The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (6 page)

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OHN Locke had been dead a long time in 1861. Southern secessionists, however, resurrected him and the American revolutionaries of 1776, for whom he was the essential political patriarch. Southerners perceived their political circumstances as being parallel to those of the Founding Fathers: both sets of revolutionaries believed that they were dissolving Lockean compacts—the British Empire and the United States of America. For a time, the secessionists argued, these compacts had served the best interests of the contracting parties. Then, just as George III and his Parliament threatened the well-being of the American colonies, so Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Congress threatened the essentials of the Southern way of life. Similar problems called forth similar solutions—secession and independence—justified by the Lockean theory of the right of revolution.
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In both cases catharsis came only after a prolonged period of radical activity. It has been the fashion to speak of the Southern secessionist leaders as “fire-eaters.” Applied to Edmund Ruffin and men like him, the term is accurate to a point. Yet Ruffin and company were more than side-show performers; they were dedicated revolutionaries as well. With no less zeal and skill than James Otis or Sam Adams, the fire-eaters pursued their radical cause. Compare, for example, Ruffin’s activity at Harpers Ferry with that of Sam Adams at the Boston Tea Party. Throughout the South those who shared the intensity of Ruffin’s persuasion engaged in similar activities. By 1861, major institutions of Southern society—press, pulpit, and school—were repeating the Southern line. Secession was not just a spontaneous restatement of Lockean theory; it was the culmination of years of radical tactics and revolutionary propaganda.
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By February 1, 1861, seven Southern states had reenacted, they believed, the revolutionary “secession” of the Founding Fathers. In the process, Southerners had been preoccupied with a political philosophy whose end was revolution and with radical agitation whose goal was dissolution of the Union. In February 1861, however, the time for rending a nation was past; the time for making a nation from independent republics had arrived. Secession was basically a negative process. Once secession was accomplished Southern leaders faced the challenge of doing something positive: creating the Confederate States of America. To do this, representatives from six seceded states—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana (Texas completed the secession process late and her delegates arrived later)—gathered in Montgomery, Alabama, on February 4, 1861.
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If delegates to the convention at Montgomery were seeking a proper setting in which to shed the euphoria of secession and to grapple with the hard realities facing the proposed Southern nation, they chose the right place. In 1861, Montgomery was a conveniently located state capital, the home of Alabama radical William Lowndes Yancey and not much else. The town spread over seven hills on the south bank of the Alabama River and afforded convenient access by rail and river to the seaboard, gulf, and Mississippi Valley regions of the deep South. Yet despite its claim to being the capital of the black belt—that layer of dark, rich soil which bisects the state—Montgomery’s cotton trade had been declining for a number of years. Industry had made little impact on the local economy, and Montgomery was essentially an overgrown country crossroads—overgrown because fifteen years before, in 1846, the town had become the capital of Alabama. Montgomery’s primary business was politics, normally a seasonal enterprise that seldom penetrated the town’s basic somnolence for long.
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Approximately 9,000 people, half black, half white, lived in Montgomery in 1861.
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At first most of the white natives reacted with excitement to the gathering of secessionist delegates to the convention. In time, however, as the convention proceeded with its work and curiosity seekers and “place mongers” crowded into Montgomery, some residents of the town lost their earlier enthusiasm and became annoyed at the intrusion of so many outsiders. The outsiders returned this sentiment.
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Montgomery’s physical facilities may have been adequate for a Southern state capital, but as cradle of the Confederacy the town had marked deficiencies. Main Street, extending about a mile up from the Alabama River to the state capitol, was less than a grand boulevard; only eighteen years earlier, a team of oxen had drowned in one of the many mud holes which yawnpd in the street.
