Southern History Series: Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens on the Causes of The War Between the States

In his book A Constitutional View of the War Between the States, former Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens methodically explained how slavery was the “incident” or “occasion” of secession and the War Between the States, but the true and ultimate cause of the war was the doctrine of state sovereignty. The Union fought for a consolidated nation-state and a sovereign federal government. The Confederacy fought for a voluntary union of sovereign states.

Little Aleck was telling the truth. He was a Unionist who had opposed and voted against secession at the Georgia Convention. Like Robert E. Lee in Virginia though, Alexander Stephens believed in the right of secession and understood the Union to be a voluntary compact of sovereign states. In a fight, there was no question that he owned his allegiance to Georgia, not to Washington, DC.

“All this manner of treatment of the subject is radically defective. It utterly ignores the true causes of the war, on alone which its Rightfulness depends. Slavery, so called, or that legal subordination of the black race to the white, which existed in all but one of the States, when the Union was formed, and in fifteen of them when the war began, was unquestionably the occasion of the war, the main exciting proximate cause on both sides, on the one as well as the other, but it was not the real cause, the “Causa causans” of it. That was the assumption on the part of the Federal authorities, that the people of the several States were, as you say, citizens of the United States, and owed allegiance to the Federal Government, as the absolute Sovereign power over the whole country, consolidated into one Nation. The war sprung from the very idea you have expressed, and from the doctrine embraced in the question propounded to me. It grew out of different and directly opposite views as to the nature of the Government of the United States, and where, under our system, ultimate Sovereign power or Paramount authority properly resides.

“Considerations connected with the legal status of the Black race in the Southern States, and the position of several of the Northern States toward it, together with the known sentiments and principles of those just elected to the two highest offices of the Federal Government (Messrs. Lincoln and Hamlin), as to the powers of that Government over this subject, and others which threatened, as was supposed, all their vital interests, prompted the Southern States to withdraw from the Union, for the very reason that had induced them at first to enter into it: that is, for their own better protection and security. Those who had the control of the Administration of the Federal Government, denied this right to withdraw or secede. The war was inaugurated and was waged by those at the head of the Federal Government, against these States, or the people of these States, to prevent their withdrawal from the Union. On the part of these States, which had allied themselves in a common cause, it was maintained and carried on purely in defense of this great Right, claimed by them, of State Sovereignty and Self-government, which they with their associates had achieved in their common struggle with Great Britain, under the Declaration of 1776, and which, in their judgement, lay at the foundation of the whole structure of American free institutions.”

It’s a question worth revisiting in our own times.

Who are you loyal to at the end of the day? Do you feel closer to your state or the federal government? Are you loyal to your family, kin and neighbors or Washington, DC and the US Empire? Do you even know your neighbors these days? Do you even have deep roots in your area?

Note: If you like the Georgia Secession Flag which is a red star on a white background, you can buy the t-shirt and the flag at Dixie Republic

About Hunter Wallace 9606 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent


  1. I do know my neighbors and have deep roots in my area. I also know what DC is looking like and pushing these days, and I want no part of it.

  2. Yes, I am close to my family and despise DC. But to the question of the Civil War, and I say this as a northerner, it always bugged me that the slaveholders sent their young men to fight and die to preserve their (elites) economic caste. It smacks of what we have done as a nation ever since: send our younger poorer working class whites to die in pointless wars to preserve….what?

    The slaveholding class didn’t bear any cost to the war. Afterwards they lose power and some financial worth but did they ever apologize to the families of the deceased? I doubt it.

  3. I look to my state which I have lived in for almost the past 70 years for the common good of my entire existence and not to the perverse totally degenerate out of touch federal government whom most of my elders denounced as evil while growing up.

  4. The call would have been easier to make even 100 years ago, but nowadays I’m not so sure who or what we can rely on or rally to. I’m from Florida, and I can tell you that Miami-residing nose people and their servitors control the politics here, and there is no real backlash against it even from nominally conservative leaders. As much as I would love to see it, I can’t see how secession on the state level will happen this time around when every state is run by the metropolitan areas all stocked with the racial enemies of their white populations.


      Most big cities in Dixie are full of Yankees, Northern Jews and their coloured auxiliaries. In Other words, Carpetbaggers, Niggers and Messicans.

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