The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865

THE
CONFEDERATE NATION
1861*1865

By
EMORY M. THOMAS

ILLUSTRATED

N
ATIONALISM has been a perennial theme in American historiography, but surprisingly enough historians have devoted but scant attention to the analysis of Southern nationalism. Yet the brief and tragic experiment of the Confederate States of America with nationalism provides a laboratory scarcely less interesting than that provided by the American States between 1774 and 1789. Because historians are camp followers of victorious armies, most of them take for granted the triumph of the first American bid for nationalism and the failure of the Southern. Yet, on the surface at least, the Old South of the fifties and sixties boasted more and more persuasive ingredients of national unity than had the American states in 1774. For the South—and the Confederacy—had, among whites at least, far greater ethnic homogeneity than had the United States of the 1770s, for less than one percent of the population of the Confederate States was foreign born. It acknowledged a greater degree of religious unity than could be found in the original States—for outside Maryland and Louisiana the whole of the Southern population was not only Protestant but evangelical. It displayed a substantial economic unity, with concentration on staple crop agriculture and on slaves as a work force. By modern standards it confessed pronounced class differences, but by its own standards it could boast that it was a classless society, for all whites could claim membership in an upper class: here was a principle of social philosophy which speedily took on the authority of a moral and a religious principle and provided the South with one of the most powerful of all the forces making for national unity—a common ideology. Nor, for all its inferiority in population and resources, was the Confederacy without military advantages: a territory more extensive than any which had ever been conquered in the whole of modern history; interior lines of communication; a long military tradition and superior military leaders; and a not unreasonable expectation of a foreign intervention which would rescue the South as French and Dutch intervention had rescued the new United States during the Revolutionary war. Perhaps most important of all was the elementary consideration that the South did not have to win on the field of battle in order to achieve independence, for it could afford to lose all the battles and all the campaigns and still triumph as long as it was prepared to settle simply for independence with no demands on the Union except the elementary one that it let the Sisters depart in peace.

With all these advantages, why did the South lose? That is the question to which Professor Thomas addresses himself in
The Confederate Nation: 1861–1865,
and whose answer he seeks down almost labyrithine ways. Was the failure political and constitutional; was it perhaps impossible for a government based on the principle of decentralization and state rights to fight and win a modern war? Was it military, insofar as the Confederacy never achieved unity of command, and never exploited its resources effectively? Was it economic and financial—reliance on an agrarian economy which, with the success of the Union blockade, was unable to provide essential manufactures? Was it diplomatic—the failure of King Cotton to vindicate his sovereignty? Was it, in the end, moral—the inability of a crusade for slavery to rally support from those Old World states whose recognition and support was, in the end, essential to victory?

In
The Confederate Nation
Professor Thomas has reflected the powerful and persuasive political, cultural, and racial claims of Southern nationalism against the background of the economic, the diplomatic, and the moral, which proved less responsive to importunate demands for national independence. He has traced the evolution of that section which we know as the Old South into the Confederate States, and then the fortunes and misfortunes of the embryonic Confederate nation as it embraced defeat and yielded to disintegration. In the course of this review he provides us with a picture of an alternative American nationalism—a nationalism which, with all its roots in America, had in many respects more in common with the nationalism of the Old World than with that of the New.

The Confederate Nation: 1861–1865
is a volume in the New American Nation series, a comprehensive, cooperative survey of the area now embraced in the United States. Other aspects of this era are set forth in David Potter’s
Impending Crisis,
Clement Eaton’s
Growth of Southern Civilization,
Russel Nye’s
Society and Culture in America: 1830–1860,
and in forthcoming volumes on the Civil War, constitutional development, and the culture of the war and the postwar years.

H
ENRY
S
TEELE
C
OMMAGER
R
ICHARD
B. M
ORRIS

A
T some early point in our correspondence about this book, Professor Henry Steele Commager stated that a new history of the Confederacy needs “not so much new information, as new and fresh ideas.” To be sure, the literature of the South as short-lived nation is extensive. Still, there is “new information” here. For the most part, though, I have emphasized “new and fresh ideas”—my own and those derived from recent research and scholarship on the Confederacy by others.

