Note: This article was originally published in the Spirit of Jefferson on September 7, 2022.
On a beautiful sunny Saturday recently, Michael Tolbert of Charles Town gave a group of American history buffs some long and well thought out reasons to take another look at how the Civil War came to be, not just how but why.
Tolbert, in a presentation at Happy Retreat, the home of slave owner Charles Washington in Charles Town, took a long view of the path to the war, one which took his audience far out to an event that predated the founding of the United States, and in fact predated our history as a British colony. That fateful event was the landing and subsequent settlement in Newfoundland by Leif Erikson, the culmination of a trip originating from his home base in Greenland.
Erikson’s settlement collapsed, but Tolbert sees its significance as the first of a long series of westward aiming adventurers and explorers ultimately bringing European settlers to eventually colonize the entire Western Hemisphere. He makes the point that many of the crews included Africans indentured or enslaved by earlier excursions onto the western coast of Africa. With the depredations against the native American Indian populations the early colonists lacked a native-born work force with which to establish the export industries necessary to pay back the creditors in Europe financing the expeditions. It may have been the example of the early African crew members that stoked the idea of importing other Africans to fill that gap.
Tolbert makes the point that slavery was not a new idea that coincided with the colonization of the West. It was a practice well embedded in the history of many societies, including the classical Greeks and Romans who established much of our concept of what constitutes civilization. In other words, there was a sense among European elites and clergy that slavery was not only legal but moral, and so justified treating some humans as property.
Tolbert, a former Charles Town councilman who is writing a book on the Civil War bombardment of the Jefferson County Courthouse, traces the gradual changes in thinking of various groups in the 18th and 19th centuries that led to a reconsideration of the morality of treating people as property. In other words, the moral justification for slavery began to ebb, creating ultimately the abolitionist movement in many states. One of the most fervent abolitionists was the man who has gone down in our Jefferson County history as an icon of the movement, John Brown.
Because slaves had become the literal backbone and muscle of the “King Cotton” economy of the Southern states, there was a lot of resistance to the morality argument of the abolitionists. The South became dependent on slavery as a workforce because white Southerners were finding more opportunity by moving west into territories our early government won through successful wars against the Spanish and French. Slave owners wanted those newly annexed territories to be slave holding, the abolitionist states did not. So, there again, Tolbert emphasized the persistent factor of western movement as critical to building the fire that led to Southern secession.
John Brown’s unshakeable belief that slavery was a sin against God himself put him into 180-degree opposition to John Calhoun, one of slavery’s strongest defenders. Calhoun was an early vice president and later senator from South Carolina who laid out arguments and conditions for his state to remain in the Union. He was just as strong willed as Brown, but from a diametrically opposite standpoint.
Tolbert sets the two at opposing poles on each of the four factors defining the slavery question. What he emphasized, though, was that much of the population held intermediate positions on the four factors. One person in particular, the young Abraham Lincoln, believed in the legality of slavery, waffled on the morality and property issues, but was strongly opposed to extending slavery westward. Later as president, as he came to see the divisiveness of slavery, he went over completely to the John Brown pole and eventually issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
It’s the simpler task to summarize Tolbert’s long effort in putting together a convincing set of arguments to explain the “why” of the Civil War. But it is his work product literally laid out in hundreds of individual supporting exhibits on the lawn that stamps his work as important and approachable.
Tolbert explains that the effort began because it interested him, but then took on additional significance. He believes that the documentation he has painstakingly researched and assembled can be helpful in guiding the teaching of this important chapter in United States history. He sees a future for the project especially in providing teacher training that will percolate down into curriculum for school programs in history and social studies.
He also emphasized that this intricate history project, which travels an 861-year timeline from Leif Erikson in 1000 to the firing on Fort Sumter in 1861, leaves many opportunities for others to insert their own evidence and documentation. He believes strongly that there is still much important history to be done to understand the most interesting questions of what America was and is all about.
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