Conservatives or Radicals?

A second and wholly different view of the coming of secession derives from an analysis of the dynamics of what recently historians have called the politics of slavery. Since any political system is a highly competitive one in which the pursuit of prominence, position, and place provides a powerful,
and sometimes overwhelming, motive force, much of what happened in is explained through the dynamics of political competition. In any political environment, those who are out of office seek to pursue office for its own sake. This is done both through formal opposition parties and through the competition for leadership and influence within a party in power. Given the relative weakness of formal opposition parties in the Deep
South, which led secession in 1860–61, much of the cutting edge of driving political ambition came from within the ruling Democratic Party. As national slavery issues had dominated political rhetoric and debate in the Southern states during the sit followed that the quest for office would hinge on playing up themes and rivalries which revolved around the defense of slavery in the national political arena. Once national sectional rivalries over slavery extension exploded into prominence after 1854, competition within the Southern Democratic Party concentrated essentially on where individual politicians and their supporters placed themselves on the spectrum of arguments and assertions concerning the appropriate defense of the institution of slavery within the United States. It has long been argued, as for example by Horace Montgomery in 1950 in analyzing the secession convention in Georgia, that the secessionist political process was from its inception in the control of the extremists.”
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This is, of course, a highly convenient argument for more restrained southerners to put concerning their own past the unpleasant initiative in driving the South to the most extreme defense of slavery is conveniently attributed to southerners of the least politically or emotionally admirable character. Clement Eaton in portrayed the planters as molding their lives on the model of the English gentry but failing to engage in debate about the South’s political and social future in a sufficiently openminded manner. A Whiggish belief in orderly progress and scorn for proslavery extremists, as well as abolitionists, had become overwhelmed during the emotional crisis that preceded the Civil
War.”
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Michael Holt described the period after November, 1860, as one in which the radicals orchestrated a powerful campaign of propaganda and pressure They flourished because of the particular state of public opinion which gripped the lower South during 1860. Allan Nevins had argued that much of the lower South experienced a frenzy of excitement with South
Carolina being like abed of charcoal suddenly leaping into flames Holt describes the frenzy that characterized the deep South after Lincoln’s election while David Potter and Don E. Fehrenbacher remarked that all of the States were acting in an atmosphere of excitement approaching hysteria.”
In these circumstances, William J. Cooper has seen the operation of secession
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as the work of the more youthful radical politicians with the well established leaders of the lower South relegated to the back seat.
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The main thrust of both these approaches to understanding secession derives from an emphasis on the political reaction to the debates over slavery which had racked America during the s. A third approach to an understanding of secession flows from an attempt to unravel the role played in those political events by longer-term structural economic changes that were affecting both North and South during the sands. While no one nowadays subscribes to the view that somehow an industrial North confronted an agricultural South, there is widespread agreement that extensive industrialization and urbanization affecting the whole country in the mid-nineteenth century had profound implications for politics across all sections. Yet the precise workings of that impact, and the relationship between political developments and the spread of an industrializing economy,
have, predictably, been subject to widely differing interpretations.
One view, most elaborately advanced by J. Mills Thornton, holds that secession was enacted by radical politicians who sought to preserve the radical tradition associated with the purest form of Jacksonian democracy.
The social model advanced by the Jacksonians portrayed an ideal America as a society of independent farm owners and small-scale producers whose existence was hardly touched by government interference and whose earnings and livelihood were not sapped and exploited by unregulated banks or ruthless and corrupt business corporations. This radical ideal, which in many parts of the South during the s seemed indeed to fit reality,
no longer squared with the increasing pressures of commercialization during the s. As a consequence younger radical politicians exploited the national debate over slavery extension to advance the cause of secession as a means of freeing the South from the main engine of industrial and commercial growth, which was located in the North. But the crisis of modernization existed within the Southern states. The radicals dynamic energy arose therefore partly in antithesis to the political order of the
Southern states individually, since the political establishment condoned increasing commercial development in the 1850s.
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This argument thus combines an appreciation of the major economic changes which affected
America in the mid-nineteenth century with an analysis of politics which is located in the individual Southern states. That analysis is predicated upon the notion of intense internal competition for power racking a Democratic
Party which both embodied the radical Jacksonian tradition and yet formed the political establishment throughout the s. If, atone level,
his argument describes secession as being intended to conserve the Southern way of life, at another level it depicts the force which divided Southern politics in 1860 as a radical quest for the preservation of a past Golden Age rather than a conservative accommodation to the South as it existed.
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Bruce Collins

