Colin Woodard (36 page)

In the 1860 presidential election the Midlands voted overwhelmingly for Lincoln, except for northern Maryland and Delaware, where he did not appear on the ballot. (In those places, Midlanders voted for the moderate Bell instead.) Lincoln easily won most of the Midland Midwest from central Ohio to southern Iowa, tipping Illinois and Indiana into his column. While Midlanders voted with their Yankee neighbors, they had no desire to be governed by them. Faced with the possibility of a national dissolution, most Midland political and opinion leaders hoped to join the Appalachian-controlled states to create a Central Confederacy stretching from New Jersey to Arkansas. The proposed nation would serve as a neutral buffer area between Yankeedom and the Deep South, preventing the antagonists from going to war with each other. John Pendleton Kennedy, a Baltimore publisher and former congressman, championed this “Confederacy of Border States,” which opposed both the Deep South's program of expansion by conquest and the Yankee plans to preserve the Union by force. It was, he argued, the “natural and appropriate medium through which the settlement of all differences is eventually to be obtained.” Maryland's governor, Thomas Hicks, saw merit in the proposal, which could preserve the peace in a state split between Midland, Appalachian, and Tidewater sections; he corresponded with governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Ohio, and Missouri (all of which had substantial Midland sections) plus New York and Virginia to lay the groundwork for such an alliance should the Union break up.
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But the Deep South lost all Midland support after Sumter. In Philadelphia, Easton, and West Chester—Pennsylvania communities that had previously been centers of secessionist sympathy—mobs destroyed pro-Southern newspaper offices, drove pro-Southern politicians from their homes, assaulted secessionists in the streets, and forced homes and businesses to display Union flags. In Maryland the Central Confederacy proposal became obsolete overnight; Midland and Appalachian sections rallied to the Union, Tidewater ones to the Southern Confederacy. Their flag attacked, Midland sections of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri threw in their lot with the Yankees.
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By midcentury, Tidewater had effectively been politically neutered, its people a minority in Maryland, Delaware, North Carolina, and even Virginia (until 1861, when West Virginia's secession tipped the balance back into their favor). As friction increased over slavery, Tidewater found itself forced into the Deep Southern orbit for protection, despite their cultural differences. Unlike that of sugar and cotton, tobacco's global market had weakened, and the Tidewater gentry had sold many of their slaves to Deep Southerners or simply moved their operations to the Gulf. The region's elite felt besieged, and many embraced Deep Southern ideologies, even if they could not carry them out in their own states.

George Fitzhugh, scion of one of Virginia's oldest families, became the region's proslavery standard-bearer. In his voluminous writings, Fitzhugh endorsed and expanded upon Hammond's argument to enslave all poor people. Aristocrats, he explained, were really “the nation's magna carta” because they owned so much and had the “affection which all men feel for what belongs to them,” which naturally led them to protect and provide for “wives, children, and slaves.” Fitzhugh, whose books were enormously popular, declared he was “quite as intent on abolishing Free Society as you [Northerners] are on abolishing slavery.”
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As the conflict with the Yankees loomed, there was renewed interest in the old Tidewater theory that racial differences were to blame. In wartime propaganda, the Deep Southern elite was explicitly included in the allegedly superior Norman/Cavalier race in an effort to increase the bonds between the two regions, with the (decidedly un-Norman) Appalachian districts often embraced for good measure. For Tidewater in particular, casting the conflict as a war for Norman liberation from Anglo-Saxon tyranny neatly sidestepped the more problematic slavery issue. The
Southern Literary Messenger
, Tidewater's leading journal, conceded in 1861 that “the Round-heads
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may gain many victories in view of their superior strength and their better condition” but assured “they will loose the last [battle] and then sink down to their normal position of relative inferiority.” The journal argued the Confederate aim was to create “a sort of Patrician Republic” ruled by a people “superior to all other races on this continent.”

