The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (7 page)

To understand the subtle schism between what the Confederacy was supposed to be and what it became, it is necessary to look at some of the men who assumed leadership at Montgomery and during the processes of secession which brought them to the convention. The mechanics of disunion were important because they significantly affected the actions and attitudes of the Montgomery delegates and they revealed most clearly the tension between the rival themes of radical theory and constructive action coexisting in the Southern political mind.

South Carolina’s situation was especially instructive. The Palmetto State had both a long tradition of secessionist notions and a heritage of unionism and moderation. In the spring of 1860 South Carolina radicalism seemed to have reached a low ebb; the National Democrats, who proposed to save the South and the Union through the Democratic Party, gained control of Carolina polity. As a result, when the Democrats refused to adopt a platform containing strong guarantees for slavery, the state delegation to the Democratic Nominating Convention followed, rather than led, the Southern walkout in Charleston.

The subsequent sectional division of the Democratic Party and the strong probability of Lincoln’s election in the fall of 1860 discredited South Carolina’s National Democrats and gave radical secessionists the leverage they needed. Even so, South Carolina might not have been the first state out of the Union had it not been for its conservative constitution, which required the legislature instead of the voters to select presidential electors. When the legislature convened on November 5 to choose electors, a national Republican victory appeared certain. Accordingly, Governor Gist kept the solons in session to await the election results. Once Lincoln’s victory was sure, Gist requested a secession convention, and his legislature issued a call for elections. From this point the die was cast. Unionists made poor showings when they dared to run for convention seats, and most of the cooperationists, convinced that ultimately South Carolina would not secede alone, supported separate state action. The convention met on December 17, and three days later by a unanimous vote of the delegates South Carolina seceded. Had an outbreak of smallpox not forced the body to move from Columbia to Charleston, the process would have been even shorter.
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The Palmetto Republic made not one, but two declarations of independence, in which the convention attempted to explain and justify disunion. The “Declaration of the Immediate Causes of Secession,” drafted by Memminger, focused on threats to slavery and slavery expansion made by the North during the recent past and likely to be made by the Republican Party in the near future. The “Address to the Slaveholding States,” drafted by Rhett, was an extended dissertation which began with the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and rambled through a long catalog of sectional issues and crises, demonstrating Southern righteousness and Yankee perfidy at every point.
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Rhett and Memminger shared a zeal for disunion; both were sincere Southern nationalists, yet the difference in the documents they produced was revealing. Rhett had been dreaming of a separate Southern nation for more than half of his sixty-one years. An austere, reserved man, he abstained from liquor and comradeship. About the South, though, Rhett had no reservations and exercised little control over his emotions. Rhett’s vision of what the South had been and should be was deep and fixed; Southern ideology had made him an ideologue. All this came through in his “Address"; it was a fundamental appeal to Southern nationalism.
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Memminger, on the other hand, although he had absorbed the Southern life style as deeply as Rhett, had come late to Southern nationalism. Born in Germany and orphaned in Charleston at a very young age, Memminger had acquired the education and background to go with his native abilities and had become a successful lawyer in his adopted city. His mind was flexible; he was a tactician instead of an ideologue. Once convinced that moderation was suicidal and cooperation futile, Memminger became a straight-out secessionist. He shared his countrymen’s hopes and, more important, he knew their fears. Thus, while Rhett’s “Address” appealed to hopes for a neo-Greek democracy, Memminger’s “Declaration” dwelt upon fears for the sanctity and expansion of slavery. Both Carolinians were hyper-Southern; but while Rhett espoused eternal principles, Memminger sought successful strategems.
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Georgian T. R. R. Cobb expressed the difference. “Rhett,” Cobb wrote to his wife, “is a generous hearted and honest man with a vast quantity of cranks and a small proportion of common sense.” “Memminger,” he added, “is as shrewd as a Yankee, a perfect——metamorphosed into a legislating lawyer.”
