FIVE SERIOUS POLITICAL MISTAKES
We need to remember that the disastrous American Civil War was the
accumulated result of five political mistakes and blunders.
The first mistake occurred during the Constitutional Convention in
1787. Ten states wanted to outlaw slavery in the Constitution, just as they had
already provided in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. However, South Carolina
was a state that had staple crops of tobacco, rice and indigo that were highly profitable
exports, and these crops were cultivated and harvested by slave labor. South
Carolina, therefore, took the position that it would secede from the Union if
the Constitution contained any reference to the abolition of slavery or any
restriction on the importation of slaves. Both Georgia and North Carolina took
the same position. To avoid the splitting of the Union and other states agreed
to postpone any legislation regarding the importation of slaves for twenty
years.
The second mistake occurred in 1808, twenty years later, when Congress
should have taken care of the slavery issue. In 1794 Eli Whitney had perfected
the cotton gin which could rapidly separate the cotton fiber from the seed. Previously
it had required a full day to separate a pound of cotton, but now 50 pounds
could be done in a day. This revolutionary invention made cotton the major
industry in the southern states. As new cotton plantations were established throughout
the South, the vast acres of cotton were harvested by slave labor. This meant that
by 1808 farmers in the South were heavily dependent on slavery. Congress tried
to pacify the demands by Northerners for abolition of slavery by merely outlawing
the importation of salves. Sadly, the domestic slave trade in the South had
become an established institution. It would take a war to curb its expansion.
The third mistake involved slavery only indirectly, but it almost
sparked the Civil War in 1832. This was because the Founders had felt very
strongly that foreign merchants desiring access to the American market should
pay a small fee or tariff for that privilege. That tariff was expected to raise
enough money to pay the entire cost of the federal government, including
national defense. In keeping with this philosophy, the northern states had
passed a tariff act in Congress, but the southern states felt that this was a
severe handicap on their growing export trade, which was flourishing with cheap
slave labor. Because South Carolina refused to collect the tariff and
threatened to secede from the Union, President Jackson announced that a large
military force would enforce the Tariff Act. Eventually South Carolina decided
to back down lest there might be a civil war.
. . .
The fourth political mistake which contributed to the final explosion
of the Civil War was a blunder by the Supreme Court. This was the famous Dred
Scott case handed down by Chief Justice Taney on March 6, 1857. Dred Scott was
a slave who had been a servant of an army surgeon at St. Louis, Missouri. When
the army surgeon was moved to Illinois and then Minnesota, Scott went with him.
However, he was now in a free territory where slavery had been abolished by the
Missouri Compromise. When he was taken back to Missouri, he sued for his
freedom, asking that he be freed since he had been in a free territory. The
case was eventually taken to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court decided against Dred Scott and said that if slaves
were transported to a free territory, they were not to be set free. That was
bad enough, but they also declared that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.
This decision so inflamed the anti-slavery element of the country that it became
one of the main issues in the 1860 election which put the Republican Party in
power and Abraham Lincoln in office.
The fifth and final political mistake occurred when South Carolina
received word of Lincoln’s election. The South Carolina state convention met on
December 20, 1860 and passed the famous Ordinance of Secession. It declared
that the Constitution of the United States was repeated and the union between
South Carolina and the United States was dissolved. Ten other states followed
in quick succession. On April 12, 1861, the bombardment of Forth Sumpter
commenced and the terrible Civil War had begun. By what time the vast majority
of the members of the Church were safely tucked away in the western valleys of
the Rocky Mountains. (Richard N. Skousen and W. Cleon Skousen, Brother
Joseph: Seer of a New Dispensation, 2 vols. [Orem, Utah: Verity Publishing,
2004], 1:403-5)
Further
Reading:
