The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (8 page)

When the convention met in Tallahassee the secessionist majority voted down other attempts at delay and on January 10 adopted a secession ordinance 62 to 7; when the choice became union or disunion, twenty cooperationists went along.
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To attend the Montgomery Convention, the secession convention chose Jackson Morton, a Whig and leader of the cooperationist cause in Florida, and secessionist Democrats James Patton Anderson and James Byron Owens. All three were active in Montgomery.
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Georgia had the most land and the most people of any state in the deep South and was therefore crucial to the secessionist cause. Moreover, that state was the vital hinge between the seaboard and the gulf South. Back in 1850 a convention of Georgians had frustrated the radical secession scheme by agreeing to wait and test the Compromise of 1850 rather than attending a Southern convention and concerting secession. The Georgia Platform, a strong ultimatum to the North to abide by the 1850 Compromise, had dealt a death blow to the secessionists’ hopes at the time.
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By 1860 circumstances and minds had changed. On December 6, Howell Cobb, President James Buchanan’s secretary of the treasury and acknowledged leader of Georgia Democrats, resigned his national office and publicly announced his support for secession. Cobb’s brother T. R. R. Cobb had long been among the radical leaders, and Robert Toombs, Whig senator and erratic genius, also joined the campaign for immediate secession. To counter this powerful secessionist triumvirate were three highly respected Georgia moderates: Alexander H. Stephens, who believed immediate secession unwise but agreed to abide by his state’s decision, Herschel V. Johnson, Douglas’ Democratic running mate in 1860, and Benjamin Harvey Hill, who lent strong Whig support.
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In November, Georgia Governor Joseph E. Brown, a staunch secessionist, requested from his legislature a million-dollar appropriation with which to arm the state and a convention to vote secession. The legislature debated two weeks before agreeing to call the convention. The delay was an accurate indication of the division in Georgia’s political mind. Campaigns for 301 delegate seats at the convention were intense. The radicals used every tactic at their disposal. Howell Cobb, not himself a candidate, traveled throughout the state campaigning for straight-out secessionists. Toombs returned to Washington to see for himself whether compromise was possible, then on December 23 dispatched dramatic telegrams to Georgia’s leading newspapers reaffirming his support for immediate secession. Results of the delegate elections on January 2 promised a close but clear secessionist majority in the convention. Still, Governor Brown apparently juggled the vote totals supplied to the press to make it appear that the popular vote overwhelmingly favored immediate secession. Authorized by the convention to keep the actual count a secret, Brown reported the vote as 50,243 to 37,123 for secessionists; an accurate count shows that a slim majority of Georgians in fact voted for cooperationists (42,714 to 41,717).

When the convention met in Milledgeville on January 16, advocates from South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi were present to make speeches and stir up secessionist enthusiasm. The Governor’s final trick was to inject into the proceedings a resolution of the New York legislature promising support to the President of the United States in putting down the “insurgent” South Carolinians.
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Though the secessionists had the necessary votes from the beginning, these emotional tactics no doubt aided the radicals. A motion to delay secession, the moderates’ chief test, failed 133 to 164. On January 19 secession carried 208 to 89, and Georgia committed itself to the South Carolina Program.
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Georgians were the most numerous and probably the most talented of the delegates at Montgomery. Both Cobbs were there; Howell Cobb was elected president of the convention, and T. R. R. Cobb was an active member of the committee that drafted the permanent Constitution. Stephens, who attended although he had expressed some reservations when chosen by the Georgia convention, was a moderating force in the debates, and his election as Confederate vice-president was an index of the convention’s moderate temper as well as Stephens’ new-found loyalty. Toombs was a somewhat enigmatic figure at Montgomery. Originally he had hoped to become president of the Confederacy; when the hope proved illusory, he made his peace with Stephens and led a “loyal opposition” to the Cobbs.

