The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (5 page)

Greek democracy not only cloaked the Southern status quo with respectability; it offered the vision of a social and political system superior to the North’s. Thus, as early as 1838, Calhoun could assert that:

Many in the South once believed that it [slavery] was a moral and political evil. That folly and delusion are gone. We see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world. It is impossible with us that the conflict can take place between labor and capital, which makes it so difficult to establish and maintain free institutions in all wealthy and highly civilized nations where such institutions as ours do not exist. The Southern States are an aggregate, in fact, of communities, not of individuals. Every plantation is a little community, with the master at its head, who concentrates in himself the united interests of capital and labor, of which he is the common representative. These small communities aggregated make the State in all, whose action, labor, and capital is equally represented and perfectly harmonized. Hence the harmony, the union, the stability of that section which is rarely disturbed, except through the action of this Government. The blessing of this state of things extends beyond the limits of the South. It makes that section the balance of the system; the great conservative power, which prevents other portions, less fortunately constituted, from rushing into conflict…. Such are the institutions which these deluded madmen are stirring heaven and earth to destroy, and which we are called on to defend by the highest and most solemn obligations that can be imposed on us as men and patriots.
³⁴

To sustain this vision of the South as heir to Greek democracy and home of balanced political economy, Calhoun more than anyone else advanced the tactic of state rights and raised it to the level of gospel. In theory, sovereign states had made the compact of union, which was the Constitution. If worse came to worst sovereign states might dissolve the compact and leave the Union. Worse need not come to worst, however, for unless a state’s or the states’ rights were abridged the Union was a good thing and the compact secure. Left to manage their own affairs Southern states need not fear interference with slavery, inimical trade laws, ruinous taxes, and the like, because the federal government had not the power to impose its will upon the states.

The Civil War rendered forever invalid the state rights political theory so closely associated with the Old South and so firmly connected with the secessionist origins of the Confederacy. Still, in 1860 state rights was a viable doctrine in Southern minds if only because it seemed the sole way to protect slavery. But it was more than a defense mechanism. State rights political theory was also in harmony with Southern life. The vaunted Southern emphasis upon individualism and especially the localism inherent in the South’s folk culture found political expression in state rights. Thus when Southern Senators spoke of the “Sovereign State of Alabama” or wherever, they were only partially playing a game with their Northern colleagues. They were expressing their political and cultural code as well, and they were generally sincere in this expression. By 1860 Southerners had employed the rhetoric of state rights so long and so well as to transform a political theory into an article of faith.
³⁵

During the 1850s the South’s reliance upon state rights as a political weapon grew increasingly intense and more futile. The foremost national political issue of the decade following the Mexican War was slavery in the territories. Southerners believed their civilization had to expand to survive. They insisted that slaveholders had the same right to take their property (slaves) into the territories as Northern emigrants had to take theirs. Expansion was not only necessary economically; it promised political advantage as well in the form of more Southern congressmen. Also, expansion was vital to defuse what William L. Barney has termed the “Malthusian time bomb” produced by the multiplication of black Southerners. As the slave population increased within a limited land area, Southern whites feared not only falling slave prices but increased racial violence as well.
³⁶

State rights, however, was essentially a limiting doctrine. Under its cover, politicians were able to say “thou shalt not” to the national government and to defend against encroachments upon state and local matters. In the 1850s, though, Southerners sought to defend and extend at the same time. By embarking, however hesitantly, upon compromises over slavery in the territories—such as the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act—Southerners opened themselves to the possibility of compromise on other issues as well. If slavery could be the subject of national debate and territorial limitation in California or Kansas, then slavery might be nowhere secure. When their minority circumstance forced Southern politicians to abandon the absolutes of their state rights position in search of expansion, they exposed the weakness of their doctrine as well as their numbers.

The South’s political alienation from the nation as a whole was a progressive movement which gathered converts and intensity with the passage of time. In 1814 New Englanders at the Hartford Convention were making thinly veiled threats of secession in protest against “Mr. Madison’s War.” Then, Southerners struck the nationalist pose. During the Nullification Crisis in 1832, Calhoun believed he was averting the distasteful extremes of submission or disunion. Nevertheless South Carolina stood alone, and Southern leaders who favored secession were still renegades. By 1850 politicians in South Carolina and Mississippi were seriously advocating disunion but finding few allies elsewhere. In 1860, Southern politicians perceived secession as a real possibility and few opposed disunion on the basis of political principle.