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Besides Rhett and Memminger, there were six other South Carolinians in the Montgomery delegation; not surprisingly the old moderates, unionists and National Democrats, were not on hand. The most influential was Rhett’s cousin Robert W. Barnwell, briefly a United States senator and president of South Carolina College. T. R. R. Cobb said, “Barnwell is a very gentlemanly old man, full of politeness [and] modesty and attracts my kind feelings … I do not rate his talents very high.” Barnwell served as elder statesman, in both his delegation and in the convention, and was important in his opposition to the fanaticism of his cousin Rhett.
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However united the South Carolinians often appeared, they were, most of them, men of the main chance. Together they shared an allegiance to Southern nationalism; as individuals they sought to serve conspicuously. At this juncture, only time would tell whether they would serve as ideologues like Rhett or as tacticians like Memminger. Significantly, the delegation did not unite behind the candidacy of Rhett for president of the Confederacy.
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The Mississippi experience was similar to that of South Carolina. Radicals in both states had tried to provoke secession in 1850 and 1851. Both had seen their hopes founder when the other Southern states failed to unite on the issue and their fellow Carolinians and Mississippians shrank from seceding alone. The events of 1860 renewed secessionist hopes, and Mississippi radicals were quick to seize their opportunity. In the 1860 presidential election John C. Breckinridge, the Southern Democrat, received 59 percent of the vote in Mississippi; John Bell, the Constitutional Union moderate candidate 36.2 percent; and Northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas only 4.8 percent.
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Shortly after Lincoln’s election, Governor J. J. Pettus called a special session of the Mississippi legislature to debate the fate of the state, and the solons called for elections to a convention.
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Mississippians elected a strong secessionist majority to the state convention. The radical leadership was composed of relatively young lawyers and planters, men on the make who had the most to lose if the slave-plantation system were to die or fail to expand. The cooperationists and unionists were older men and politically more conservative (Whiggish) than the secessionist-democratic majority.
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On January 9, 1861, an ordinance of secession carried the convention, 84 to 15; eventually, ninety-eight of the convention’s one hundred members signed the ordinance.
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The Mississippians at Montgomery faithfully reflected the radical leadership of their state. For the most part they were young planters and lawyers who held few slaves and whose greatest service and status appeared to be in the future. Although the Mississippi delegation was representative and capable, it is interesting to note who was
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included. None of the really great cotton planters was there; the old line secessionists, Pettus, John A. Quitman, and L. Q. C. Lamar, were noticeably absent; and those who were in Montgomery proved to be less doctrinaire than expected.
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Perhaps there was a hint of nascent moderation in Mississippians at the secession convention. In the aftermath of secession, that body passed (66 to 13) a resolution against renewing the African slave trade. Significantly, Mississippi and Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis had been among the leaders of the movement to reopen that trade as recently as 1859. Davis, however, was now pursuing an ambiguous course; in the aftermath of Lincoln’s election he had advised against immediate secession. Having accepted the risks and dangers of secession, Mis-sissippians seemed more concerned about tactics designed to solidify their revolution than about doctrinaire proposals designed to carry the revolution to its logical extreme.
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Alabama secessionists had a far more difficult task than their counterparts in Mississippi and South Carolina, much to the chagrin of the state’s foremost secessionist, William Lowndes Yancey. Born in Georgia in 1814, Yancey grew up in Troy, New York, attended Williams College, then returned south to “read law” with South Carolina unionist Benjamin F. Perry. After some experience as a lawyer and newspaper editor in South Carolina, he moved to Dallas County, Alabama, where his reputation as a courtroom orator quickly led him into politics. Yancey soon forsook the unionist persuasions of his legal preceptor and during the 1840s became a strong advocate of Southern rights. To answer the Wilmot Proviso of 1846, which proposed making land gained in the Mexican War free soil, he formulated the Alabama Platform, insuring the protection of slave property in the territories, and walked out of the Democratic convention of 1848 when his platform was not adopted. During the 1850s Yancey abandoned hope of seeking the South’s salvation in the Democratic party or the Union, and thereafter he devoted his skill and influence to Southern independence. The next time he walked out of a Democratic convention, in Charleston in 1860, most of the delegates from six other Southern states followed. This triggered the sectional split in the party which facilitated Lincoln’s election and led to South Carolina’s secession.
