Part
I -- Why War?
I, W. C. Thompson, was born in Monroe County, Georgia, March 23, 1840.
Moved with my father to Tallapoosa County, Alabama, in December
1852 and came to Arkansas October 1859. We settled in Ouachita
County in the southern part of the state to farm the land.
Even though it was
May of 1861 when the State of Arkansas seceded from the Union of States,
the seeds for the War of Rebellion had been planted
many years before. Some folks lay blame on the use of slaves in the Southern
States for the war but that really never was the case. Fact is, the federal
government was okay with slavery in the Confederate States; they just
didn't want to allow any new states to be able to choose. And then,
of course, there were the radicals -- up North (John Brown) and down
South (Alexander Stephens)! Never underestimate the impact of Uncle
Tom's Cabin being published and fanning the radical abolitionist flames.
You see, even before the colonies met in 1776 to dissolve the union
with England, African slave trade was a growing business. Tribal chiefs
in Africa were making money by selling tribesmen to England, and England
was making money selling those people to what became known as slave traders
in New England.
The slave traders of New England, in turn, made money by selling the
slaves to land owners, merchants and whomever they could entice into
purchasing one or more. Of course those who bought slaves wanted a return
on their money, so having the slaves generate income for the owner by
working crops proved to be the best return on the money.
Slaves were working
in all thirteen colonies, and the main slave traders were in the North.
Massachusetts became the first
territory to stop using
slaves. It turned out that slaves weren’t as profitable up north
as down south because it was easier to farm in the south and the growing
season was longer.
Eli Whitney’s
cotton gin (1793), and variations of it, greatly increased the production
of cotton and lowered the cost
of slave ownership
in the South. You see--one cotton gin could do the work of ten slaves.
Excess slaves moved to sugar-producing areas and out of the fields.
Please allow me to
ask you to think about this for a moment. Cotton production in the
South in 1793 was about 10,400 bales;
it 1860 it was
7,000,000 bales. What was the number one industry in the North at the
time? Cotton textile mills. Where did they get their cotton? Cotton shipments
to England were increasing at the rate of five per cent per year. Could
a Confederate States of America establish a sound economy without interference
from the North? Okay, I’m not going to give you all the answers.
Just a little something to think about. But, I digress.
The colonies were
victorious in dissolving the union with England and got together May
25, 1787 to begin a Constitutional
Convention to develop
a guiding document for what was to become a new political entity known
as the United States. And that’s when the heat really turned up
for causing the War Between the States known as the American Civil War.
Of the 74 delegates appointed to this convention, only 55 attended.
Patrick Henry refused to attend because he was afraid too much power
would be placed in a central government that would take power away from
the states, the very thing that had caused the dissolution with England.
Given the population
at the time was concentrated in Pennsylvania and the New England states,
most of the delegates came
from there. The three
most populous states were Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Virginia. So
it really wasn’t a surprise when Edmund
Randolph of Virginia proposed
that both the House and Senate have members selected based upon population.
William
Patterson of New Jersey offered a plan of his own. Rather than
have a House and a Senate, why not just have one legislative body in
which each state had equal representation?
Both of these plans
would have concentrated the government’s
power in the North until more states were added and more of the population
moved into the new states. There were no states west of the Mississippi
River. The South is where the new Union would grow because all the states
would need more crops to satisfy a growing population and, as already
pointed out, farming was more productive in the South.
Roger
Sherman of
Connecticut offered a compromise. The new government should have a
two-house legislative assembly. The House
was have its
members based upon population and the Senate would offer equal representation
to each state. After a lot of arguing and such, this finally passed about
the middle of July – nearly two months after the Convention began.
Once it was decided how the members of the new legislative body would
be selected another issue arose. Slavery. Virginia was one of the most
populous states because of the large number of slaves working the farms.
Forty percent of the population of the Carolinas and Georgia were slaves.
With the continuance of slaves being sold by the northern states to the
southern states, the population would shift, and the northern states
would lose power in the new government.
The northern states
offered a motion that slaves would NOT be counted at all. The southern
states saw what was happening and
threw a fit. I’m
talking a big fit here. They threatened to walk out altogether and stop
the formation of a Union of States. Each state would simply have its
own government and conduct its own business without any ties of any kind
to other states.
The northern states
relented. Slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person and Congress
would pass no laws ending
slave trade before
1808 but each time a slave was sold, a tax of $10.00 would be paid to
the federal government. You can find all this in Article I of the Constitution
of the United States. I’m not making it up.
But it was Article
IV of the new Constitution that riled the most feathers in the days
leading up to some southern states getting
fed up with the
federal government. You see, Article IV is what’s called the full
faith and credit clause, and that means all states agree to follow the
laws of all the other states.
Clause
3 of Section 2 of Article IV states, “No
Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof,
escaping into
another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged
from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the
Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.
In other words, if
a slave ran away from one state to another, the state where the slave
was found would return the slave to the slave owner’s state.
Over time, quite a few of the northern states refused to follow the
Constitution and, consequently, refused to return the slaves. (Abraham
Lincoln addressed this issue in the first inaugural speech and said,
in essence, everyone ought to play by the rules.)
