Themes of the American Civil War

The fear may have been cited by secessionists, but it came lowdown the lists of secessionists grievances and anxieties. The clearest statement that the
Republicans in power in Washington would create a free labor party throughout the South within four years comes in a letter from Senator Robert
Toombs to his fellow Georgian politician, Alexander H. Stephens.
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The latter was notably reluctant to join the secessionist camp, and argued against immediate secession in the late s. Toombs was self-evidently trying to put the strongest possible pressure on his prominent colleague he had already concluded that the Union would have to end if the Republicans captured the White House in 1860. This argument followed his own decision for secession and did not contribute to that earlier decision. Moreover, a collection of speeches delivered from 12 November to 19 November in
Georgia—including addresses by Thomas RR. Cobb and Robert Toombs,
who were leading secessionists—makes no reference to a Republican threat to internal Southern politics the danger postulated was from federal government interference.
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Nor did the South’s subsequent experience suggest much basis for any internal threat from potential Republicans.
During the war, poorer whites expressed resentment against major slaveowners and their pretensions, but few of them supported Unionism or populist political movements galvanized by Republicans. Despite internal class resentments, the Union army, when it arrived in the upper South, was still identified as an invading force and the main source of the problems which ordinary whites faced. The Union armies presence was not always unwelcome and indeed could be beneficial—in providing food and security against widespread banditry and disorder in the wake of local Confederate defeat—but the general good conduct of the Northern soldiers did not mean that they or the Republican Party were widely popular or acceptable.
After the war, instate elections in 1867, the Republicans secured the support across the South of only about 15 percent of eligible white voters.
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Non- slaveholding white southerners reluctance to back the Republicans has been attributed to Confederate nationalism fostered by the war itself, and to the spirit of self-defense provoked by the intrusion of an invading army into ordinary southerners homelands.
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But the logic of such hypothesizing could readily run in the opposite direction. Let us assume that the individual states’
majorities for secession were obtained through the political will of the slaveholding elite, through trickery and often intimidation, and through a rushed timetable that denied secession’s opponents along enough period in which to organize their campaigning. Let us assume further that the war,
with its privations, taxes, inflation, and requirement that poor men fight to protect slaveholders interests, confirmed many non-slaveholders’ suspicions of and resentments against the planters and the political elite. Having been denied a proper say in the decision for secession, and then having been squeezed by wartime impositions, surely these non-slaveholders, who never
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believed—we are told—the prewar rhetoric about a separate South and the benefits of slavery, would have welcomed the Republicans even more warmly because of the way in which they had been treated in the late s. In fact,
little of this happened. Yet the explanation that this indifference resulted from the vibrancy, or at least viability, of wartime Confederate nationalism seems strained. If the decisions of 1860–61 ran as thoroughly and deeply against majority white opinion as has been claimed, it would surely be improbable that remembrance of so vast a betrayal at so devastating a cost would have disappeared by 1863–64. This failure of the Republican Party, portraying itself as the poor whites friend after a conflict in which poorer whites had fought and suffered for the slaveholders interests, shows how very little real prospect there had been for the development of a proto-Republican crusade in the antebellum South.
Nor was this at all surprising. The Democratic Party itself articulated values which were perfectly consistent with the non-slaveholders’ aspirations.
The political and financial impositions thrust by Southern state governments upon ordinary citizens were extraordinarily weak. The legal system was loose;
punishments were light the restrictions on personal movement and access to subsistence resources were negligible. Legislative petitions submitted to state legislatures show very little articulation of class grievances in the
1850s, when the most significant issue raised in such petitions concerned temperance reform in the middle of the decade. Militia duties fell far short of being oppressive. Taxes remained incredibly low. For example, forty-eight of 132 Georgia counties in 1860 either made no returns on local school taxes or reported none having been raised Peter Wallenstein has noted that the nonpayment of poll tax disqualified voters and speculated that the rich may well have paid the taxes of poorer voters in order to secure their votes;
yet the annual poll tax in Georgia in the s was c per white male aged twenty-one to sixty years, at a time when a laborer in that state could easily earn c in a day.
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The physical environment of the antebellum South was scarcely idyllic, but it offered extraordinary amounts of physical and psychological space for poorer and middling whites. Through most of
Mississippi, Alabama, upstate Georgia and even much of South Carolina in the1850s there were scarcely any towns and no politically mobilized channels of discontent against the prevailing order.
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It is scarcely credible that a
Republican ideology founded upon quite complex notions of wage labor,
highly commercial agriculture, thriving market towns, high levels of education, moral concerns about enslavement, and a commitment to a dynamic mixed economy galvanized by a more elaborate banking system and tied together by more diverse forms of transport corporation should have commanded more than a very limited appeal in the rural prewar South.
The second interpretation seems equally untenable. It is easy to see why secession was portrayed as a radical strategy pushed forward by the younger
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generation of politicians out of office within the South. Naturally, the election campaign of November, 1860, and the subsequent elections for state conventions were accompanied by much excitement, propaganda, even sometimes physical violence. Among Democrats, a good deal of the work in the counties of the Southern states and in the delegate conventions was indeed the responsibility of younger politicians and younger lawyers on the make.
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But this phenomenon maybe partly explained by the fact that, among the
Democrats, the older men were already officeholders and therefore in positions which required some circumspection during a crisis which would lead to a constitutionally dangerous conclusion. The secession movement in that sense created a separate track of political activity from that in which the party leadership already engaged. Younger party activists were clearly far better suited to opening up that parallel track, but this did not mean that the established politicians objected to this activity or were reluctant to engage themselves in the process of secession. There were also advantages to be had in bringing fresh faces into the movement. Senator James H. Hammond of South Carolina was delighted at the speed of secession and emphasized that it was a movement of the People of the South and not a bullying movement of the politicians And to set against the accounts of secession which portray it as accompanied by violence and intense propaganda we have other observations. The Rev. CC. Jones of Savannah, Georgia, noted of a large crowded meeting in the city which supported secession, The meeting was remarkably peaceful and orderly and elevated, with an entire absence of folly and rowdyism More generally, for the South Carolina low country, it has been noted that the arguments for secession were strongly and widely pressed throughout the years 1858–60 and that by 1860 almost all the prominent clergymen in the coastal and interior low country supported disunion. In Texas F. B. Sexton, chairman of the state Democratic convention of 1860, wrote of a secession meeting, The sober, reflecting, sterling men of the country were present and no division of feeling existed.”
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The more important fact is that the political leadership of the South created the crisis which led to secession. The insistence, articulated first in the mid-1840s and then redoubled from 1854 onwards, that slavery had to be introduced into new territories acquired in the West formed the main argument of the Democratic party leadership. By September 1858 Senator
Albert G. Brown of Mississippi told a party meeting in his state, you must give up the Union or give up slavery He explained:
The sentiment of hostility to the South and its institutions is widening and deepening at the North everyday. Those who tell you otherwise are deceived or they wilfully deceive you. Twenty years ago this sentiment was confined to a few fanatics now it pervades all classes, ages and sexes of society. It is madness to suppose that
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this tide is ever to rollback. I was raised in awe, in almost superstitious reverence of the Union. But if the Union is to be converted into a masked battery for assailing my property and my domestic peace, I will destroy it if I can, and if this cannot be done by direct assault, I would resort to sapping and mining. . . . Now, as in 1850, I do not fear the consequences of disunion. I do not court it, but I do not dread it.
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The only remaining guarantor of the Union was the Democratic Party.
Yet Brown dismissed the doctrine of popular sovereignty—which Northern
Democrats saw as vital to their electoral chances within their section—as a wicked cheat or a mischievous humbug The attempt represented by that doctrine to compromise the constitutional and political issues created by the drive for slavery’s extension into the western territories was further torpedoed by Brown and his fellow senator from Mississippi, Jefferson Davis,
in February l. They introduced Senate resolutions insisting upon federal government protection for slaveholders in all the federal territories. This demand fora so-called federal slave code destroyed the extraordinary efforts by which Northern Democrats had tried to paper over the increasingly broad cracks in their own national party’s political edifice.
