Historic Papers on the Causes of the Civil War

by Eugenia Dunlap Potts

Eugenia (nee) Dunlap Potts was the author of: The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky (1874), Historic Papers on the Causes of the Civil War (1909), Idle Hour Stories (1909), A Kentucky Girl in Dixie, Short Mountain Trail, Stories for Children, The Housekeepers' Olio, and Home Talks. "No pen or brush can picture life in the old Southern States in the ante-bellum days. The period comprehends two hundred and fifty years of history without a parallel. A separate and distinct civilization was there represented, the like of which can never be reproduced. Socially, intellectually, politically and religiously, she stood pre-eminent, among nations. It was the spirit of the cavalier that created and sustained our greatness. Give the Puritan his due, and still the fact remains. The impetus that led to freedom from Great Britain, came from the South. A Southern General led the ragged Continentals on to victory. Southern jurists and Southern statesmanship guided the councils of wisdom. The genius of war pervaded her people. She gave presidents, cabinet officers, commanders, tacticians and strategists. Her legislation extended the country's territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific. "

Genres: History, Civil War, Historical

34 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1909

About the author

Mrs. Eugenia Dunlap Potts was born at Lancaster, Ky. Her father was the Hon. George W. Dunlap, a distinguished lawyer and statesman. Her mother was Nancy E. Jennings, a woman of brilliant talents. Mrs. Potts graduated from Franklin Female Institute, then took a special course at Philadelphia in music and French. She married Surgeon-Major Richard Potts, U.S.A. and C.S.A. of Maryland. Mrs. Potts was left a widow, with her infant son, quite young. Her literary career always promising, now began in earnest. Her "Song of Lancaster", a metrical history after the style of Hiawatha, Longfellow read and approved in an autograph letter of which the young author was very proud. She has several later works ready for the press. Her favorite enterprise is the "Illustrated Kentuckian," which she owns and edits in a masterly manner. She is a member of the Episcopal Church. Her postoffice address is Lexington, Ky.

Reviews

[Charles van Buren]

A Southern view of the causes of the war

Review of free Kindle edition
A Public Domain Book
Publication date: May 17, 2012
Language: English
ASIN: B00849XXYO
46 pages

The first two sections of these papers, the first titled The Old South and the second, Slavery, present a romanticized view of the antebellum South which is no more the whole picture than is UNCLE TOM'S CABIN. The following is from Ask.com:

"Without being politically biased and sticking only to the facts less than 5% of whites in the south were slaveholders prior to the war.

Also as slaveholders were the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminoles holding around ten thousand. Also as slaveholders were free blacks who owned slaves at a higher percentage of their population than whites.

Or about 2.8% of white people owned slaves in the southern states. Additionally, 7% of all white people in southern states owned 75% of all slaves. (Ask.com summarized a lot of data in this answer. I suspect this is meant to say that 7% of slave owners owned 75% of the slaves. I have seen similar figures elsewhere in the past.)

The total number of white people in America (North & South) in 1860 who were slave owners was about 3.1%.

As for free Negroes in the southern states, about 10% of them owned slaves. So that means that free blacks were 3 times more likely to own slaves than free whites in the southern states.”

From Quora.com: "Most estimates are from 5-8% of white southerners owned slaves. Sometimes there are higher estimates of as much as a third of white southerners owning slaves, but these are derived from counting all members of slave owning families. Most slave owners owned under 10 slaves."

Other sources give figures similar to Ask.com. There are some which give estimates that upwards of 30% of white southerners owned slaves with some states as high as 49%. but these estimates have been criticized for inflating the figures by doing such things as counting each individual member of a slave owning household as a slave owner, thus inflating the percentage of slave owners. Some of these percentages come from highly politicized sources such as Jamelle Bouie of SLATE. Political correctness has entered the debate leading to dueling statistics. I trust earlier studies before political correctness got such a firm hold on higher education.

Even using the suspect percentages, the figures support neither the idealized view of the South as a land of benevolent planters and plantations nor the view of the South as a land of brutal slave owners. Most Southerners were neither but were instead small landholders and farmers; tenant farmers; shopkeepers; employees of various enterprises, large and small; hunters; trappers; fishermen; ranchers; riverboat and railroad men; in fact anything but plantation owners.