Eleven Southern states and rump segments of two others eventually left the Union and formed the Confederacy, and it is tempting to think of those states as a unity. Nineteenth-century reality was neither so simple nor so tidy. Just as the South was never static in its relationship with the rest of the United States, so also were Southerners seldom really united in terms of political policy.
³⁷

There were many Souths. Topographically the section varied from the swamps of Louisiana to the mountains of western Virginia; culturally Southerners included such diverse peoples as Creoles, European immigrants, mountaineers, the first families of Virginia, and Texas frontiersmen. So it is no surprise that Southerners embraced a variety of political persuasions. On the crucial issue of secession, Southern voters and politicians tended to favor disunion most where the slave-plantation system and the ingredients of Southern cultural nationalism were strongest, mainly in the cotton states of the deep South. In the upper South, where slaveholding planters did not dominate the social economy quite so strongly and where the elements of Southern nationalism were not so pronounced, the stance on secession was more ambiguous. And even in the deep South there were areas populated mostly by yeoman farmers whose loyalty to the plantation-slave system was at least suspect.

Thus the secessionist leadership feared not only threats from Northerners without; it became increasingly alarmed over apostasy within. Should the border South fall away from the Southern world view and convert to Yankeeism, then the deep South would be an even smaller fraction of the American body politic.
³⁸
In 1860 and 1861, for reasons both positive and negative, Southerners made their break. Secessionists hoped that their nation would prosper and feared that this was their last chance to save a life style that had become sacred.

The Southerner’s vision of the Yankee had become stereotypical and malignant: the North was home to a set of self-righteous moneygrubbers whose personalities were a match for its cold climate; “Yankee” was synonymous with pious frauds and pasty faces; worse, Yankees sought power and pelf at Southern expense. Union with such people had never been desirable; now it was no longer possible.
³⁹
As David F. Jamison, president
pro tem.
of South Carolina’s secession convention phrased it:

I trust that the door now is forever closed from any further connection with our Northern Confederacy. What guarantees can they offer us more binding, more solemn, and with a higher sanction, than the present written compact between us? Has that sacred instrument protected us from the jealousy and aggressions of the Northern people, which commenced forty years ago, and which ended in the Missouri Compromise? Has it protected us from the cupidity and avarice of the Northern people, who for thirty-five years have imposed the burden of sustaining this Government chiefly upon the South? Has it saved us from abolition petitions, intended to annoy and insult us, on the very floors of Congress? Has not that instrument been trodden under their very feet by every Northern State, by placing on their books statutes nullifying the laws for the recovery of fugitive slaves? I trust, gentlemen, we will put no faith in paper guarantees. They are worthless, unless written in the hearts of the people. As there is no common bond between us, all attempts to continue as united will only prove futile.
⁴⁰

Southern diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut recorded an even more direct statement of Southern chauvinism. During the crisis at Fort Sumter she repeatedly heard women say, “God is on our side.” When she asked, “Why?” the response came, “Of course, He hates Yankees! You’ll think that well of Him.”
⁴¹

On the eve of secession, a sense of distinctiveness, apprehension over the future of slavery and racial tranquility, and the persistence of folk culture added a dynamic quality to the ideology of the planters and transformed Southern sectionalism into Southern nationalism. This much is background, the “prehistory” of the Confederate States of America. The Confederacy’s official history began in Montgomery, Alabama, where cause became nation.

1
James E. Walmsley, “Preston Smith Brooks,” in Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone (eds.),
Dictionary of American Biography
(New York, 1929); Alvy L. King,
Louis T.
Wigfall: Southern Fire-eater
(Baton Rouge, La., 1970), pp. 25–34.

2
Alleged Assault upon Senator Sumner
(House Report, No. 182, 34 Congress, I Session); David Donald,
Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War
(New York, 1960), pp. 289–296; Robert L. Meriwether (ed.), “Preston S. Brooks on the Caning of Charles Sumner,”
South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine,
XII (1951), 2–3.

