Secession, Slavery and Civil War

The US Civil War was fought not over slavery but secession. Yet slavery was the issue on which the southern states seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy.

Slavery was the issue by which the northern states won official British neutrality. Slavery had been abolished in most of the British Empire in 1833. Britain could not now be seen to be supporting it, however much it was in her interest to weaken the US.

Abraham Lincoln’s signing the Emancipation Proclamation abolishing slavery in all US states was a tool in winning the war and declaring freedom as universal in the USA.

Till now, “one nation under God” had been an elusive ideal. In fact, the US was still the decentralized entity that had preceded adoption of the United States Constitution in 1788.

The southern states seceded in defense of the self-determination for which the original Thirteen Colonies had broken with Britain. Calling themselves the Confederate States of America was a throwback to the first constitution, the Articles of Confederation of 1777.

After the Civil War “one nation …” as set out in the Pledge of Allegiance, became a legal fact, enforced on the battlefield. It would be another century for this to become reality.

Canada, on the other hand, has never been a unified nation-state. That is because of a cohesive population, the Québécois, who consider themselves a “nation” within the federation: a reality that was finally recognized in the Parliamentary resolution of 2006.

Despite talk of “creating a new nation” by Canada’s Fathers of Confederation, Québec 1866 editorials show that a French Canadian nation was a possible goal of the 1867 deal.

In Canada and the US therefore, the constitutional progression were reversed. The American colonies began as a confederation that later became “a more perfect Union”.

Before Confederation in 1967, Canada spent 26 years under the 1840 Act of Union, adopted for the express purpose of assimilating French Canadians into an English speaking society. That Union and the purpose behind it failed.

Re-constituting Quebec as a separate province in a federal rather than a unitary system, was the price of Québécois participation in the 1867 Constitution Act.

For English speaking Canadians in three other provinces, this was a coming together into a new country. For many French Canadians it was a step out of the Union straitjacket and the first step on the road to their own political independence.

These two currents of thought have persisted in Canada and Québec in the 142 years since Confederation. Tomorrow we’ll explore how this has developed.