I have attempted to write a narrative interpretation. The Confederacy lived briefly; but the human drama involved all but dictates that its historian be a storyteller. The Confederate era was an extended moment during which Southerners attempted simultaneously to define themselves as a people and to act out a national identity, all the while engaged in total war for corporate survival. The momentous nature of these events and the centrality of this experience in the American and Southern past demand that its historian offer interpretations and attempt to derive the meaning of it all.

During my research, and in the organizing, writing and revising of this book, many people have given generously of their time and talents. Naturally I owe a great debt to other scholars upon whose works I have built. Many friends within the historical profession have helped with ideas and advice. I would like to thank especially Eleanor Brokenbrough of the Confederate Museum, Louis H. Manarin of the Virginia State Library, John M. Jennings and Howson Cole of the Virginia Historical Society, Richard B. Harwell of the University of Georgia Library, and the staffs of the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, the University of Georgia Library, and the Southern Historical Collection in the University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill. I much appreciate the indulgence and advice of series editors Richard B. Morris and Henry Steele Commager, as well as the kindness of Corona Machemer at Harper
&
Row. Finally I thank my family and friends who “got me through it” with understanding and love.

E
MORY
M. T
HOMAS

O
N an October Tuesday in 1859 an old man with long silver hair poured disconsolance into his diary; Edmund Ruffin was sixty-five years old and prepared to die. “I have lived long enough,” Ruffin wrote, “a little more time of such unused & wearisome passage of time will make my life too long.”
¹

Behind Ruffin’s lament was a deep-seated sense of frustration and failure. He had not failed at the normal activities at which people fail and about which they then consume their later years fretting and worrying. Ruffin had been a highly successful Virginia planter and an esteemed agricultural scientist, he had most of the trappings of personal and vocational success, but in the one great passion of his mature life, he was frustrated. The old man had devoted the last fifteen of his sixty-five years to the dream of Southern independence. He perceived the planter civilization of the South in peril; the source of that peril was “Yankee” and union with “Yankees.” Thus he preached revolution. Ruffin was a rebel with a cause, a secular prophet, but his cause lacked a constituency, and the prophet lacked sufficient honor in his own beloved South.

On that same October Tuesday in 1859, less than two hundred miles from the plantation where Ruffin brooded, events were taking place which promised to brighten his mood considerably. Perhaps even as Ruffin wrote, United States Marines under the command of Colonel R. E. Lee stormed a fire engine house at Harpers Ferry, suppressed an attempted slave insurrection, and captured its leader Captain John Brown. Like Ruffin, Brown was an aging zealot and a rebel, who, on the night of October 16, had attempted to seize the town of Harpers Ferry along with the United States arsenal there and establish a base for what he hoped would be a massive slave insurrection, “to purge this land with blood.” On October 18, however, Brown’s raid was an apparent failure just thirty-six hours after it began. Oddly, John Brown seemed unperturbed by his failure;
“Let them hang me, ”
he said.
²

If Brown was unruffled, Ruffin was jubilant when he learned of the abortive raid and its consequences. The news acted like an emotional tonic on him. “Such a practical exercise of abolition principles is needed to stir the sluggish blood of the South,” he wrote. On November 21 he contemplated attending Brown’s execution, scheduled for December 2 in Charlestown, but considered the difficult journey and the cold weather and resisted his “strong inclination.” As the execution date drew nearer, though, Ruffin succumbed to his feelings, and at six-thirty on the morning of November 26, he set out for the “ ‘seat of war.’ ”
³

When he arrived in Harpers Ferry, Ruffin visited the fire engine house and other shrines of the raid. He found friends and began to feel a part of the event he had come to witness; once in Charlestown his zeal to participate became almost manic. When he suffered the ignominy of arrest as a “suspicious person” and learned to his distress that only military personnel would be able to view Brown’s execution, he attempted to make some military connection. Finally Colonel Francis H. Smith, superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), offered Ruffin a place in his corps of cadets and furnished Ruffin with a rifle and uniform overcoat for the occasion.
⁴

“Ludicrous” was how Ruffin described his appearance: a sixty-five-year-old man with white locks flowing over the collar of a borrowed overcoat, stumping along in a formation of teen-aged boys for two miles to the execution grounds. For Ruffin, though, the opportunity to take part in the execution more than compensated for the embarrassment.