3
Ibid.

4
The Warren quote is cited in Albert Murray,
South to a Very Old Place
(New York, 1971), p. 22, in the context of a discussion of the concrete in the Southern mind.

5
W. J. Cash,
Mind of the South
(New York, 1941) p. 44. Other southern “Mind” studies include William R. Taylor,
Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American
National Character
(New York, 1961); Clement Eaton,
The Growth of Southern Civilization
(New York, 1961), chapter 13, and
The Mind of the Old South,
revised edition (Baton Rouge, La., 1967); and Rollin G. Osterweis,
Romanticism and Nationalsim in the Old
South
(New Haven, Conn., 1949).

6
Charles S. Sydnor, “The Southerner and the Laws,
“ Journal of Southern History,
VI (1940), 3–23.

7
David M. Potter, “The Enigma of the South,”
Yale Review,
LI (1961), 142–151, and David Bertelson,
The Lazy South
(New York, 1967) deal with the primacy of individual, as opposed to corporate, identity from opposite points of view; both scholars, however, acknowledge the central importance of personalism in the South.

8
The classic statement on Southern violence is John Hope Franklin,
The Militant
South
(Cambridge, Mass., 1956). See also Cash,
Mind of the South,
pp. 44–45.

9
See the essay of Charles G. Sellers, Jr., in “The Tragic Southerner” in his
The Southerner as American
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1960).

10
Clement Eaton,
A History of the Old South: The Emergence of a Reluctant Nation,
3rd edition (New York, 1975), pp. 451–461; W. W. Sweet,
The Story of Religion in America
(New York, 1939), pp. 322–447; Eaton,
Mind of the Old South,
pp. 200–223; Clement Eaton,
The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South,
revised and enlarged edition (New York, 1964), pp. 300–334.

11
Eaton,
History of the Old South,
p. 378; Cash,
Mind of the South,
pp. 82–84. See also Ernest T. Thompson,
Presbyterians in the South, 1607–1861
(Richmond, Va., 1963); William W. Sweet (ed.),
Religion on the American Frontier: The Baptists, 1783–1830
(New York, 1931), and Donald G. Mathews,
Religion in the Old South
(Chicago, 1977).

12
Cash,
Mind of the South,
pp. 55–60.

13
For a case-study comparison of Northern and Southern religious attitudes toward reform, see Eaton,
Mind of the Old South,
pp. 205–209.

14
See Osterweis,
Romanticism and Nationalism;
Anne Firor Scott,
The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics
(Chicago, 1970); Emory M. Thomas,
The American War and Peace, 1860–1877
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), pp. 37–38; and especially Raimondo Luraghi,
The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South
(New York, 1978), pp. 15–82.

15
On Southern writers in general, see, Jay B. Hubbell,
The South in American Literature, 1607–1900
(Durham, N.C., 1954); and Vernon Louis Parrington,
Main Currents in American Thought,
II,
The Romantic Revolution in America, 1800–1860
(New York, 1927), 1–172. On Simms see especially Jon L. Wakelyn,
The Politics of a Literary Man: William Gilmore Simms
(Westport, Conn., 1973). J. V. Ridgely.John
Pendleton Kennedy
(New York, 1966) is the standard biography of Kennedy.

16
Cited in Parrington,
Main Currents,
II, 130.

17
Ibid.
, 55.

18
Ibid.,
54. On Poe see also Arthur Hobson Quinn,
Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography
(New York, 1941); and Edd Winfield Parks,
Edgar Allan Poe as Literary Critic
(Athens, Ga., 1964).

19
Jay B. Hubbell, “Literary Nationalism in the Old South,” in David K.Jackson (ed.),
American Studies in Honor of William Kenneth Boyd
(Durham, N.C., 1940), pp. 175–200; Edd Winfield Parks,
Henry Timrod
(New York, 1964); Rayburn S. Moore,
Paul Hamilton Hayne
(New York, 1972); and Parrington,
Main Currents,
II, 98–107.