At least in these two sections Ms Potts acknowledges the importance of slavery as an issue which led to war. In fact she seems to regard it as the primary issue which caused war. In the section titled Secession, she does discuss the importance of other issues, particularly tariffs. She also notes that neither secession nor nullification were exclusive to the South. New England had threatened secession on several occasions from the very beginning of the nation. During the Embargo Act crises not only did New England threaten to secede but Massachusetts and Connecticut proclaimed the constitutional right of nullification. This section of the paper is a pro-southern but fairly reasonable account of the history and disagreements which led to secession.

The last section, The Southern Confederacy, emphasizes the efforts of the South to leave the Union without war. There are excerpts from speeches by Southern leaders expressing the desire for peace. The inauguration of Jefferson Davis is described in some detail. Lastly there is an account of some of the hardships and destruction borne by the South.

[Jason Schneeberger]

Released in 1909 and written by Eugenia Dunlap Potts, HISTORIC PAPERS THE CAUSES OF THE CIVIL WAR tells the story from the side of The Confederates. Having been studying the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln quite extensively lately, I jumped at the chance to read this when I saw it for free in the Kindle Store.

The beginning of the book is all about how great everything was in the south before the end slavery. There was an abundance of food, work, good cheer and the slaves actually loved their life, according to Mrs. Potts. I am all for hearing the other side of the fence when it comes to the Civil War, but when Mrs. Potts goes into detail as to why "the negroes" would have been much happier and content, had slavery not been outlawed and that they were treated very good, I can't help but laugh at these writings.

Mrs. Potts is a knowledgable woman about what was going on at the time as far as states issues, the ongoing problems with slavery and she manages to say a lot in this short book. She does not beat around the bush and openly admits that from the Southern standpoint, the Civil War was COMPLETELY about slavery from the get go. There has been many debates about this over the years, but right here, from the pen of someone whose family fought in it, there can be no denying the truth.

This collection of papers is very short (only 37 pages), but it clearly states The Confederate stance during the Civil War. I do not agree with the ideas presented here, but I will rate this book on the knowledge you are able to get from it and recommend it to anyone studying the Civil War. I give it a 3/5!

[P]

A short narrative written from the perspective of a Southern woman covering what the Old South was like, her perspective on slavery, why the South seceded and in the end, after enduring untold privations, how the Confederacy finally capitulated, mainly from exhaustion brought on by the overwhelming, seemingly unlimited resources applied against it by the North.
For me, it's always interesting to read what people of the time thought about while they were making history themselves. The part describing how and why the South decided to secede, with the subsequent jubilation over shedding the yoke of Northern interference, was especially eye-opening.
Of course since the North prevailed, their history has become today's 'conventional wisdom', i.e., what 'everybody knows'. The truth is that this episode was not a Civil War - defined as what occurs when one part of a country's citizenry tries to overthrow the standing government, an ambition the South never had - but rather it was a war to prevent Southern states from seceding from a union to which they no longer wanted to belong. IOW, it was a war to prevent secession.
A well-written documentation from someone who was there.

[Katherine Morey]

Civil War

The book was so interesting. I learned more from it than in school. It was hard to put down. Awesome!

[Dave]

My, this lady was in love with her southern heritage and way of life. She does her best to justify slavery and the bravery of the southern states during the (in her view) inevitable battle for rights (the Civil War).
I suppose the worst part is that there are still many who would fully sympathise with the authors views.

[Faith Spera]

A common thread to present time in New Orleans

Very interesting considering the events happening in New Orleans st this time. The removal of the statues that are mentioned in the diary by the Mayor for political future in Washington DC.

[Richard]

There's some historic value here, but some points are either exaggerated or false. The Confederacy rebelled, and the war started in South Carolina. Lincoln wanted to preserve the Union, and thank God he was President.

[Lacy]

Part 1 describes the standard southern plantation before the war.

Part 2 tells how slavery was involved in the country’s disputes.

Part 3 explains the history leading up to the secession of the 15 southern states.

Part 4 describes the secession and civil war.

It’s a bit dry.

Clean.

[Jim Townsend]

Very interesting.

[James Crawford]

The first is a paper read before read before the Lexington chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1909. The woman starts off by praising the importance of the South in the history of the United States, especially before the Civil War. She concentrates on the 'social enjoyment' in the South before the Civil War and how great it was.

'Armies of negroes tilled the soil and were happy in their circumscribed sphere, humanly cared for by the whites.'