During the summer of 1859 Democratic state conventions in, for example,
Mississippi and Louisiana made absolutely no concessions on national policy to their northern Democrat colleagues. The only forward-looking policy that they demanded was the annexation of Cuba from Spain. Such a measure had been formally recommended to the Senate by its Committee on Foreign
Relations in January, 1859, with the extraordinary assertion that acquisition had long been a strategic goal of the United States and that popular support for the measure commanded a unanimity unsurpassed on any question of national policy that has heretofore engaged the public mind Of course,
the aim was to add 581,000 slaves (out of 1,586,000 people on the island) to America’s population.
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The Mississippi Democratic state convention of
July 1859 declared openly that a Republican victory in the presidential election of 1860 would lead to Mississippi’s preparations, singly as a state or in cooperation with other states, to secede.
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In December 1859 Vice- president John C. Breckinridge addressed the legislature of his home state of Kentucky. He portrayed the Democrats as the guarantors of the constitution and tried to moderate Southern opinion by saying that he hoped there would never be a need fora federal slave code, preferring instead that southerners rely for the protection of slavery within the territories upon the executive branch of the federal government. But he had no doubts that the Republican Party posed a dreadful threat to Southern rights and the
South’s future, stressing, we will have no peace until the Republican Party is destroyed, which can only be done by producing a reaction upon the
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public mind of the North.”
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Yet when Breckinridge became the Southern
Democrats’ presidential candidate in 1860 he offered nothing to the
Northern Democrats to enable them to beat the Republicans upon their home ground. The last months of 1859 had spread despondency among many in the Southern political elite. John Brown’s raid upon Virginia, with clear evidence that some Republicans had supported this highly dangerous direct action, and the easy victory of the Republican Party in the New York state elections, prefiguring a strong Republican performance in the North in the following year’s presidential contest, decisively fueled that sense of gloom.
Senator Robert Tombs of Georgia wrote to a close confidant on December, 1859, that, if the Republicans won the election of November, I see no safety for us, our property and our firesides except in breaking up the concern. I do not think it wise for the South to suffer a party to get possession of the government whose principles and whose leaders are so openly hostile not only to her equality but to her safety in the Union, and . . . if such a calamity should come,
we should prefer to defend ourselves at the doorsill rather than await the attack at our hearthstone. I think it madness to wait for what some people call an overt act.”
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In the same month, Governor MS. Perry of Florida indicated in his annual message to the state legislature that he favored an eternal separation from those whose wickedness and fanaticism forbid us longer to live with them in peace and safety Governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia at the same time told his state legislature that the arguments were over and that the state now needed to look to its armaments for protection in the future.
In February 1860 the Alabama state legislature followed the Democrat state convention’s resolutions by calling for elections to a state convention if a Republican won the presidency. This motion was passed by a virtually unanimous majority. By early April the political elite in Texas were preparing themselves for the strong possibility of secession The record of the Southern Democrat leadership from the introduction by Brown and Davis of their federal slave code resolutions in February, to the presidential election of November, 1860, demonstrates unambiguously its total lack of interest inlet alone commitment to, defeating the
Republican movement in the North. The only concern which the Democratic leadership of the Southern states displayed in this period was to ensure that the national Democratic Party maintained a firm commitment to the constitutional principle of permitting slavery in the western territories of the United States. Given this extraordinary preoccupation with legalism and constitutionalism, and the potentially explosive consequences of allowing that preoccupation to open the way to a Republican victory in the
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presidential election of 1860, it is difficult to see how Avery Craven could have concluded, As the summer of 1859 wore on, it became increasingly apparent that conservative men and attitudes dominated the South.”
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The conservative position, of insisting on the complete defense of slavery, played into the radicals hands and of course sat very ill with the normal requirements of conservative statesmanship, namely to manage necessary changes in ways which minimize the subsequent disturbance to the prevailing order.
The fact that the political establishment did nothing to avert a crisis leading to secession weakens the third interpretation being considered here.
This claims that the radical younger politicians in the Democratic Party sought to purify their party by removing the political elite, through constant pressure for more radical national policies to protect slavery. If the elite was actually doing all it could to protect slavery in the national political arena,
then this particular way of outflanking the elite would appear to have been a somewhat unpromising approach.

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