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Then, in November, Breckinridge carried Alabama; but the candidates of moderation, Bell and Douglas, had a combined vote total of 41,526, which compared respectably to Breckinridge’s 48,831.
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Governor Andrew B. Moore was a strong secessionist, more than willing to comply with his legislature’s authorization to call a state convention in the event a “Black Republican” was elected president. Campaigns for delegate seats were brisk. Alabama cooperationists divided sharply in their response to the secession question—some favored eventual secession, others were covert unionists, and many wavered between these poles. Consequently the cooperationist cause lacked unity and direction.
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Geographical conditions and political heritage complicated the situation. North Alabama was traditionally the home of small farmers and Jacksonian Democrats. Holding few if any slaves and revering the political memory of Andrew Jackson as frontier nationalist, north Alabamians were almost solidly cooperationists. Alabama urbanites, the few there were, also generally voted cooperationist moderation. In Mobile and Montgomery, however, the influence of planter residents and large slave populations added to the radical count. South and central Alabama had the geographical hallmarks of secessionism: plantations, cotton, and slaves. In 1850 and 1851, however, the north Alabama Democrats had joined the central and south Alabama Whigs to squelch the radicals. In 1860 the Whigs went over to secession, and, united with the state’s secessionist Democrats, they produced a working radical majority in the Alabama convention.
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As in Mississippi, the secessionist leaders in the state convention were young planters and lawyers with relatively few slaves—men with a stake in the continuance of the Southern status quo. Cooperationists, as a group, were older, less wealthy and held even fewer slaves than the strong secessionists.
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In preliminary tests the Alabama convention split by a narrow vote of 54 to 46 in favor of secession. With only an eight-vote working majority the radicals were careful. They erred once—Yancey made a fiery speech in which he labeled all who opposed secession as traitors, and secessionist leader Thomas H. Watts quickly softened Yancey’s diatribe. In the end, on January 10, the secession ordinance passed 61 to 39; thereafter fifteen of the delegates who voted against the ordinance signed it.
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Moderation made itself heard more clearly in the convention after Alabama seceded; the body went on record opposing the renewal of the African slave trade, and narrowly defeated a motion to exclude members of the secession convention from representing the state at Montgomery. In fact the convention chose its Montgomery delegation (with one exception) from outside its membership; that exception was David Peter Lewis, a unionist who fled the Confederacy in 1863 and did not return until after the war. Early gossip among the delegates at Montgomery was full of concern that Union men and “reconstructionists,” who supposedly desired to rejoin the United States, were a majority in the Alabama delegation. Such rumors were exaggerations. Alabamians clearly chose secession, but they did so with reservations, and prudence guided the state’s selection of an essentially moderate delegation.
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Significantly, Yancey, the man who had worked as hard as anyone in the South to bring the Confederacy into existence, was not selected for his state’s delegation, and Lewis, the avowed and persistent unionist, was. Nevertheless, with the exception of Lewis, the members of the Alabama delegation accepted secession and committed themselves to the new nation. As a group, they were sensible secessionists who cared most about making their revolution work.
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In 1860 the state of Florida was essentially an extension of Alabama and Georgia. In terms of population it was quite small; the entire population, approximately 78,000 whites and 63,000 blacks, was less than that of New Orleans.
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On the heels of Lincoln’s election, Governor Madison S. Perry charged his legislature to call a state convention and the members complied. Perry was present in Charleston when South Carolina seceded, and presumably shared with other radical leaders in Florida the object lesson in disunion he had learned. On December 22 the voters chose secession convention delegates, electing forty-two secessionists and twenty-seven cooperationists. There was no marked difference in the backgrounds of the two factions. Apparently the best index of secession or cooperation in Florida was proximity to Georgia and Alabama. Northern counties were more likely to elect cooperationists because their voters wanted to wait and see what Georgia and Alabama did about secession. Florida cooperationists, as a group, favored united secession.
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