(Um, yeah. They were happy. Sure. If you say so, lady. Sure they were happy. And the men in the nice white coats will be coming to take you away.)

She then describes the plantation houses, and how wonderful they were (and totally forgets that not all the whites in the South were that rich and had plantation houses of their own. There were a lot of poor whites that were as separated from the rich as poor people are in today's world.) Her view of the women who ran the plantations ran along the lines of efficiency in running things, but no interest in anything intellectual other than religion.

She says the men who went to war did so to defend state's rights. She says that the Union army carried out vandalism when they attacked the Southern mansions and it was 'wanton destruction' that they practiced.

The next article is on slavery. This section is about as disgusting as I expected, with her trying basically to say that the North was just as bad, if not worse, as the South in regards to slavery. In reference to anything changing in the South, she said 'The planter would not willingly give up his property honestly acquired...' His property? Hello. The slaves were human beings, not someones property. As far as 'honestly acquired' goes, that means he bought them at a slave auction where entire families could be separated forever. She also brings up the tidbit that slavery is in the Bible and is not condemned.

>She refers to John Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe in the same sentence as 'fanatics.' She says that, as a result of all that was going on, '...the helpless negro was dragged from his havens of peace and comfort.' In relation to part of their culture, the woman refers to the '...relic of ancient African barbarism.'

It just gets worse. In referring to the number of slaves that were Christians, the woman writer says: '...So the owners of these Christianized people were doing missionary work in saving them from the cannibalism of heathen Africa.'

And worse.

'The world can nowhere show human beings as care-free in bondage as were the negroes of the ante-bellum days.'

The next article is on secession. She claims that, historically, there were numerous threats of secession, even by Northern states, long before the Civil War. Then she talks about the inauguration of Jefferson Davis. Finally she talks about the after effects of the war, at least acknowledging that the North entered the war with a lot of advantages over the South (more people, more factories, more guns, etc.) She basically paints an idealistic view of the South and an extremely nasty, vicious view of the North in relation to the war.

This is, without doubt, the most one-sided book I have ever read on the Civil War.

[Thom Swennes]

The Historic Papers of the Causes of the Civil War were written and presented to the public in 1909 by Eugenia Dunlap Potts. These papers start by painting an ad hominem, romantic, shaded and somewhat false image of southern life. She covers the introduction of the first slaves by Dutch ships to the colonies and the consequent necessity of maintaining and prolonging this institution. She describes the life of the southern aristocratic plantation owners but completely skips the vast majority of southerners that didn’t own slaves. The matter of individual states rights is never mentioned, giving the reader the false impression that slavery was the only issue for separation. During the Jefferson Administration, many New England States considered dissolving the union in fear of being overwhelmed by the south. Here they may have had good cause as only four of the first fifteen presidents were northern born but stays historically a moot point as it never went further as a threat. These papers do give the reader a fair account of the feelings in the south and therefore the causes of the Civil War but it could have been better.

[Thom Swennes]

The short but extremely insightful narrative the Historic Papers on the Causes of the Civil War by Eugenia Dunlap Potts is well worth an hour of anybody’s time. Published in 1909 it gives a history of the causes of the war that threatened the future of the Union of States that are thankfully still known as the United States. Her point of view was often ad hominem and leaned heavily toward the southern cause but, as being on the losing end of that conflict, this is the less publicized and known. Slavery is somewhat sugar-coated and the plight of those in a system depriving them of all basic rights is easily skipped. Eugenia Dunlap Potts (1840-1912) experienced the war as a young girl and the impressions left her certainly colored her personal views. She wrote and published eight other works and I hope someday to read them as well. I enjoyed this book very much.

[Jim Byrne]

Interesting read

this book shed light on
a part of history that I was aware of but not in this level of detail. I found the history of the events leading up to the civil war interesting and informative

[M]

Shows the total delusion of those who supported the culture of the antebellum south; combination of fantasy and overt racism. An essential read for those who want to understand the southern mindset during and after the war.

[Jessie]

Audio

[Straw]

I don't know how to rate this. Is it offensive..yes! Is it a reflection of the mythology surrounding the Lost Cause mentality, heck yes.

[jim copley]

A Rant

I didn't learn much. It seemed to me to be a rant for the South. The facts and examples were made to prove an opinion not explain why the war happened