A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (62 page)

In mid-December, Kentuckian John J. Crittenden, a respected Senate leader, submitted an omnibus set of proposals, which were supported by the Committee of Thirteen—politicians who could have averted war had they so chosen, including Jefferson Davis, Seward, Douglas, and from the House a rising star, Charles Francis Adams.

Crittenden’s resolutions proposed four compromise measures. First, they would restore the Missouri Compromise line; second, prohibit the abolition of slaveholding on federal property in the South; third, establish compensation for owners of runaways; and last, repeal “personal liberty” laws in the North. More important, the compromise would insert the word “slavery” in the Constitution, and then repackage the guarantees with a constitutional guarantee that would make the provisions inviolate to future change.

By that time, the North held the decision for war in its hands. Given that the South was bent on violating the Constitution no matter what, Northerners glumly realized that only one of three options remained: war, compromise, or allowing the Deep South to leave. Since no compromise would satisfy the South, Northerners soberly assessed the benefits of allowing the slaveholding states to depart. The money markets already had plunged because of the turmoil, adding to the national anxiety. Northerners desperately wanted to avoid disunion, and had the Crittenden proposals been put to a national plebiscite, it is probable they would have passed, according to Horace Greeley, although the secessionists would have ignored them as well.
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But in Congress the measures died. Republicans never cast a single vote for the provisions and, more important, the South could not accede to any of the conditions. Now, truly, the issue was on the table: would slavery survive without the support of the people? Would a majority of Southerners long support the slaveholding elites if federal law opened up its mails and harbors? Answers came shortly, when a new government formed in the South.

The Confederate States of America

No sooner had the telegraphs stopped clattering with the 1860 electoral counts than Robert Barnwell Rhett, William Yancey, T. R. Cobb, and other Southern fire eaters led a movement to call the state governments of the Deep South into session. South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi met first, the legislators in Columbia, South Carolina, ablaze with secessionist rhetoric. American flags were ripped down, replaced by new South Carolina “secesh” flags of a red star on a white background. The Palmetto State’s incendiary voices hardly surpassed those in Alabama, where the secession proposal had early widespread support.

Virginian Edmund Ruffin, one of the hottest fire eaters, had outlined a League of United Southerners in 1858, and the commercial conventions in 1858 advanced the notion still further. On November 10, 1860, the South Carolina legislature announced a convention to occur a month later. If necessary, South Carolina was ready to act unilaterally. Florida, Alabama, and Georgia announced similar conventions. Every step of the way, South Carolina took the lead, issuing an “Address to the People of South Carolina” that called the Constitution of the United States a failed “experiment.” Rhett proposed a conference in Montgomery with other Southern states to form a government separate from the United States, and South Carolina officially seceded on December 20, 1860.

Stephen Douglas lambasted the movement as “an enormous conspiracy…formed by the leaders of the secession movement twelve months ago.” Fire eaters, he said, manipulated the election in order to “have caused a man to be elected by a sectional vote,” thereby proving that the Union was as divided as they claimed.
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However, evidence paints a more complex picture. In many of the Southern states, the vote on secession was quite close. In Mississippi, for example, the secessionists defeated the “cooperationists” by fewer than 5,000 votes.
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January’s secession conventions in other states produced even smaller prosecession margins. Secession carried in Georgia by 3,500 ballots and in Louisiana by 1,200. Nowhere in the South did the vote on secession approximate the numbers who had gone to the polls for the presidential election. Only 70 percent of the November total turned out in Alabama, 75 percent in Louisiana, and only 60 percent in Mississippi—making the prosecession vote even less of a mandate. Nevertheless, Douglas’s conspiracy interpretation did not account for the fact that the secession forces won the elections, no matter how narrowly and no matter how light the vote, underscoring the old adage that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing, or in the case of an election, stay home. More important, the winner-take-all system led to a unanimous agreement by the states of the lower South to send delegates to a February convention in Montgomery. As an Alabamian put it, “We are no longer one people. A paper parchment is all that holds us together, and the sooner that bond is severed the better it will be for both parties.”
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In fact, secession had been railroaded through even more forcefully than the final state convention votes suggested. There was no popular referendum anywhere in the South. Conventions, made up of delegates selected by the legislatures, elected 854 men, 157 of whom voted against secession. Put in the starkest terms, “some 697 men, mostly wealthy, decided the destiny of 9 million people, mostly poor,” and one third enslaved.
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The circumstances of secession thus lend some credence to the position that when war finally came, many Southerners fought out of duty to their state and indeed many saw themselves as upholding constitutional principles. Few believed they were fighting to protect or perpetuate slavery per se. Given the conception of “citizenship” at the time—in the North and South—wherein rights originated in the
state,
not the federal government, most Southerners normally would have sided with their state government in a fracas against the national government.

On February 7, 1861, the Montgomery delegates adopted a new constitution for the Confederate States of America, and two days later elected Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as the CSA’s first president. Davis looked much like Lincoln, and had he worn a beard, from certain angles they would have been indistinguishable. Like Lincoln, he had served in the Black Hawk War, then saw combat at both Monterrey and Buena Vista under Zachary Taylor. Like Lincoln, Davis knew heartache: he had married Taylor’s daughter, who died of malaria. Davis differed from his Northern counterpart in many ways though. He lived on a small estate given to him by his brother, but he never achieved the wealthy planter lifestyle of other Confederate spokesmen. His view of slavery was based on how he, personally, treated his slaves, which was well. Thus, the abominations perpetrated by other masters seemed pure fantasy to Davis, who did not travel extensively. Debates over issues became assaults on his personal honor, leading him to give short shrift to the advice of moderates.

