Nature of the Secession Crisis

As Jefferson Davis wrote on January 17, 1861, The Election was not the
Cause it was but the last feather which you know breaks the Camel’s back.”
Senator Davis had played a full role in arguing for the most complete form of possible federal protection for the institution of slavery during early By January, 1860, he was satisfied that there has been a great advance in public opinion towards the Southern rights creed. We are now all-powerful at the South, but are still in a minority at the North In May, 1860, in along Senate speech, he repeatedly stressed that the government of the United
States consisted of a compact between sovereign members. That compact depended upon vital principles of equality between the states and respect for and adherence to community independence While he argued that he hoped the Democrats would reunite as a national conservative party,
he would accept no compromise by acceding to the Northern Democrats’
ideas concerning popular sovereignty in the territories. At the same time he argued that agitation which had started as a quest for sectional power had now developed into a full-blown Northern attack on slave society. From
September 21, 1860, to the presidential election Davis toured quite extensively in his native state of Mississippi. Immediately after the election his own preference was to try to move cautiously to try to ensure that eight to ten states acted together. But, interestingly enough, he advised Robert
Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina that if his state seceded and the federal government tried to coerce it back into the Union, then the whole South would unite to defend South Carolina’s actions at the same time, he advised that South Carolina need not wait for Abraham Lincoln to enter the White
House before seceding. Within Mississippi, Davis, together with the state’s other Senator and Congressmen, met the Governor in early November fora two-day session. Although Davis argued for delay and for secession only by a number of states working together, the group decided by a four to three majority to calla special session of the state legislature to discuss the situation. On November 30 Davis contacted Eli Whitney concerning the shipment of arms to Mississippi. In early December he was speaking in the
Senate of impending war and the secession of his own state, and on
December 14 he added his name to a declaration that the Union could notwork and that a Southern confederacy had to be organized speedily.
On January 5, 1861, Davis joined a caucus of senators from Georgia, Florida,
Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi which resolved that those states should secede immediately and that a convention should meet at Montgomery, Alabama, on or before February 15 to form anew government. When he delivered his own personal farewell address to the United
States Senate on January 21, 1861, Davis asserted that he had conferred with the people of Mississippi before the decision to secede had been taken and that for many years he had maintained that the right of secession was
“an essential attribute of State sovereignty.”
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While Davis did not, immediately on Lincoln’s election, publicly call for secession and confrontation, he had every reason to proceed with caution.
He knew the risks of taking such a step from his experience of the struggle in Mississippi in 1850–51 over the acceptance of the compromise of At that time he had adopted a strong state’s rights approach and had found himself in advance of political opinion within Mississippi, defeated in his effort to ensure the rejection of the compromise measures.
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The experience of 1851, when state political opinion had accepted apolitical accommodation which he wished to reject, would naturally have made him cautious in the crisis of 1860. Such a reaction was reinforced by the fact that Davis himself wanted to see a concerted response by the Southern states to the challenge of Lincoln’s election. Southern leaders discussed at enormous length from November, 1860, to February, 1861, the various tactical considerations which influenced secession. Some southerners wished to wait until Lincoln occupied the White House and to see whether there was an overt act against slavery or the South which would then become the occasion fora grand reaction right across the whole section. Within the Deep South, probably a majority of political leaders came to the view that secession should occur before Lincoln did in fact take up power in the first week of March, But there were many different arguments as to how far the intending secessionist states should wait to cooperate together or simply follow their own individual paths out of the Union. While many of the younger hotheads may have sought immediate action, the more experienced political leaders,
the vast majority of whom were trained lawyers, naturally sought to consider some of the legal, constitutional and, ultimately, military consequences of individual states acts of secession.
But, to conclude, from the public enthusiasm for secession of some of the younger activists and the reluctance among many of the political establishment to declare immediately and explicitly for secession, that the leading
Democrats of the Deep South were fiercely divided over secession exaggerates those essentially tactical differences. Disagreements over procedure and precise tactics were only to be expected in a situation which was potentially highly complex and, to put it mildly, fraught with explosive and dangerous consequences. The fact remains that even moderate Democrats had been closely involved since the summer of 1860 in tactical cooperation with those who were known to be committed to secessionism. The Southern
Democratic candidate for the presidency, John C. Breckinridge, had never himself pressed fora federal slave code or commented on the right of secession, but he had not dissociated himself from out-and-out dis-Unionists such as William Yancey of Alabama. One Southern newspaper pointed out,
“Mr Breckinridge claims that he isn’t a dis-Unionist. An animal not willing to pass fora pig shouldn’t stay in the stye.”
