Themes of the American Civil War
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| Herrenvolk democracy in the South provides a convincing explanation of this phenomenon, even though his interpretation disappoints those who would like to believe that ordinary non-slaveholding whites supported the slave system only because they were duped by the hegemonic power of the slaveocracy’s ideology. 54 A second fundamental contention needs to be linked to this notion of a viable Southern democracy. Despite all their personal rivalries, animosities, and jockeyings for place and power, Southern politicians agreed that their section faced a major political crisis in the s. That crisis may have been, in important respects, intensified by the politicians themselves or by Southern fire-eaters promoting an array of arguments in favor of separation. But the debate over slavery was not controlled by Southern politicians and propagandists. Northern antislavery and abolitionist sentiment grew enormously from the sand it permeated Northern religious as well as political life. 55 The proslavery apologists claim that Northern opinion became increasingly critical of slavery during the s flowed from neither Southern Secession • 59 fantasy nor political gamesmanship. Congressional debates may have become exasperatingly legalistic, but they translated into legislative and constitutional terms those far wider concerns over the South’s peculiar institution. It was no wonder that Southern politicians became almost entirely preoccupied with the defense of slavery and the South from 1854 onwards. Although they had the leeway to contain and channel that debate—choosing instead on occasions to intensify it—they could never control the national controversy over slavery. The ideological secessionists position was formulated in the sand widely promoted from the late s. The turbulent debates of the mid- 1850s over the fate of slavery and the newly opened territories of Kansas and Nebraska simply served to strengthen and propagate the views of those who had seen that Northern antislavery opinion would inevitably increase. In July, Jefferson Davis, while campaigning in Mississippi, had declared, “If secession presented the only alternative to social and political degradation, he believed Mississippi would adopt the alternative, even had her citizens to leave their widows and orphans alone to weep upon her fields.” 56 Later in the decade Davis did nothing to prevent the drift to secession; indeed, his political actions accelerated that movement. And when the secessionist crisis came he involved himself deeply in the management of the process towards secession, in the realization that secession was likely to lead also to war. The arguments which came to ahead in 1860 had been debated exhaustively, in election after election and instate after state, during the s. They concerned the very future of the South in the Union. No political movement of any significance arose in the South after 1854 to proclaim the importance of other issues or to dismiss the politics of slavery as merely projecting the concerns and interests of an elite. Southern politicians put the vital question of the future of the section’s political and social order repeatedly and passionately to their white electorates throughout the decade. The overwhelming response was that slavery and slaveholding rights should be defended with the utmost vigilance and vigor. Given the white electorates repeated endorsements of this agenda, the secessionists acted logically in 1860. The probability remains—however unpalatable to us—that there was far more consistency between the decision to secede and the beliefs held by white electorates than recent interpretations of these events have allowed. Jefferson Davis’s declarations offer a salutary reminder that politicians often do what they say they will do. Notes 1. John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic I, Commerce and Download 2.25 Mb. Share with your friends:
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