To Ruffin’s delight, the VMI cadets were stationed closest to the gallows, about fifty yards away. John Brown seemed to Ruffin a “willing assistant” in the grisly business at hand. Giving no sign of fear or concern, he walked where he was led and stood alone and unbending over the trap for an interminable ten minutes while the fifteen hundred troops took their assigned positions. Ruffin carefully recorded Brown’s every twitch and convulsion during the transit from life to death. In his diary Ruffin praised Brown’s “animal courage” and “complete fearlessness of & insensibility to danger & death.”

His praise was grudging, though, and later Ruffin resented public references to Brown’s courage, lest the villain appear less villainous.
⁵
Ruffin remained in Charlestown for several days after the execution and collected a few of the pikes Brown had brought to Harpers Ferry to arm his followers. Ruffin labeled and shipped some of them to Southern politicians as propaganda weapons, tangible evidence of Yankee perfidy.
⁶

What inspired Ruffin to leave home in late November, journey fourteen hours by train, go without adequate sleep, and expose himself to ridicule in the company of boys to watch a stranger die? Obviously part of the answer lay in Ruffin’s emotional and mental composition. His journey to Charlestown was a caricature, the extreme expression of a true believer. But to dismiss Ruffin as a demented zealot would be to ignore those other white Southerners who to some degree shared his zeal. The essential fact of the Confederate experience was that a sufficient number of white Southern Americans felt more Southern than American or, perhaps more accurately, that they were orthodox Americans and Northerners were apostates. Southern sectionalism became Southern nationalism and underwent trial by war. The degree of Ruffin’s enthusiasm was unique and extreme; his persuasion was not. The answer to the riddle of Ruffin’s behavior—and by extension that of the South—was what Southerners expressed in one syllable: “cause.”

Regarding another American struggle for independence, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1815 that their revolution of 1776 had been complete “in the minds of the people … before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.”
⁷
The same was true of the Confederate revolution. The Confederate experience began in the Old South, not as a nation or a would-be nation, but as the cause.

The Southern cause was the transcendent extension of the Southern life style; the cause was ideology. In this context “ideology” is not synonymous with “dogma” or “doctrine.” Rather, Southern ideology was a belief system, a value system, a world view, or
Weltanschauung.
It was the result of a secular transsubstantiation in which the common elements in Southern life became sanctified in the Southern mind. The South’s ideological cause was more than the sum of its parts, more than the material circumstances and conditions from which it sprang. In the Confederate South the cause was ultimately an affair of the viscera.

During the middle third of the nineteenth century, Southerners began to close their minds to alternatives to their “way of life"; they celebrated and sanctified the status quo and prepared to defend and extend it against threats real or imagined. In this process interests and institutions became ideals and goals. Questions about the Southern way of life became moral questions, and compromises of the Southern life style became concessions of virtue and righteousness. The Southern world view developed both positive and negative perspectives. The cause was Janus-faced: it stood
for
a distinctive Southern life style and
against
the Yankee alternative. Indeed, it is often difficult to determine for any given time whether love of things Southern or hatred of things Northern was the dominant motive force.
⁸

If the raw materials of life in the ante-bellum South were the positive roots of the Confederate ideological cause, then a proper study of the cause must first examine the components of that life style. Such a study is more easily proposed than accomplished. Life in the Old South was more than a little like the house that Jack built: each element depended upon every other element in the whole. The Southern bodies social, economic, intellectual, and political were decidedly commingled. And at the center of Southern experience lay a fundamental paradox: Southerners were at the same time Southerners and Americans.

More than other Americans, Southerners developed a sectional identity outside the national mainstream. The Southern life style tended to contradict the national norm in ways that life styles of other sections did not.
⁹

But if Edmund Ruffin represented an intense Southern commitment, others such as Andrew Johnson responded with similar intensity to their American identity. By turns since about 1830 or so, Southerners have been either a peculiar people who pursued a counterculture outside and opposite the American mainstream or products of the American experience no more peculiar than most other Americans.
¹⁰

In terms of social structure, popular mythology derives much of its view of the South from the moonlight-and-magnolias legend, which portrays a society of two well-defined tiers. Plantation aristocrats formed the upper stratum; slaves and “po white trash” the lower. Planters were bona fide gentle folk who set the tone and pace of Southern life. “Trashy whites” made little impact. While they believed themselves superior to bonded blacks, in reality—so the legend goes—the “po whites” were of little worth and less consequence than the happy and loyal “darkies.” Such was life in the never-never South.

