The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (9 page)

Davis had many of the qualifications which the Montgomery delegates sought. He had been a strong Southern rights man—but not too strong, like Yancey and Rhett. His public experience had been broad; he had been congressman and senator, had graduated from West Point, fought with distinction in the Mexican War, and served the Pierce administration as secretary of war. This military background was important; for even though the Southerners repeatedly told themselves and others that the North would not fight to restore the seceded states to the Union, their words were more hopeful than confident, and just in case they might be wrong, they wanted a constitutional commander-in-chief who would command. Few delegates knew Davis well; few people ever did. In time many of them would make judgments of Davis the man; but for the moment his public record was more important than his private life. And if Davis seemed a bit aloof, so much the better—dignity was important in the government of a revolutionary nation, and Davis looked like a president.
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By the time the convention could turn its full attention to the choice of a president, three state delegations (Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama) favored Davis. Louisiana and South Carolina were uncommitted; Davis and Cobb had supporters in both delegations. Georgia was the least committed, having three serious contenders in its own delegation. At this juncture Cobb repeated his disclaimer and “immediately announced his wish that Davis should be unanimously elected.” Accordingly every delegation except Georgia met in caucus and agreed upon him.
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The Georgians met at ten o’clock on February 9, an hour before the convention was to reassemble to vote. To the Cobbs’ chagrin, Stephens emerged as Georgia’s choice for vice-president, and the other state delegations agreed to vote for him. Thus Howell Cobb’s magnanimity in refusing to contest the presidency not only cost him the opportunity of leading the Confederacy; it also advanced the career of his Georgia rival.
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When the convention gathered on the ninth, the election, which had been so uncertain the night before, became a
pro forma
ceremony. The convention elected Davis and Stephens unanimously, thus preserving the appearance of unity and harmony. In the process delegates effectively snubbed the old radical secessionists in favor of “safe” Southerners.
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On February 11, the Monday following Friday’s election, Howell Cobb administered the oath of office to Vice-President Stephens. The day was Stephens’ birthday, and because Davis was still en route to Montgomery from his plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi, Stephens stood alone in the limelight. Small and slight of build, he was not physically impressive, and his stooped posture made him appear older than his forty-nine years. In the old Union he had been a national leader, and he was known to be a learned man. Now he was vice-president because he had been a cooperationist, because he was a Georgia Whig, and because his friends in the Georgia delegation had worked for his election. What his public career had not fully revealed about him thus far was the degree of his attachment to principles and the doctrinaire bent of his mind. He once wrote an associate that principles were the “pole star of my existence.”
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As long as Stephens had followed his principles into vain conflicts as a spokesman for a minority South, his leadership had been consistent and effective. Now, however, Stephens no longer represented a minority. He was called to help lead the cause which he had so long proclaimed. The unanswered, indeed unasked, question was whether his principles could survive the transition from the political outs to the political ins. His nimble shift from union to secession indicated that his principles could bend instead of break. He threw himself into his new task with enthusiasm and energy and for a while was second to the President not only in office but also in influence. But Stephens’ ascendancy was brief; it corresponded with that period of time during which the Confederacy was what he had hoped it would be, a national extension of the ideology of the Old South. When the exigencies of the Confederacy’s war prompted other Southerners to reexamine and redefine the substance of their ideological position, Stephens resisted the apostasy. Clinging to his principles he became an enemy of the administration he once had served.
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President-elect Davis arrived in Montgomery on February 16. A large crowd followed him from the railroad station to the Exchange Hotel. There Yancey welcomed him and proclaimed that “the man and the hour have met!” As Davis offered his thanks, the symbolism of the moment was perfect. Yancey, the fire-eater, surrendered the stage to Davis, the statesman. The radicals’ hour was over; sensible men had come to Montgomery to carry out a revolution made by others.
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Two days after his arrival, Davis was inaugurated provisional president. An estimated ten thousand people, more than the town’s population, watched the procession to the steps of the capitol, then thronged in front of the building to witness the ceremony. Before taking the oath of office, Davis delivered an inaugural address.
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Davis was known as a logician; but his address strained logic. He began by drawing the common parallel between what Southerners had done and what their grandfathers had done in the American Revolution. Then after invoking “the right of the people to alter or abolish governments,” he abruptly asserted, “it is by abuse of language that their act [forming the Confederacy] has been denominated a revolution.”
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Only in the context of the moment in Montgomery did Davis’ revolution-no-revolution non sequitur make sense. The new President was supposed to allay fears, and he knew it; consequently most of his speech was a recital of how unchanged was the Southern status quo. “We have changed the constituent parts,” he said, “but not the system of our Government.”
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Davis’ message was clear: we have exercised the right of revolution, he was saying, but we did so only to preserve the Southern life style. Davis believed what he said, and none of his listeners seemed to question his logic.

