Themes of the American Civil War
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| The Role of Slavery Jefferson Davis, it should be remembered, was not only the constitutional head of the Confederate states but also a wealthy Mississippi cotton planter and thus, in a more general sense, the elected guardian of the dominant economic and political interests within Southern society. For the conservative planter class, the secession movement had promised both liberation from Northern tyranny and also the less welcome prospect of unbridled popular challenges to the established order. In the event, radical control of the secession process had already been superseded, and by February, it was the political moderates such as Davis himself who were firmly in charge. Yet the potentiality for domestic upheaval had by no means disappeared, particularly since the Confederacy quickly become embroiled in a disruptive and largely internal war for national survival. Adjourning the Confederate Congress in February, 1862, another leading planter-statesman, Howell Cobb of Georgia, who had presided over the constitutional deliberations in Montgomery twelvemonths earlier, argued that the South’s “revolution” was unique in its conservatism. Usually revolutions are the result of the excited passions of the people whose patience is exhausted, and hence their popular tendencies have too frequently degraded them into anarchy and discord Cobb concluded. 32 Jefferson Davis’s instinctive fear of revolution not only embraced potential challenges to the political and economic power of the planter class from the white majority but was also based upon fears of a radical subversion of the Southern racial order. It is a telling fact that both in the inaugural address and in subsequent speeches during the war’s first year, Jefferson Davis avoided any mention of black slavery, the one aspect of Southern society which fundamentally distinguished the region from the rest of the American Union. On one level, Davis’s aversion to discussing slavery can be said to reflect the continuing and widespread apprehensions over the possibility of slave rebellion however, it also demonstrated the profound difficulty that the President faced in attempting to fashion a legitimate national identity, based upon the existing realities of Southern life. Slaveholders formed only a minority of southerners, and Davis was surely aware of the potential social fragmentation—and therefore the collapse of his vision of national “homogeneity”—that would arise if substantial numbers of whites 160 • Martin Crawford not to mention their black neighbors, slave and free) sought to dissent from the region’s dominant labor and caste system. As scholars have now begun to insist, black slavery was the Confederacy’s true Achilles heel. Ashe toured the Deep South in the immediate aftermath of Fort Sumter, William Howard Russell found reassurances about the security of the slave system increasingly hard to swallow. There is something suspicious in the constant never-ending statement that we are not afraid of our slaves the British correspondent reported from Montgomery Fears of insurrection arguably played a key role in determining the Confederacy’s destiny from the outset, and, as the war bit deeper, the regime’s waning control over its 3.5 million black slaves proved decisive to its outcome. Approximately 600,000 slaves abandoned their plantation and farm homes during the war and entered the Union lines nearly a quarter of the fugitives enlisted in the federal army Davis himself was not immune from slavery’s erosions: in Maya number of his slaves robbed the plantation house at Brierfield, Mississippi, before running away the same month his Richmond coachman, William Andrew Jackson, also escaped. (Jackson subsequently traveled to England, where he took a leading part in arousing pro-Union opinion. Jefferson Davis’s biographers omit all mention of his slave coachman’s exploits, despite the fact that the escape to Union lines at least was well publicized.) 35 To argue that the antebellum South’s most distinctive feature was black slavery is hardly novel, but it is important to acknowledge how fundamentally committed this society—especially the cotton states of the Deep South from where Jefferson Davis’s legitimacy and authority primarily emanated—had become to maintaining the existing racial order. As the South’s vital labor force, black slaves were subjected to a unique form of racial and class subordination. Yet we should also acknowledge how instrumental a role race played in maintaining the stability of white society. Although the social, economic, and cultural bonds that linked the yeoman farmer to his wealthy planter neighbor were complex ones, it was race that in so many ways provided the final and secure basis for class stability in the nineteenth- century South. In no other part of America did race play such a vital role in structuring relationships between the various social groups than in the uniquely biracial society of the Southern states. 36 The planter class did not survive the war intact new men came to govern in the South. But the redeemer leadership of the post-Reconstruction era continued to employ race as the most effective means of ensuring that neither the newly emancipated blacks nor the lower orders of white society would mount any serious political challenge to governing class authority. African- American political subordination in the rural South in the late nineteenth century was facilitated by new forms of economic dependence, while the majority of Southern whites continued to believe that their liberty could Davis and the Confederacy • 161 be secured only by resisting black progress in any meaningful form. When in the Populist revolt impoverished white farmers threatened to breakout of the traditional patterns of class dependence and even to suggest limited cooperation with their black counterparts, the response from the Southern Democratic leadership was swift and brutally efficient. By the beginning of the twentieth century black and, to a lesser extent, lower-class white disfranchisement had helped reestablish the traditional relationship between race, class, and power which the Populists and, by different means, the invading Yankees had threatened to subvert. Jefferson Davis’s conscious avoidance of the central theme of Southern history, therefore, provides an important clue to the ultimate bankruptcy of Confederate nationalism Ironically, by failing to confront the issue of black slavery in his founding rhetoric, Davis implicitly undermined his own argument fora distinct Southern nationality. And as the conflict progressed, and Confederate military deficiencies were cruelly exposed at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and elsewhere, the President’s ideological appeal to southerners became founded on little more than resisting the barbaric Northern conduct of the war, now made more barbaric by what was seen as Lincoln’s incitement to servile insurrection As the war took a dramatic new course following Lincoln’s emancipation decree in January, 1863, Jefferson Davis showed how few ideological resources he now had at his disposal. Every crime which could characterize the course of demons has marked the course of the invader the President told an impromptu crowd at the Confederate White House a few days after the decree came into effect. By showing themselves so utterly disgraced that if the question was proposed whether you would combine with hyenas or Yankees, I trust every Virginian would say, give me the hyenas Download 2.25 Mb. Share with your friends:
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