America Aflame (32 page)

The delegates elected Jefferson Davis to a six-year term as the first president of the Confederate States of America. A strong choice, given Davis's extensive military and political background. Even his ramrod-straight bearing made him look presidential. But colleagues found him aloof as if, at times, he were staring beyond them at something far distant, perhaps his own fate. Davis was also inclined to equate compromise with weakness and interpret opposition as a personal attack. Self-righteous at times and without a sense of humor always, Davis's character did not suit his position as a leader of a new nation, even if his professional credentials said otherwise. Even his wife, Varina Howell Davis, admitted, “He did not know the arts of the politician, and would not practice them if understood.”
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Despite his distance from the radicals, Davis had supported secession from the time of Lincoln's election. He had led the Buchanan administration's charge against fellow Democrat Stephen A. Douglas. Robert E. Lee admired Davis's forthrightness but added that he was “of course, one of the extremist politicians.”
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In an effort to appeal to the conservative sentiment both in and out of the Confederate government, the delegates turned to Alexander Stephens for vice president. So here he was, a prisoner of his sense of duty, not only supporting but also playing a leading role in a government he had fought to prevent. Perhaps he felt, along with fellow Unionist James Alcorn of Mississippi, that he could “seize the wild and maddened steed by the mane” and apply a brake to the hotspurs' course, thereby saving the South from certain ruin. In the meantime, he would speak his mind, as he always did.
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Jefferson Davis had delivered a lofty inaugural address meant for worldwide consumption. He stressed the constitutional bases of the new government and depicted secession as a conservative movement designed to preserve the founding principles of the American nation. A month later, on March 21, 1861, his vice president delivered a more candid and more memorable speech. Historians still quote it today. Yet Stephens did not believe he had said anything momentous on that evening of March 21, 1861. He merely reiterated what southerners had been saying and writing about their society since the sectional conflict flared in the 1850s: that slavery and southern civilization were synonymous. Stephens praised the new Confederate constitution that “put at rest
forever
all the agitating questions relating to … the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.” While many secessionists wrapped themselves in the cloak of the Founding Fathers and their ideals, Stephens, the realist, would have none of that. The Founders had believed “that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error.”

Whether Stephens rendered the Founders' views on slavery accurately is beside the point. The Confederate States of America would remove any ambiguity about the permanent status and stature of the African. “Our new government,” Stephens informed the audience, “is founded upon exactly the opposite idea: its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.”
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Stephens's “Cornerstone” speech attained a national notoriety that surprised him. Anyone who had read southern publications over the previous five years would find little new or startling in the address. Yet coming as the new Confederate nation was attempting to establish its legitimacy, such ideas were bound to achieve a wide circulation. Jefferson Davis was furious with his vice president. The speech jeopardized the careful work of building the case for his country on the issue of state versus national sovereignty. Northerners and Europeans roundly condemned the speech, though Stephens's words confirmed for many northerners the Republican charge that the Confederate States of America was nothing more than a slave republic. As one Republican editor wrote, the speech “was of incalculable value to us.”
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Davis himself subscribed to Stephens's views. Many southerners did. In a speech to the Confederate Congress just after the war began, and with little national or international coverage, Davis placed the crisis squarely on the northern majority in Congress and its “persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States.” He praised slavery as an institution in which “a superior race” transformed “brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers. With interests of such overwhelming magnitude imperiled, the people of the Southern States were driven by the conduct of the North to the adoption of some course of action to avert the danger with which they were openly menaced.”
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Again, nothing new. Yet it seemed curious to identify slavery and the South as one and inseparable in order to forge a new nation and rally all southerners behind the government, given that a majority of white southerners did not own slaves. Plus, constitutional reforms in the southern states had increased the political power of the nonslaveholding majority. It would have seemed politic to broaden the appeal of secession. What benefits would disunion bestow on this large class of men and their families? Would a Republican administration tap into nonslaveholders' discontents—articulated in great detail by North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper—and offer patronage positions in exchange for their support? Perhaps the growing immigrant population in southern cities would combine with native-born nonslaveholding whites to oppose secession. Or, the fiercely independent yeomen farmers and their families in the southern mountains—the Appalachians and the Ozarks—might disdain following their “betters” out of the Union.

Except for South Carolina, secession was not a certain thing. Even in the Palmetto State divisions existed that worried Low Country planters. James H. Hammond, the governor and former senator, warned fire-eaters to tone down their rhetoric for fear of alienating upcountry nonslaveholding farmers and townsmen who did not share their zeal for disunion. In Georgia, the secessionist governor, Joseph E. Brown, was so concerned about opposition to leaving the Union that he suppressed the statewide vote totals for delegates to the special convention called in January 1861. Not until 1972, when historian Michael Johnson uncovered the tally, did we learn that secessionist candidates carried the state by a very narrow margin, though Brown had reported the result as a “clear majority.”
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In convention delegate votes across the Lower South, secessionist candidates averaged fewer than 55 percent of the total vote, a majority but not an overwhelming mandate. These figures were unimpressive considering that the secessionists presented a clear program and controlled the press and much of the wealth and political power of their states, while their opponents divided on the conditions of cooperation with the federal government. Only one of the seven states that seceded by early February 1861—Texas—submitted its ordinance of secession to a popular vote. Across the Lower South, secessionists were strongest in those districts where plantation slavery predominated, a confirmation of the connection between the Confederate States of America and slavery, but also perhaps of the tenuous loyalty of the nonslaveholders.