The more deep-rooted variant on the assessment of the impact of economic changes derives from the Marxian tradition. This claims that there were deep sectional antagonisms flowing from wholly different economies,
with the one based on a system of slavery and the other based on a system of free labor. Ultimately, for those writing in the Marxian tradition, it was the slaveholding class acting as a class which swept all before it in a decision,
setting aside all local and subregional differences, that strictly followed class interests.
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The most recent elaboration of this view argues that the Southern system, although compatible with merchant capitalism, became increasingly incompatible with the industrial capitalism of the North that emerged in the
1850s, and that the slaveholding class, given the strength of their hegemonic power over the non-slaveholding Southern whites, ensured the breakup of the Union.
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In one sense, therefore, the impact of economic development has given rise to one interpretation which portrays secession as apolitically radical act. A further interpretation is derived from Marx’s contemporary writings which depict secession as a conservative resistance to the dynamic changes brought about through both the industrialization of the North and its agricultural expansion into the Middle West.
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Underpinning much of this debate is a fundamental disagreement over the nature of the political process and its relationship to the underlying structure of white society in the mid-nineteenth century. One view has long been that politics did not empower ordinary, poorer non-slaveowning whites to express their true interests and sentiments. J. Morgan Kousser has emphasized, Repeated outbreaks of nonslaveowner and yeoman dissent from the s through the s undermined the view that all white
Southerners agreed that the protection of slavery and white supremacy ought to be the constant theme of politics Stephen Ash has argued that during the war itself the arrival of the Union armies in central Tennessee unblocked the surging tide of militancy among poorer whites yet this tide rapidly receded owning to inertial forces among the poor whites themselves Such interpretations have become increasingly powerful and important in the last forty years because they open lines of inquiry to a Southern past which is not bigoted, dominated by the values of a slaveholding elite, and racist in its defense of slavery and segregation. It is also important because it flows from the most powerful assumptions about the relationship between popular rule and war.
Americans have long adopted the ideas promulgated by Tom Paine—the great publicist of American rights in in his later work, The Rights of
Man. One of his central arguments was that monarchical governments made war, not peoples. One reason for this was that monarchs and their courts did not bear the financial costs of wars and conquering expeditions, but instead loaded them onto their subjects, most recently, in the eighteenth century,
through borrowing made possible by national debt. Paine argued that if those
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who paid for wars made the decisions concerning martial adventures then wars would cease to bean option. Countries with truly representative systems of government would never go to war with each other This powerful contention, so central to the making of the earlier American revolution against British rule, has remained a shaping consideration in American thinking and indeed democratic thinking ever since. If it remains axiomatic that democratic peoples do not go to war with each other, it therefore follows that the secession crisis had to be produced by the actions of an antidemocratic elite. This was part of the dilemma raised by the coming of the
Civil War in 1861. Lincoln in July, 1861, resolved the dilemma by underscoring the probability that in no state of the South did a majority of the qualified electorate seek secession, with the possible exception of South
Carolina itself.
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It became convenient for conservative-minded apologists for the old South to assert that secession was the handiwork of extremist radicals. And it has become important for those promoting racial integration and harmony in the last fifty years to argue that the political order of the
1850s was not founded upon genuinely widespread white consent. Yet the truth behind such a claim is extremely difficult to sustain, given the facts that
Southern states voters tended to vote overwhelmingly in favor of Democrat candidates and that Southern Democrats by 1860 had come to promote secession.

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