The Georgia delegation well reflected the secession process which brought them to Montgomery. Of the ten delegates, three were Democrats and seven Whigs, four had been cooperationists, and six had been leaders of the straight-out secessionists. Most of the time this diverse group acted together—a significant commentary upon the convention’s determination to present a united front.
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In Louisiana secessionist sentiment was slow to form until the crisis of 1860 and 1861. The radicals had made little headway in the state, whose principal city, New Orleans, was a national trading and transportation center and whose most characteristic crop, sugar, was protected by the national tariff. When the fever of disunion struck, however, it became an infectious contagion. In the 1860 presidential election, Breckinridge Democrats carried Louisiana by only a narrow plurality. Lincoln’s election, though, disenchanted many of the Whiggish supporters of the Constitutional Unionist moderate Bell. Thus when Governor Thomas O. Moore called for a convention to consider secession the legislature complied.
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On January 7, Louisianians elected eighty straight-out secessionists, forty-four cooperationists, and six undecided delegates to the state convention. As in Georgia, the radicals reported a greater popular vote margin for secessionist delegates than was actually cast. The New Orleans
Daily Delta
gave secessionist candidates 54.2 percent of the vote; the actual returns indicate secessionists received 52.3 percent. Louisiana cooperationists, however, were more inclined toward secession than their counterparts in other states, especially since the convention met after five states had already seceded. Louisiana secessionists tended to be richer and larger slaveholders than their brethren elsewhere and to come from parishes where cotton was the principal crop. The cooperationists came either from the farmer class of the northern parishes or from the sugar-planting regions in the southern part of the state.
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The convention voted secession on January 25 by a majority of 113 to 17. Louisiana then accepted the South Carolina Program and chose six delegates to the Montgomery Convention.
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These delegates, like Louisiana’s radical leaders, were wealthy slaveholders committed to the Confederacy. Men of means, they determined that a Southern nation could best protect those means; well satisfied and well treated by the status quo, they went to Montgomery to preserve it
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Texas was exceptional. Governor Sam Houston, an unalterable foe of secession, refused to call the legislature into session or to heed radical demands for a convention. In the impasse a number of influential secessionists took it upon themselves to call an extralegal convention. Houston countered by calling a special session of the legislature, hoping it would denounce the proceedings; but it did just the opposite, approving the idea of a convention. Relying upon the right of Texans expressed in the state constitution to alter or abolish their government and upon this belated legislative approval for legitimacy, the Texas secession convention met in Austin in late January and passed 152 to 6 a resolution favoring secession. On February 1, Texas formally voted to secede (166 to 8); included in the ordinance was the provision that it be referred to the voters for final approval. The popular vote confirmed the convention’s actions by more than three to one, and in time even Houston acquiesced in the action and coexisted with the Confederacy.
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Because of the necessary referendum and the relative tardiness of the state’s secession, the Texas delegation arrived in Montgomery too late to debate the provisional Constitution or to help elect the president and vice-president. Indeed the delegation did not officially claim its seats until the permanent Constitution was in its final stages of debate. Most colorful among the Texans was Louis Trezaunt Wigfall, a South Carolina native who had moved to Texas because he owed too much money and had fought too many duels in South Carolina. A staunch fire-eater, Wigfall persisted in his doctrinaire Southernism as senator in every Confederate Congress. Among the less colorful Texans was John H. Reagan, who became postmaster general of the Confederacy.
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Including the Texans, fifty men served in the Montgomery Convention. Although two-fifths of them had been cooperationists in their home states, it is safe to say that with one or two exceptions all of the delegates endorsed by their presence the
fait accompli
of secession and wished their new nation well.

Secession was a radical act, and the process of disunion was the product of radical men and tactics. The Montgomery Convention, on the other hand, was a moderate, even conservative, body.
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This paradoxical sequence of radicalism followed by moderation is understandable only in the context of the delegates’ background and recent experience. Even the most radical delegates realized that disunion had been not the unanimous choice of the Southern people, but often the tenuous choice of an emotional moment. And most of the delegates realized that if the Confederacy were to survive, it needed the good will and support of at least its own people and if possible people in the upper South, Europe, and even the North. The Confederates made a revolution to preserve and protect the Southern status quo from encroachment. At Montgomery they attempted to frame a government which would do precisely that.