Aside from the romance of moonlight and magnolias, much of the lingering appeal of the old legend stems from the fact that it portrays a society that was “different.” More precisely, it portrays a society dominated by landed aristocrats: the South as aristocracy in contradiction to the middle-class democracy supposedly characteristic of America.
¹¹

But the time is long past when thoughtful people conceived of Southern society in such simplistic terms. In fact, there was potential tension between aristocracy and democracy in the social structure of the Old South. Genuinely “great” planters were relatively few in number. In 1860 only about 2,300 people owned as many as one hundred slaves and extensive acreage. Approximately 8,000 Southerners owned as many as fifty slaves and significant arable land. Naturally these numbers usually represent heads of families and thus the planter class was perhaps five times larger than the number of slaveholders. Still, in 1860 there were 1.5 million heads of families in the South, and of these only 46,000 met the rule-of-thumb criteria for planter status: land and twenty or more slaves. Only about one-fourth of the South’s heads of families in 1860 owned any slaves at all, and of these an estimated 60 percent owned no more than five.

From these data emerges a picture of a fairly broad-based status pyramid in Southern society. In contrast to the moonlight-and-magnolias model, facts indicate that the vast majority of whites outside the planter class were neither “po” nor “trash.” Census data and tax records confirm the existence of a large class of small planters and yeoman farmers. There was a Southern “mudsill,” but even among landless hunters and “squatters,” class distinctions were ambiguous. Mountain folk who retained a sturdy pioneer heritage and independence may have paid few taxes and resisted the efforts of census takers, but they were not poor. In short, research in hard data on the Old South has led to what one historian has termed the “discovery of the middle class.”
¹²

While the existence of a Southern middle class composed of small planters and yeoman farmers, together with a small group of townspeople (merchants, craftspeople, and the like), alters the traditional view of an aristocratic South, it does not necessarily overturn it. The important questions are: what was the role of those Southerners whose social position lay somewhere between planter and slave, and how much influence did they have? Scholars have offered at least three possible answers.

First, it may have been that the planters were not the “real” South after all, that the middle class, or “plain folk,” were in fact the backbone of the Old South. Planters depended upon plain folk politically for votes, economically for vital skills and jobs, and socially for deference and companionship if nothing else.
¹³

A second answer to the riddle contends that the planter aristocracy did not in fact exist. “Aristocrats” were merely plain folk with land and slaves,
nouveaux riches
whose behavior was conditioned by plebeian origins, not by any aristocratic code.
¹⁴

A third explanation focuses upon evolutionary change in the ante-bellum South. Once upon a time, in the colonial South, there were wise and gentle aristocrats, but the spread of the “cotton kingdom” changed “the land of the country gentlemen.” Gradually, in the early 1800s, cotton culture spread, and in time social mobility declined. By mid-century the planter class had degenerated into a group of cotton capitalists who ruthlessly exercised their traditional political hegemony and practiced a kind of thought control by dominating politics, press, pulpit, school, and society. The plain-folk majority were unwitting victims of the cotton kingdom, which, “like the rising industrialism of the North, … placed material profits above human rights.”
¹⁵

Each of these accounts of the role and influence of Southern plain folk in effect Americanizes the Old South. If the real Old South was actually the mass of forgotten nonplanter whites, or an amalgam of frontier coon hunters some of whom happened to be wealthy, or a class of well-meaning farmers escorted into folly by selfish leaders, then the Old South was at heart a middle-class democracy well within the American tradition. None of these contentions, however, adequately explains why this one group of American middle-class democrats so despised another group of American middle-class democrats as to dissolve the Union and fight to perpetuate that dissolution. Moreover, if the plain folk were really the backbone of Southern society, why did they follow the planters out of the United States and into a desperate war for the sake of planter interests?

Regardless of the numbers of plain folk, the fact remains that aristocracies are by definition small groups of people. Whether or not Southern aristocrats were but one step removed from frontier farmers is not as significant as the fact that the planters believed in a landed aristocratic ideal and acted out that belief. However coarse their manners and tastes, the planter class pursued planter class interests and for the most part led the rest of the South into the same course.
¹⁶