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The War Between the States -- A Constitutional View (2 Volume Set)

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A two volume examination of the constitutional issues involved in the seccsion of the Southern States, the creation of the Confederate States government, and the war waged against them by the United States government. Written by the Vice President of the Confederate States, the discussion is set forth in Socratic dialogue style. An excellent study of the most important constitutional crisis in American history.

This two-volume set is one of the two major works (the other is by Jefferson Davis) that asserts that "slavery had nothing whatever to do with the Civil War." This thesis was developed only AFTER the end of the Civil War; it is also anti-historical.
Before and at the beginning of the war, Davis and Stephens were of the opinion that slavery, indeed, was the underlying cause of the conflict.

Slavery, clearly, was an embarassment after the Civil War -- after all, before the Civil War, the US was the only Western country that had slavery. It is in this context that this fictional work was written.

The idea that the civil war was a "constitutional crisis" that had "nothing whatever to do with slavery" is nonsense. The legal question of whether states could secede from the Union was settled by the US Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison, early in the century; the answer was NO: the Union, once created, was perpetual. Give that decision a thorough read; the constitutional question was settled.

Strange -- both Davis and Stephens AT THE OPENING OF THE CIVIL WAR found slavery to be the root cause of the conflict (read their speeches). Specifically, the pro-slavery South was fearful of what the newly-elected Lincoln and Republicans in Congress were planning to do, even though the 1860 Republican platform stated that the Party had no intention of abolishing slavery. Even so, the pro-slavery South was motivated by fear; and the timing of the beginning of secession (led in December, 1860, by South Carolina, shortly after the coming formal election of Lincoln by the Electoral College was considered assured) illustrates this.

So . . . read the speeches of Davis and Stephens (who was an out-and-out racist, and a vigorous one!) as the War began, not the fiction they wrote later. Also: (1) read the statements of secession made by the seceding states: their blaming slavery as the root cause of secession is clear, and (2) read the 1861 Confederate Constitution (e.g., Art. I, Sec. 9, Subsec. 4 -- the Confederate Congress was barred from impairing the right to own slaves) to see that the seceding south was VERY serious about preserving slavery. (The Confederate Constitution is on the internet, much to the consternation of present-day "Confederate impersonators"; read it!)

For an excellent, objective book on the entire subject of the shifting historiography of Civil War history, read "Americans Interpret Their Civil War".