February 4, 1861, was sunny and warm. Most of the Montgomery delegates had been in town several days and, naturally, had discussed informally the work they were about to do. As the delegates took their seats in the state capitol, they knew pretty well what would happen on the first day. William P. Chilton of Alabama acted as host and called the convention to order. Then the delegates unanimously elected Barnwell of South Carolina temporary president of the convention, presented their credentials, unanimously elected Howell Cobb convention president, appointed a committee to draw up rules, and adjourned. All had gone according to the script.
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On the second day, February 5, the delegates began testing this harmony. Debate began on the first of the difficult questions: what was the convention empowered to do? From a series of resolutions, amendments, and substitutes and a gentleman’s agreement came the delegates’ ambitious answer: draft a provisional Constitution, elect a provisional president and vice-president, and then draft a permanent Constitution while sitting as the provisional Congress.
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In normal times these would have been high-handed actions for legalistic Southerners. But these were not normal times, and the delegates felt compelled to create an instant government in order to quell fears that the Confederates were not in earnest. Many people both outside the new nation and within it believed secession to be a bluff and assumed that the Southerners had left the Union only temporarily in order to get better terms for themselves inside it. The contrary was true. The delegates at Montgomery tried to outdo each other in zeal for the permanency of their break with the North. Stephens of Georgia, for example, mindful of his cooperationist record, took pains to declare disunion irrevocable and compromise impossible. “The delegation from Georgia,” President Cobb wrote his wife, “are acting with perfect unanimity on all questions.”
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Having agreed upon their mission, delegates next voted to conduct much of their business in secret sessions which promised fewer public poses from the delegates, encouraged free debate, and still allowed the convention to present a united front. With these preliminaries behind them, the delegates began the substantive business of drafting a provisional Constitution.

A committee of twelve chaired by Memminger worked steadily for two days and nights and on the afternoon of February 7 presented their results. Next day the delegates debated the document and about midnight unanimously adopted it.
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Memminger’s committee used the United States Constitution as its model. The common assumption was that the work done in Philadelphia in 1787, with a few adjustments, would serve the Southern nation well enough—as long as Southerners were free to construe it properly. There were significant differences, however. The preamble of the new Constitution spoke of “sovereign and independent states” instead of “we, the people” and invoked “the favor of Almighty God.” The delegates passed over potentially divisive points about tariffs and slavery and agreed to deal with them at more leisure when they took up the permanent Constitution. The provisional Constitution provided for an item veto by the president, thus eliminating the practice of attaching unrelated riders to legislation; included a procedure to be followed in the event of presidential disability; and combined district and circuit court systems into a single district system in which each state constituted a district. Aside from these adjustments, the provisional government was little different in structure from that of the United States.
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After adopting the provisional Constitution, the convention adjourned late on the night of February 8 and agreed to hold elections for provisional president and vice-president the following day.
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So far there had been amazingly little politicking on the subject.
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Rhett believed he had earned the honor. However, since honor must be bestowed rather than grasped, Rhett had not sought it openly, and his fellow South Carolinians did not put him forward.
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Howell Cobb was a contender but had said he did not want the job; and some, including his brother T. R. R. Cobb, believed him.
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A few delegates favored Toombs, and so did Toombs; but support for the fiery Georgian never grew, as his erratic statesmanship and hard drinking made him unacceptable to those delegates who demanded propriety and respectability. According to Stephens, Toombs was “tight every day at dinner” and “about two days before the election” Toombs was
“tighter
than I ever saw him.”
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Yancey was unacceptable for some of the same reasons. He had so long been indentified with radicalism that many were afraid of him. Stephens was the third Georgian under consideration, but although he was an energetic member of the convention, his eleventh-hour conversion to the Confederacy was a strong point against him, and in his own delegation were men whose political memories of Stephens were long and unpleasant. From the beginning the name most often mentioned was Jefferson Davis.
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