the whole story. The Upper South, with a much smaller proportion of slaves was not interested in dissolving the union over the issue. The Southern unionists tried to work with outgoing president Buchanan and incoming president Lincoln to bring the southern states back into the union peacefully. Many solutions were proposed, including the Corwin Amendment that would enshrine the right to keep slaves in the U.S. constitution which was approved by Lincoln. A mutual mood of distrust however thwarted these attempts. The new polity, calling itself the Confederate States of America, demanded that federal troops leave forts on their territory, including ones in Florida and Fort Sumter, South Carolina (named after the famous revolutionary war partisan). Lincoln, who had no intention of letting the confederacy successfully stay independent, refused to move the troops and the Confederate Army bombarded the unsupplied and undermanned fort until they surrendered, a miraculously bloodless affair. Using the “provocation” of the attack on Fort Sumter, Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 militiamen to be raised by the States of the Union to crush the “rebellion”. The use of federal troops against Southerners is what incensed the Upper South into seceding, with North Carolina, Virginia, Arkansas and Tennessee successfully joining the C.S.A, and border states Missouri and Maryland’s state legislatures narrowly being prevented from joining by armed unionist sympathizers and federal troops. Out of hatred for the Union that had stolen their land, many Indians including a large section of the Cherokee allied themselves with the new Confederacy.

The feeling of the north during the beginning of the conflict was focused primarily on preserving the Union. As the war dragged on and casualties mounted, abolitionism which was a fringe ideology even in the north became popular as a way to “punish” the south for “starting” the war. There were also strategic and logistical advantages to the 1863 Emancipation proclamation, which “freed” slaves in enemy territory but not occupied or loyal territory, undermining the security of the south but not upsetting the needed southern unionists in states like Kentucky and West Virginia (which engaged in a double secession in 1863 that was rubberstamped by congress on dubious constitutional grounds). For its part, although the Confederacy was founded at least in part as a movement towards states rights, the C.S.A’s government was highly centralized, and it engaged in property confiscation and conscription on an even greater scale than the Republicans did in the North  As we all know, the Confederacy was defeated in 1865, and federal troops occupied the South until 1877 during the period known as reconstruction, aka, the reconstruction from the damage done to the confederacy by invading and pillaging armies such as William Tecumseh Sherman’s. The real recovery from the destruction of the “Civil War” took decades on decades, with economists in the 1930s still tracing southern poverty and lack of development to the war. This deprivation led to the Southern populist and agrarian movements, which sought to return the South to its roots as a large trading center for goods such as tobacco and cotton on the world stage. While the South never united in challenge to the federal government again, many Southern Americans feel a cohesive sense of Southernness and view the Confederacy as an inextricable part of their heritage, and not a wholly negative one either.

In the present day, many southerners, especially those in South Carolina and Texas, have advocated for secession from the United States, and the American South has the highest proportion of people who when polled support an independent country of their region. The Texan legislature in February of 2021 formally tabled a bill for a secession referendum ala Catalonia or Scotland. While it will probably not pass constitutional muster, the lust for independence among the Southron is legitimate, and the fact that it once was connected to a long dead evil institution does not mean we should now ignore their cause. The great anarchist and abolitionist Lysander Spooner had the correct position all the way back in 1861: Against slavery, against the war, for secession, and for emancipation. Long live the South and may 1000 flowers bloom!