Gentlemen and Madam, the question before us: Was the South’s secession an act of constitutional liberty, or a desperate attempt to preserve a dying labor system? 

Shelby Foote's: Well now… I reckon it was both, but mostly a tragedy of men who loved their country and couldn’t find a way to keep it whole. We had a genius for compromise—Clay, Webster, Calhoun, all those giants—and we threw it away. Take Robert E. Lee in January 1861. He writes to his sister: “I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than a dissolution of the Union… Secession is nothing but revolution.” He was no fire-eater; he hated the idea. But when Virginia went out, he followed his state, because he believed the Union had become something the Founders never intended. Or look at Stonewall Jackson up in the Shenandoah—quiet, pious man—still voting for the Union candidate in the Virginia convention, hoping against hope for peace. These weren’t wild-eyed radicals; they were honorable men watching the old republic slip away because the politicians in Washington forgot how to talk to each other. The soldiers who fought later? Most of ’em, North or South, didn’t give a damn about the slaves one way or the other. They fought for home, for their comrades, for what they believed was liberty under the Constitution. That’s the tragedy—we failed at the one thing Americans are supposed to be good at.

Daina Ramey Berry: Constitutional liberty? That phrase rings hollow when you look at the auction blocks, the ledgers, and the bodies priced like livestock. Secession wasn’t about some abstract principle—it was a frantic effort to protect an enormously profitable labor system built on commodifying Black lives from womb to grave. Enslaved people weren’t just labor; they were capital, their "value" calculated in dollars before they were even born. Mothers were appraised as "breeders," children as "increase" like cattle, and even after death, their bodies held "ghost value" for medical schools and grave robbers. When South Carolina’s delegates cheered the secession ordinance in December 1860, they openly declared the threat to slavery—Lincoln’s election, the fear of containment—as the cause. But listen to the enslaved who lived it: an old man in the quarters hearing the news might say the white folks had “gone crazy,” because they knew the stakes were their families, their children sold away, their worth measured in pounds of flesh. The system wasn’t dying from inefficiency; it was thriving on human chattel, generating massive wealth for the South and the nation. Secession was the desperate bid to keep that wealth—and that power over Black bodies—intact. The enslaved understood this better than anyone: their "soul value," their inner humanity and resistance, clashed daily with the market price slapped on them. That’s no noble defense of liberty; that’s a defense of treating people as property.

David W. Blight: Let’s step back and listen to the stories not just of the moment of secession, but of how those people—and their children—told the tale afterward. In Charleston, December 1860, the delegates cheer as the ordinance passes unanimously. They declare the North’s hostility to slavery the cause—no ambiguity in their own words. But fast-forward a few decades: the veterans’ reunions, the monuments, the blue-gray handshakes at Gettysburg in 1913. Old soldiers embrace, laugh, share pipes—Union and Confederate alike—while the emancipation they fought over fades from the story. Why? Because white America chose reunion over reckoning. Frederick Douglass warned it would happen: he said the war’s meaning would be buried under “a new religion of forgiveness,” where the blood of slavery gets washed away in mutual valor. Jefferson Davis, in his postwar memoirs, insists slavery was “only an incident,” not the cause—rewriting history to make secession noble defense of states’ rights. But the enslaved and freed people knew better. They told stories of running to Union lines, of turning the war into their own revolution. The South seceded to preserve a slave society threatened by Lincoln’s election—plain in every secession document, every commissioner’s speech. Yet in the name of healing sectional wounds, we built a memory that made slavery incidental, reunion sacred, and justice deferred. That’s the deeper tragedy: the war ended slavery, but the stories we told afterward helped preserve white supremacy. The people who lived it—soldiers, slaves, widows—left us competing memories, and too often we chose the comforting one.

Foote: You make it sound so cold, Professor. Those men in Charleston weren’t villains in their own eyes. They believed they were saving a civilization. Mary Chesnut wrote that December: “Now for Virginia!… Those who want a row are in high glee. Those who dread it are glum and thoughtful enough.” She felt the dread too. They all knew what was coming.

Berry: They knew, and they chose anyway—because facing the end of that "civilization" meant losing the power to buy, sell, breed, and appraise human beings for profit. The enslaved had no voice in those halls, but their bodies were the currency. Mothers watched their children priced and separated; families lived under the constant threat of the auction block. Secession locked in that system, refusing to let it go even as the world moved on. The war became a revolution not because white leaders planned it, but because the enslaved seized the chance to claim their own humanity against the market that valued them as flesh.

Blight: Precisely. The story doesn’t end at Appomattox. It lives in how we remember—or forget. The secessionists acted to defend slavery as a way of life, a racial order built on commodified bodies. But postwar America, North and South, forged a narrative of mutual sacrifice that sidelined emancipation and the enslaved's own stories of resistance and soul value. Douglass called it out: “There was a right side and a wrong side in this war.” We’ve spent generations trying to make both sides equal in memory. That’s why the question lingers—because the people who lived it left us stories that still compete, and the truth of slavery as the core cause keeps getting crowded out.

This imagined debate draws from the historians' real writings to explore contrasting views. Drafted with AI help and edited for accuracy.

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