An advocate of industrialism and manufacturing, Davis shared with other Southern commercial messengers a blind spot for the dampening effects of slavery on investment and entrepreneurship. Quite simply, most entrepreneurs steered clear of a slave system that stifled free speech, oppressed one third of its consumers, and co-opted the personal liberty of free men to enforce slavery. Although Davis once criticized the “brainless intemperance” of those who wanted disunion, his own secessionist utterances bordered on hysterical, earning him from the New York
Herald
the nickname Mephistophiles of the South.
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When secession came, he had an office in mind—general in chief of the new army. He scarcely dreamed he would be president.

The new Confederate constitution over which Jefferson Davis presided prohibited tariffs, subsidies to businesses, and most taxation, and required that all appropriations bills be passed by a two-thirds majority. This seemed on the surface quite Jeffersonian. Other provisions were not so Jeffersonian. The CSA constitution granted de facto subsidies to slave owners through externalized costs, passed off on all nonslaveholders the enforcement expenses of slavery, such as paying posses and court costs. And the constitution ensured that censorship would only get worse. Although there was a provision for a supreme court, the Confederate congress never established one, and the court system that existed tended to support the centralized power of the Confederate government rather than restrict it.
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Certainly there was no check on the Congress or the president from compliant courts.
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As would become clear during the war, the absence of such checks in the Confederate constitution gave Davis virtually unlimited power, including a line-item veto. The document reflected, in many ways, a Southern abstraction of what differentiated the sections of the Union.

Southern ideals of what secession entailed sprang from three main sources. First, during the past decade Southerners had come to hate free-soil concepts, finding them deeply offensive not only to the cotton economy to which they were committed but to the system of white superiority ingrained in the culture of the South. Second, a residual notion of states’ rights from the days of the Anti-Federalists, nurtured by such thinkers as George Mason and John Calhoun, had gained popularity in the 1850s. The sovereignty of the states over the Union had a mixed and contradictory record of support by leading Southerners, including Jefferson and Jackson. Under the Confederacy, the principle of states’ rights emerged unfettered and triumphant. The third was the widespread view of the propagandists of the South that “Cotton Is King!” and that a Southern republic would not only be freer, but economically superior to the North.

Demonizing Northerners followed in short order. New Englanders were “meddlers, jailbirds, outlaws, and disturbers of the peace.”
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(There had to be some irony involved in the labeling of former Puritans as jailbirds and outlaws by a region that prided itself on its frontier violence and, in the case of Georgia, had had felons as its first settlers!) Outright lies about Lincoln’s intentions occurred with regularity in order to put the citizens of the new “republic” in the proper frame of mind.

Indeed, Lincoln’s promise not to touch slavery where it already existed only irritated the fire eaters more, exposing as it did their ultimate fear: that without expansion, the South would only become darker. Being unable to transport slaves into the territories, as Senator Robert Johnson of Arkansas pointed out, would increase the population inequities, because of the “natural multiplication of colored people,” until blacks became equal in numbers to whites, then exceeded them. At that point, a race war would ensue.
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Despite thirty years of philosophizing, denials, obfuscation, scriptural revision, and constitutional sophistries, it all came down to this: the South was terrified of large numbers of blacks, slave or free. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Civil War was about slavery and, in the long run,
only
about slavery.

If anyone doubted the relative importance of slavery versus states’ rights in the Confederacy, the new constitution made matters plain: “Our new Government is founded…upon the great truth that the negro is not the equal of the white man. That slavery—subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”
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CSA Vice President Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia called slavery “the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.”
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In contradiction to libertarian references to “states’ rights and liberty” made by many modern neo-Confederates, the Rebel leadership made clear its view that not only were blacks not people, but that ultimately all blacks—including then-free Negroes—should be enslaved. In his response to the Emancipation Proclamation, Jefferson Davis stated, “On and after Febrary 22, 1863, all free negroes within the limits of the Southern Confederacy shall be placed on slave status, and be deemed to be chattels, they and their issue forever.”
¹⁸
Not only blacks “within the limits” of the Confederacy, but “all negroes who shall be taken in any of the States in which
slavery does not now exist,
in the progress of our arms, shall be adjudged to…occupy the slave status…[and ] all free negroes shall,
ipso facto,
be reduced to the condition of helotism, so that…the white and black races may be ultimately placed on a permanent basis. [italics added]”
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That basis, Davis said after the war started, was as “an inferior race, peaceful and contented laborers in their sphere.”
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Fort Sumter

By the time Lincoln had actually taken the reins of the United States government in March 1861, the Deep South had seceded. Although Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, and others still remained in the Union, their membership was tenuous. From November 1860 until March 1861, James Buchanan still hoped to avoid a crisis. But his own cabinet was divided, and far from appearing diplomatic, Buchanan seemed paralyzed. He privately spoke of a constitutional convention that might save the Union, hoping that anything that stalled for time might defuse the situation.

He was right in one thing: the crisis clock was ticking. Secessionists immediately used state troops to grab federal post offices, customs houses, arsenals, and even the New Orleans mint, which netted the CSA half a million dollars in gold and silver. Federal officials resigned or switched sides. Only a few forts, including Fort Moultrie and Fort Sumter, both in Charleston, possessed sufficient troops to dissuade an immediate seizure by the Confederates, but their supplies were limited. Buchanan sent the unarmed
Star of the West
to reprovision Fort Sumter, only to have South Carolina’s shore batteries chase it off. Thus, even before the firing on Fort Sumter itself, the war was on, and whatever effectiveness “little Buchanan” (as Teddy Roosevelt later called him) might have had had evaporated. The leading Republican in his cabinet, Lewis Cass, resigned in disgust, and Northerners of all political stripes insisted on retaliation. Ignoring calls from his own generals to reinforce the Charleston forts, Buchanan hesitated. His subordinate, Major Robert Anderson, did not.