Now the convention turned to its final task as a constituent assembly, the permanent Constitution. While a drafting committee worked, the convention took up its role as provisional Congress and began debating and enacting legislation.
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Committee members worked long and hard at their assignment and sandwiched their labors on the Constitution between sessions of Congress. T. R. R. Cobb, for example, spent mornings with his congressional committee, afternoons in sessions of Congress, and nights with the constitutional committee.
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On the last day of February the draft was ready for debate. For ten days the delegates doubled as members of the provisional Congress in the morning and of the constitutional convention in the afternoon. Finally, on March 11, they unanimously adopted the Constitution. In just thirty-five days, less than half the time it took the Founding Fathers to write the United States Constitution, the delegates had laid the foundation of the Southern Confederacy.
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The ubiquitous Robert Barnwell Rhett, who was chairman of the drafting committee, had some definite ideas about what should and should not be included in the permanent Constitution. However, few of Rhett’s ideas prevailed either in his committee’s draft or in the final document. The preamble spoke of states acting in their “sovereign and independent character” but also of establishing a “permanent federal government.” During the debates the delegates considered clauses about the right of secession from the Confederacy and about nullification. But the convention shrank from incorporating these revered Southern principles in the Constitution, and only the relative ease of the amendment process (initiated by convention of only three member states) spoke to the nullification issue raised by South Carolina in 1832. The delegates were satisfied to affirm state sovereignty in general terms and trust future generations to understand the meaning of the phrase. Nevertheless the assertion that they were creating a “permanent federal government” might have left future generations in a quandary had one or more states chosen to secede from the Confederacy.
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Interestingly, no one seems to have suggested a return to the frame of the only American precedent for genuine confederation: the Articles of Confederation.

Like the provisional Constitution, the permanent document was an altered version of the United States Constitution. Some of the basic changes from the United States Constitution included in the provisional framework reappeared in the new document: the item veto, prohibition of the slave trade, strictures against tariffs, a district court structure, and a procedure to be followed in case of presidential disability. Rhett and some of the South Carolina delegates were bitterly disappointed about the prohibition of the slave trade but found themselves almost alone in this matter.

As might be expected, the Constitution expressly protected slavery in the Confederacy and its territories—“No … law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.” The Constitution also forbade “internal improvements” and restricted the Congress from making appropriations not specifically requested by the executive branch unless the appropriations received a two-thirds majority vote in both houses. Congress was authorized to grant seat and voice to cabinet members so they might join debates over bills which concerned their departments. The Confederate Post Office was required to become self-sustaining within two years. The Confederate president was to serve six years but could not succeed himself. These provisions were adjustments in the old Constitution designed to realign its checks and balances and make the government as responsive and efficient as possible.

Significantly, the convention retained the “three-fifths clause” about the counting of slaves when determining a state’s population for the purposes of taxation and congressional representation. The “necessary and proper” clause (Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution), too, remained, as did the theoretical basis of judicial review implied in the authorization of Congress to create a Supreme Court. On balance and in theory, the Confederate executive was probably stronger than his United States counterpart. Although he could not serve more than one term, that term was six instead of four years, and he had the power of item veto and strong control over appropriations.

Ironically, the most striking feature of the Confederate Constitution was not its Southern orientation. The permanent Constitution prescribed for the Confederacy much the same kind of union which the Southerners had dissolved.
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Although the Montgomery Convention spent only ten days debating the Constitution before adopting it unanimously, it was during these deliberations that the sacred harmony of the convention came closest to shattering. Just as the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 had had a crucial “Great Debate” over state representation in Congress, so the Montgomery delegates had a great debate over admission of new states into the Confederacy. Led by Rhett, William P. Miles of South Carolina, and T. R. R. Cobb, convention radicals proposed to exclude nonslave states from the Confederacy. The moderates, Toombs, Stephens, and the president, who expressed his opinion privately, wished to leave the door open. The radicals feared reconstruction and even suggested that there was a move afoot to restore the old Union under the Confederate Constitution. Moreover, they feared that if nonslave states were admitted, free soil in the South would lead to “free-soilers” and doom the Confederacy to battle abolitionists all over again. The moderates argued that trade and transportation systems (the Mississippi River, for example) might in time attract free states to the Confederacy; they did not wish arbitrarily to exclude them and, with them, the hope of expansion into the west and perhaps into Mexico. The Montgomery Great Debate ended in compromise, as had the debate in Philadelphia in 1787. John G. Shorter of Alabama proposed that new states be admitted to the Confederacy by a vote of two-thirds of the House of Representatives and the Senate, with each state casting one vote in the Senate. The convention adopted Shorter’s compromise, thus keeping the door open to free states, while the radicals found some comfort in the fact that free states would have to secure more than a simple majority vote to enter the slaveholders’ union.
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The Great Debate at Montgomery was the last real obstacle in the way of the convention. When the delegates completed the Constitution, they could consider the Confederacy founded and themselves founding fathers. During the Great Debate, the radicals had made their last stand to extend and intensify the slaveholders’ ideology, while the moderates resisted because they were satisfied to retain the Southern status quo and because they believed that in the real world nothing more than that was possible. The moderates won, as they had won other essential points at Montgomery, because the fundamental goal of the Southern revolution was the preservation of the Southern life style as Southerners then lived it. Southerners generally had adopted radical rhetoric and tactics to transform their ideology into nationalism; but once that transformation had occurred in secession, the radicals became superfluous. Confederates did not believe they needed to make new worlds; they were more than content with the world they already had. At Montgomery the moderate majority tried to codify the Southern status quo and to present a favorable image to the South and the rest of the world, and with the founding of the Confederacy they believed they had succeeded.