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Unpaved lanes meandered off Main Street to genuinely fine homes, but visitors encountered difficulty picking their way along poorly constructed or nonexistent sidewalks and even became lost on streets which one observer complained had been “laid out before the surveyor’s compass was in use.” The capitol building, with its neoclassic facade, domed cupola, and hilltop site, was imposing; yet one of Montgomery’s more urbane visitors judged the structure not “a peculiarly stately pile, either in size or architectural effect.” Moreover, Montgomery had very few other buildings available with which to accommodate a national government. There were two moderate-sized hotels—the Exchange, which catered to the better class of people and in normal times to Alabama legislators, and Montgomery Hall, which usually housed traveling salesmen and livestock traders. Both hotels impressed their guests as filthy, insect infested, and exorbitantly expensive. Significantly, the Confederate Congress debated and passed the act concerning the members’ pay in secret session to discourage the proprietors of Montgomery’s hotels from adjusting their bills to match the congressmen’s salaries. Montgomery’s mosquitoes, alive and hungry in February, made a stronger impression upon many of the town’s visitors than did anything else about the place.
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Perhaps because most of them were used to life’s finer things, delegates were sometimes loud in their complaints about the service in Montgomery’s restaurants and creature comforts in the town. Three members of the Georgia delegation donned white kid gloves and like finery to attend a party given by a local judge, only to discover that the affair was no more than “ordinary ‘tea drinking.’ “ One of these same three complained about the “great uniformity” of suppers, which “commence with oyster soup, then comes fish salad and fried oysters, then grated ham or beef and sardines with waffles and coffee or tea, then cakes and jellies, Charlotte Russe and what is considered here the greatest delicacy called ‘Ambrosia’ which is nothing but sliced oranges and grated cocoanut.”
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Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of South Carolina delegate James Chesnut, Jr., recorded in her famous diary, “For a fortnight I have not gone to the dinner table. Yesterday I was forced to dine on cold asparagus and blackberries, so repulsive in aspect was the other food they sent me.”
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Of course, not everyone found Montgomery so unpleasant. It was a provincial town, a good place for the secessionists to get down to the hard work of founding a nation, but certainly not a pretentious cradle for the new Southern nationality. No doubt many of the delegates wondered why they were there.
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In fact the choice of Montgomery as the site of the secessionists’ convention revealed a great deal about the process of disunion just completed by the states of the deep South. The seven separate secessions which took place during the forty-three days between December 20, 1860, and February 1, 1861, were not spontaneous risings of an untutored mass of people. However fundamental and unreconcilable were the issues which provoked the Southern separation, the break with the Union did not just happen; people had to make it happen. In every Southern state were radical secessionists whose agitation transformed Southern ideology into Southern nationalism. Their zeal was genuine, and in the minds of fellow Southerners their cause was authentic; otherwise, they would have become generals with no armies. Yet the task of the radicals, as they perceived it, was more than educating and agitating; it was to plan carefully the process of their revolution as well as to proclaim its substance.

For many years the radicals had debated among themselves the tactics of their hypothetical coup. Two basic problems confronted them. First, should the Southern nation originate from concerted action by all or most of the Southern states, or should the states secede separately and then act in concert? Second, should the slaveholding border states be a part of the original Southern nation; or would it be wiser to induce the upper South to act as a buffer against reprisals from the North and then allow time to tell just how Southern the border really was? As it happened, partly by design and partly by accident, the radical leadership followed a compromise course in solving both of these tactical problems.
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South Carolina seceded alone, but not quite as separately as it appeared. “Cooperationists,” as the advocates of concerted action called themselves, were numerous and well placed in South Carolina. Actually “cooperationist” was an ambiguous label; some adopted it literally and believed in Southern unity before all else; others were cooperationists out of the fear of rash action and wished to explore with other Southerners all avenues of obtaining Southern rights before rending the Union; still others assumed a cooperationist stance to conceal from themselves and/or others unionist sympathies in hopes that “cooperation” would slow, then stall the secession band wagon. In South Carolina cooperationists were converted to the “straight-out” position only after several attempts to initiate combined action failed. Two of these tries were crucial. Christopher G. Memminger, lawyer and cooperationist leader, visited Virginia in the aftermath of John Brown’s raid in December 1859 to try to induce that state to join South Carolina in calling a convention of Southern states for the purpose of united disunion. The Virginia General Assembly listened politely to Memminger’s plan and cordially told him that Virginia would wait and see a while longer. Then in October of 1860, South Carolina Governor William Henry Gist wrote confidential letters to the governors of the deep Southern states counseling simultaneous secession in the likely event of Abraham Lincoln’s election in November. The replies to Gist’s letters were more cautious than he had hoped. Accordingly Memminger, Gist, and most of the other South Carolina cooperationists fell into line with those who advocated separate secessions, led by Robert Barnwell Rhett, Sr.