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Southern Secession
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By 1860 all the Democratic Party organizations of the seven Deep South states, and indeed many of those of the upper South as well, had placed their own preoccupations with the future guarantee of the position of slavery within the Union at the heart of all political debate. Insetting national political agendas by 1860, Southern Democratic party organizations made no concessions whatsoever to Northern political opinion. Every so often
Southern Democratic leaders pointed out the advantages of their own view of the Union as a compact between the states and America as a plural society in which different religious and civil preferences would be allowed to flourish through the operation of state sovereignty. But the political programme they offered to the nation was an essentially passive one, of adhering to an agreed structure which permitted states to get on with the ordering of their own internal affairs. Where the federal government was concerned they insisted increasingly on full federal protection for slaveowners to move into federal territories with their property rights in slaves guaranteed.
They also supported occasionally an assertive foreign policy, including the possible acquisition of Cuba, with its slaves, from Spain. But, significantly,
accompanying this vision of limited government in America as a whole,
an increasing number of southerners became ideological secessionists. They believed that the safety of their section lay ultimately outside the Union, since
Northern public opinion was becoming increasingly critical of, if not actually hostile to, slavery and all its ramifications.
It has been suggested that a longer period of reflection after November, might have prevented the decision to secede. This makes sense if it is assumed either that the politicians did not represent the interests or opinions of the Southern electorates, or that the arguments for secession were novel or fresh. In fact, the defense of Southern constitutional rights and the case against Northern antislavery and the Republican Party had been repeated in election after election throughout the s. Even in South Carolina, the least democratic state of the South, the issues which dominated the secession crisis had been debated fully, publicly, and repeatedly in 1851–52 and in Nothing new emerged in 1860 except an explicit assessment of the timing of secession, and even that factor had been aired from 1857 and in some quarters, earlier.
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Moreover, no basis existed for reconciling Southern claims with the Republicans firmly held positions, other than through one side’s capitulation to the other.
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The extent of southerners commitment to the proslavery cause is well illustrated by the limited assistance offered by southerners from the upper slave states to the process of political compromise in the early months of. Much serious discussion focused on resolving the dispute between the seceded Deep South states and the federal Union. From various schemes put forward, most notably the so called Crittenden compromise, named after a prominent Kentucky senator, it is easy to demonstrate how far even moderate
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political leaders of the upper South went in their adherence to slavery. All the various compromise schemes endorsed by politicians from the upper
South stipulated that slavery would be protected by constitutional amendment instates where it already existed. So, too, a constitutional amendment would prohibit Congress from interfering with slavery in existing territories in America south of the line 36°30´, the old Missouri Compromise line of. The proposed Crittenden compromise went even further and stated that any territory acquired in future by the United States which lay south of the line of latitude 36°30´ would be open to slavery this claim was rejected by virtually all Republicans, since it gave every encouragement to Southern politicians to press for the acquisition of territories in the Carribbean or from
Mexico. But, even without that particular additional protection, all the various compromise schemes entrenched slavery where it already existed and offered some prospect for the future extension of slavery into territories which could conceivably become additional slave states.
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This latter concession was anathema to Republicans. Once Republican politicians decided to reject these particular constitutional proposals, then the compromise movement in the upper South had nothing to build upon.
As events transpired, of course, Lincoln’s decision to coerce the South
Carolinians after they fired upon Fort Sumter wrecked any hopes fora compromise peace among politicians from the upper South. The resort to force was wholly unacceptable to them. Both on constitutional grounds and in terms of the political limits upon the use of force which the upper South required, those political leaders of the upper South who were often referred to as the reluctant dis-Unionists were actually also reluctant Unionists.
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Public reactions to the secession crisis well illustrate the rapid decline in
Unionists’ support in the wake of secession and particularly in the aftermath of the firing upon Fort Sumter. A study of Lawrence County, Alabama, which was the county most opposed to secession in that state, shows that by
February, 1861, opposition to secession had fallen, with most public leaders in northern Alabama moving to support separate state secession. Once the war began, concerted efforts were made to organize the county for military action and to hold county society together during the war. When in there was a direct federal military presence in the county, men were stimulated in large numbers to join together in defending their homeland.