20
Paul H. Hayne (ed.),
The Poems of Henry Timrod
(New York, 1873), p. 128.

21
Eaton,
History of the Old South,
pp. 403–404, 451.

22
On Southern architecture see Lewis Mumford,
The South in Architecture
(New York, 1941); T. F. Hamlin,
Greek Revival Architecture in America
(New York, 1944), and
Benjamin Henry Latrobe
(New York, 1955); J. C. Bonner, “Plantation Architecture of the Lower South on the Eve of the Civil War
,” Journal of Southern History,
XI (1945), 370–388; Edward and Elizabeth Waugh,
The South Builds
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1960); and Frank E. Everett, Jr.,
Brierfield: Plantation Home of Jefferson Davis
(Hattiesburg, Miss., 1971).

23
Everett Dick,
The Dixie Frontier
(New York, 1948).

24
”Recent Southern Fiction: A Panel Discussion,”
Bulletin of Wesleyan College,
XLI (1961), 11.

25
See Daniel W. Patterson, “Folklore,” in Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (ed.),
A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature
(Baton Rouge, La., 1969), pp. 102–118.

26
Eaton,
Mind of the Old South,
pp. 130–151; Franklin G. Meine (ed.),
Tall Tales of the Southwest
(New York, 1937); Edmund Wilson,
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War
(New York, 1966), pp. 507–519.

27
Mildred Lewis Rutherford,
The South in History and Literature
(Atlanta, Ga., 1907), pp. 306–316.

28
Patterson, “Folklore,” pp. 107–118; Sterling Stuckey, “Through the Prism of Folklore,”
Massachusetts Review,
IX (1968), 417–437; John W. Blassingame,
The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South
(New York, 1972), pp. 41–76; Eaton,
Growth of Southern Civilization,
pp. 172–173; Georgia Writers’ Project,
Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes
(New York, 1972).

29
John Alden’s
The First South
(Baton Rouge, La., 1961) suggests that Southern sectional concern predated the nineteenth century and was a factor in the Revolutionary era. See also Irving H. Bartlett,
The American Mind in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
(New York, 1967), pp. 73–93.

30
The best biography of Calhoun is still Charles W. Wilts
e, John C. Calhoun,
3 vols. (New York, 1944–1951). Others include Margaret L. Coit,
John C. Calhoun: American Portrait
(Boston, 1959); Gerald N. Capers
, John C. Calhoun—Opportunist: A Reappraisal
(Gainesville, Fla., 1960); and Richard N. Currant,
John C. Calhoun
(New York, 1963). On the nullification crisis see William W. Freehling,
Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836
(New York, 1965).

31
On Fitzhugh see Eugene D. Genovese,
The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation
(New York, 1969), p. 118 ff. The best brief analysis of the Southern political mind is Bartlett,
American Mind,
pp. 73–93.

32
See Parrington,
Main Currents,
II, 94–98.

33
Quoted in C. E. Robinson,
Hellas: A Short History of Ancient Greece
(Boston, 1948), p. 78.

34
Richard K. Crallé (ed.).
The Works of John C. Calhoun,
6 vols. (New York, 1854), III, 180–181.

35
Emory M. Thomas,
The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), pp. 7–8.

36
See William L. Barney,
The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in I860
(Princeton, N.J., 1974), pp. 3–26, and
The Road to Secession: A New Perspective on the Old South
(New York, 1972), pp. 3–21.

37
For a reasoned statement on Southern “unity” see Barney,
Road to Secession,
pp. 85–102.

38
The most concise statement of the “internal” (intra-Southern) apprehensions of the secessionists is William W. Freehling, “The Editorial Revolution, Virginia, and the Coming of the Civil War: A Review Essay,”
Civil War History,
XVI (1970), 64–72. More extended analyses of the problem are Steven A. Channing,
Crisis of Fear: Secession in South
Carolina (New York, 1970), and Michael P. Johnson,
Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia
(Baton Rouge, La., 1977).

39
Taylor,
Cavalier and Yankee,
p. 24.

40
Quoted in
The American Annual Cyclopedia … 1861
(New York, 1865), p. 648.

41
Mary Boykin Chesnut,
A Diary from Dixie,
ed. by Ben Ames Williams (Boston, 1949), p. 38.