It was easier to profess pro-Union sentiment in the Upper South. The situation in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas presented a great problem for Davis's fledgling government, not to mention the border slave states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Without the states of the Upper South, particularly Virginia, the Confederacy could prove stillborn. Public expressions of contempt for secession and secessionists abounded in North Carolina and Virginia. Responding to South Carolina's secession ordinance, a Wilmington, North Carolina, editor asked readers, “Are you
submissionists
to the dictation of South Carolina … are you to be called cowards because you do not follow the crazy lead of that crazy state?” A Charlottesville, Virginia, editor declared that he “hated South Carolina for precipitating secession.” When Virginia voted for its convention to meet in mid-February, only 32 of the 152 delegates identified themselves as secessionists. Tennessee went the Old Dominion one better by voting not to call a convention at all. On February 18, as Jefferson Davis prepared to take his oath of office, Arkansas voters elected to their convention a strong majority of Unionists. North Carolinians concluded the rout at the end of the month by joining Tennesseans in refusing to call a convention.
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The border states proved even less cooperative. A special session of the Kentucky state legislature voted decisively not to call a convention and promptly adjourned. In Maryland, Governor Thomas H. Hicks did not even bother to call a special session of the legislature on the subject. A unanimous vote in Delaware's lower house expressed “unqualified disapproval” of secession. Missouri decided to hold a convention, but voters elected nary a secessionist to serve.
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The very arguments mobilized by secessionists—protection of slavery, economic independence, political sovereignty, and security—found life on the other side of the debate. James Robb, a New Orleans entrepreneur, wondered if secession would merely result in trading a northern master for a European master, as British industry would overwhelm nascent southern enterprises. Businessmen in Upper South cities were as concerned about competition from Charleston, Mobile, and New Orleans as from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Merchants who had cultivated commercial and financial connections with northerners opposed secession. Some slaveholders feared for their property more out of the Union than in it. Others worried that war and violence would inevitably accompany secession. A Presbyterian minister in Richmond warned that secession would precipitate “a horrible civil war,” and a fellow Presbyterian in Kentucky advised, “If we desire to perish, all we have to do is to leap onto this vortex of disunion.”
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Northerners followed developments in the Upper South closely. The squabbling reinforced the Republicans' intransigence to compromise. Even the press in the seceding states expressed doubt about the secession of additional slave states by late February. “Virginia would never secede now,” a Charleston editor lamented. An excited Republican colleague wrote to William H. Seward, “We have scarcely left a vestige of secession in the western part of Virginia, and very little indeed in any part of the state.… The Gulf Confederacy can count Virginia out of their little family arrangement—
she will never
join them.”
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The optimism was misplaced. Northerners and Republicans in particular overestimated the strength of Unionist sentiment throughout the South and underestimated the attraction of slavery to a broad swath of the white population. In the Lower South, slaveholding households ranged from 49 percent of total white households in South Carolina to 27 percent in Texas. In South Carolina and Mississippi, the first two states to leave the Union, nearly half of all white households owned slaves. In those states in particular, what debate existed revolved around how best to protect the institution of slavery and avert economic disaster and racial warfare. Those who opposed secession were almost always those who held out for a constitutional settlement or compromise. Few white citizens in those states wanted to remain in the Union under Republican rule without new constitutional protections.

The opposition to immediate secession in the Upper South reflected in part the lower percentages of white slaveholding families in those states, typically less than 20 percent. But even in states such as Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, the Unionist position was rarely unconditional. The votes and decisions thwarting secession in those states occurred before the various compromise plans failed. Many there assumed that their continued adherence to the Union could serve as leverage to broker a compromise between the incoming administration and the seceding states of the Lower South. Only a handful of Upper South Unionists would countenance military action against the Confederate states.

Abraham Lincoln had heard about Alexander Stephens's pro-Union speech in Milledgeville in December and wrote to his old friend for a copy. Stephens complied but warned the president-elect that even Unionists would not tolerate interference with slavery where it already existed. Lincoln responded with surprise: “I wish to assure you, as once friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy, that there is no cause for such fears.” Stephens pressed the issue further in his reply: “We both have an earnest desire to preserve and maintain the Union” provided the administration followed the principles upon which that Union was founded. The great fear of the South and even of Unionists such as himself, Stephens explained, was Lincoln's party, whose “leading object” was “to put the institutions of nearly half the States under the ban of public opinion and national condemnation.” He begged Lincoln to understand that the “Union under the Constitution” could not be maintained by force. At that point, the entire South, Unionists included, would join the battle.
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Stephens understood, if northerners did not, that every white person in the South, slaveholder or not, had a stake in the institution. The existence of slavery, its proponents had argued for more than two decades, benefited all white southerners. Slavery protected the South from the incipient class warfare brewing in the North between capital and labor. African slavery created a permanent working class laboring in the most menial positions. The system liberated whites to pursue higher occupations and opportunities for economic independence. As members of the superior race, all whites were masters. Race was the new class: no white was inferior to another white as long as Africans remained in bondage. In January 1861, J. D. B. De Bow summarized the racial appeal of the pro-slavery argument to nonslaveholders.
“The non-slaveholder of the South preserves the status of the white man, and is not regarded as an inferior or a dependant.”
Slavery also guaranteed republican government by conferring a broad equality on all whites. The South was a White Republic, and secessionists argued that only by leaving the Union and establishing a slaveholding nation could they preserve the political rights, the economic independence, and the superiority of all white southerners.
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