In Tennessee there was a dramatic shift in opinion. On February 9, 1861, all four major geographical divisions of the state voted heavily for pro-Union delegates to a convention. After Fort Sumter, however, political opinion in the state shifted dramatically and a referendum on June 8, 1861, resulted in majorities of 68 percent, 80 percent and 89 percent of voters favoring secession in three of the state’s divisions, with only eastern Tennessee voting by 69 percent to 31 percent against separation. That eastern division of the state had only 9 percent of its population enslaved in Lincolns claim,
Southern Secession
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that the secessionist majorities, even in Virginia and Tennessee, resulted from coercion or the implicit threat of coercion, has not been substantiated other than by reference to specific instances which mayor may not have been representative.
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Historians’ desire to see secession as an undemocratic, even deliberately antidemocratic, act can affect the weight given to such evidence.
There is plentiful contrary evidence that a sense of gloomy inevitability influenced the upper South once fighting began. For example, a leading
North Carolinian Unionist, Zebulon B. Vance, noted that when news of Fort
Sumter arrived his hand fell slowly and sadly by the side of a Secessionist.”
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Most Southern Unionists believed that the Union should make concessions on the extension of slavery which the Republicans, who had secured the presidency through wholly constitutional and legitimate means, rejected as a policy. They also required that the Union should restrict its ability to act as a government by avoiding the legitimate use of force in the defense of its territories and its fortifications. The leading Upper South politicians therefore assumed that the federal government was indeed a compact between the states and that the presidential election of 1860 lacked legitimacy. These views were scarcely compatible with Unionism in 1861. Lincoln rejected the doctrine of state sovereignty and its corollary, the right of peaceful secession. He claimed that a small group had systematically developed and propagated that sophism With rebellion thus sugarcoated,
they have been drugging the public mind of their section for more than thirty years He therefore also rejected the Southern challenge to the whole concept of a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people,
by the people having the right to defend its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.”
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Instead, Southern Unionists reacted as if the new administration in Washington was simply there as a dealmaker rather than as apolitical movement which had won the presidential election in every state of the North, in a section which incorporated the majority of the people of the nation. This persistent refusal to abide by the majoritarian decision showed the extent to which even the upper South endorsed the ideological secessionists states rights views and their insistence on the fullest possible constitutional defense of the institution of slavery.
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The discussion in this chapter began by asking how far secession was a conservative or radical act. Some historians have tended to portray secession as the action of radical hotheads throwing aside the restraints and conventions of the political system. If this political radicalism served the self- evidently conservative objective of preserving slavery, it was also inspired,
in some accounts, by a desire to entrench a radical, Jacksonian economic and social order. Against this dynamic, politically radical model of Southern secession maybe set various interpretations which insist that the crisis of 1860 was the handiwork of the slaveowning elite. Some such interpretations set the breakdown of the Union as an almost inevitable structural
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crisis that had to erupt if the South continued in its determination to adhere to slavery. Republican free labor ideology reflected the changing Northern mode of production and articulated the contradictions which could only increase between an industrializing and commercial system and a slave-based economy still set in the stage of merchant capitalism. Other interpretations argue that secession was brought on by apolitical elite. In one view, the slaveowning class feared the future emergence of a Southern Republican movement among the non-slaveowners, and used secession as a means of introducing constitutional changes to constrain the rights, powers, and opportunities of non-slaveowning citizens. In another view, the elite had choked off popular antislavery dissent for decades and wished to create anew republic in which their dominance could be preserved. These various interpretations all raise difficulties when confronted with the events of the
1850s.
The qualifications offered in this chapter point the way to examining secession with two controversial considerations firmly in mind. The first acknowledges that the South was, mainly, a viable and indeed lively democracy by the standards which prevailed in the Western world before While there were defects and lapses in this polity, the Southern system was (for whites) far more open and democratic than any other in the mid- nineteenth-century world, except for the Norths. Voter participation far exceeded, for those enjoying the vote, the level of white male participation today. That white democracy, offering plentiful scope for ambitious political opportunists to enter and manipulate, spawned no significant antislavery political movement in the s. Indeed, after the war the record of Southern white support for the Republicans or for reform in race relations proved to be pathetic. George M. Fredrickson’s argument for the existence of a

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