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Rhett, a lawyer, planter, politician, and owner of the influential Charleston
Mercury,
had been crusading for secession and separate state action for a long time. He savored the moment when South Carolina dissolved its union with the United States and stood alone as the Palmetto Republic. However, Rhett himself saw to it that South Carolina’s colors were not nailed so securely to the mast as they seemed. On the last day of 1860 South Carolina’s secession convention adopted a set of resolutions, authored by Rhett, which proposed a convention of seceded states to be held in Montgomery on February 13, 1861. This convention was to form a Southern Confederacy and to draw up a constitution based upon that of the United States. Rhett’s resolutions further provided for the dispatch of South Carolina delegates to Montgomery and of commissioners to every slaveholding state.
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At the time that South Carolinians were planning to hold a convention in Montgomery, the state of Alabama was still in the Union. Rhett, in contact with the radical leadership in other states, had chosen Montgomery as the convention site and proposed an agenda with ground rules for the convention in order to bring the Southern nation into being as soon as possible and to offer a program for unity which would calm the cooperationists’ anxieties throughout the South. The South Carolina Program promised Southern union before the inauguration of the Republican administration in Washington, and it provided for continuous communication among the Southern states through the network of commissioners. These fifty-two ambassadors of revolution, sent not only from South Carolina but from Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana as well, lost few opportunities to press for immediate secession in their assigned states. They also counseled adoption of the South Carolina Program as the next step after secession.
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The radicals’ tactic, as it emerged, was to convene as many disunited states as possible, as soon as possible. If the states of the upper South should choose to secede with the cotton South, well and good. If they should choose to wait, perhaps even better. Yancey probably stated this view best in a letter to Virginia newspaper editor Roger A. Pryor. “A well conducted Southern policy,” Yancey wrote, “would seem to demand that, when such a movement [secession] takes place by any considerable number of Southern States, Virginia and the other border States should remain in the Union, where, by their position and their councils, they would prove more effective friends than by moving out of the Union, and thus giving the Southern Confederacy a long, hostile border to watch. In the event of such a movement being successful, in time Virginia and the other border States, could join.”
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The Southern radicals were not clairvoyant; yet the selection of Montgomery as the convention site was an accurate prediction of the new nation’s geographical center and an index of how carefully the radicals had managed their coup.

The assembly at Montgomery of fifty delegates from seven seceded states represented a great victory for Southern radicals. But much remained to be done—nothing less than the creation of a Southern nation.

To all appearances, the Montgomery Convention did its work well. There was at Montgomery, according to one delegate, a perfect “mania for unanimity.” And in just five days the delegates adopted a provisional constitution, elected a provisional president and vice-president, and resolved themselves into the provisional Congress of the new nation. Appearances, however, were deceiving. Even in the midst of their triumph, the Southern radicals found themselves called upon to compromise their Southernism and to calm their ardor. The Confederacy created at Montgomery was not exactly what the super-Southerners like Rhett, Ruffin, and Yancey wanted. The convention’s moderate majority was interested in preserving what it believed was the Southern status quo in the new nation; it was not willing to expand or intensify that status quo. The differences were subtle but important. The fire-eating radicals who had devoted much of their lives to Southern nationalism found themselves suddenly elevated to roles as irrelevant elder statesmen in the Southern nation. In the end few if any of them made any significant contribution to the Confederacy. Having worked and planned so long to give birth to it, more than one of the radicals became disillusioned with the infant nation; thus in response to the Confederacy’s constitutional prohibition of the African slave trade, South Carolinian L. W. Spratt lamented,
“our whole movement is defeated.
It will abolitionize the Border Slave States—it will brand our institution. Slavery cannot share a government with democracy—it cannot bear a brand upon it;
thence another revolution. It may be painful, but we must make it. ”
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