This propaganda was embraced in the Deep South as well. In an 1862 speech, Jefferson Davis told Mississippi legislators that their enemies were “a traditionless and homeless race . . . gathered by Cromwell from the bogs and fens of the north of Ireland and of England” to be “disturbers of peace in the world.” The war,
DeBow's Review
declared, was a struggle to reverse the ill-conceived American Revolution, which had been contrary to “the natural reverence of the Cavalier for the authority of established forms over mere speculative ideas.” By throwing off monarchy, slaveholders endangered the wondrous “domestic institution” that rested “on the principle of inequality and subordination, and favor[ed] a public policy embodying the ideas of social status.” Democracy “threw political influence into the hands of inorganic masses” and caused “the subjection of the Cavalier to the intellectual thralldom of the Puritan.” Other Tidewater and Deep Southern thinkers came to agree that the struggle was really between respect for established aristocratic order and the dangerous Puritan notion that “the individual man was . . . of higher worth than any system of polity.” As Fitzhugh put it, it was a war “between conservatives and revolutionists; between Christians and infidels . . . the chaste and the libidinous; between marriage and free-love.” Some even championed the dubious notion that the Confederacy was fighting a Huguenot-Anglican counterreformation against Puritan excess. Slavery was not the issue, they argued—defeating democracy was.
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In the 1860 presidential election, Tidewater was split between moderate Bell and secessionist Breckinridge, with Bell's support concentrated on the eastern shore of Maryland and in Tidewater North Carolina. After South Carolina seceded, Tidewater wished to follow but was thwarted by other nations' control over Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina's state governments. Only after Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call to arms did Virginia and North Carolina secede; Maryland and Delaware never did. In all four cases, the attitude of Borderlanders, not Tidewater folk, was the decisive factor.

 

Greater Appalachia had the most ambivalent reaction to Deep Southern secession and the Yankee call to war. From central Pennsylvania to southern Illinois and northern Alabama, Borderlanders were torn between their disgust with Yankees and their hatred of Deep Southern planters. Both regions represented a threat to Borderlander ideals, but in different ways. The Yankees' emphasis on the need to subsume one's personal desires and interests to the “greater good” was anathema to the Appalachian quest for individual freedom; their moral crusades to change the behavior of others were extremely distasteful, especially their endless harping about racial equality. On the other hand, Borderlanders had already suffered generations of oppression at the hands of aristocratic slave lords and knew that they were the people the planters had in mind when they talked about enslaving inferior whites.
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In the run-up to the conflict, many Borderlanders were hostile toward abolitionists, breaking up their lectures, destroying their presses, and egging their politicians. Illinois governor John Reynolds likened abolitionists to the fanatical witch hunters of early New England, as did Indiana's Hoosier press. At the same time, Borderlanders condemned the Fugitive Slave Law, which was, as one Hoosier put it, “converting the Freemen of the North into a gang of slave catchers for the South.” Kentucky-born James G. Birney, a slaveholder turned abolitionist, spoke for many Borderlanders when he denounced the Deep Southern system “by which the majority are to be made poor and miserable that the few may spend their useless lives in indolent voluptuousness.” Indeed, it sought to make ordinary people “lie down at the foot of the Southern Slaveholders ‘like whipt and trembling Spaniels.' ”
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Caught between these threats to their freedom, Borderlanders became strong supporters of the notion of “popular sovereignty,” the principle by which local residents would decide if a new territory would have slaves or not. When this compromise failed to hold the Union together, many Borderlanders wished to either remain neutral or join the proposed Central Confederacy. When South Carolina seceded, Virginia's Borderlander governor, John Letcher, told state legislators that the Union would split into four separate nations, with Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and other border and Midwestern states becoming “a mighty fourth force.” Appalachia's leading political figure, former president James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, maintained the South should be allowed to go in peace but that the Union should defend itself if attacked. The region was deeply divided in the 1860 election, with the moderate Bell winning narrow majorities in four Appalachian-controlled states (Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and Texas), Lincoln taking the Appalachian vote in Pennsylvania, and Douglas capturing much of the Appalachian Midwest.

When the Gulf states voted for delegates to their respective January 1861 secession conferences, their Appalachian districts were opposed to the exercise. Kentucky refused to call a conference at all and remained neutral in the ensuing war. In February Appalachian-dominated North Carolina and Tennessee held popular referendums on whether to hold secessionist conventions. In both states the proposals were defeated. In Arkansas, Deep Southerners in the state's lowland southeast threatened to secede after delegates from the Appalachian northwest blocked their proposal to leave the Union. When Virginia seceded in April, the Appalachian northwest of the state rebelled against the rebellion, seizing control of the strategically vital Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
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Once again Fort Sumter and Lincoln's subsequent call for troops proved decisive, forcing Appalachian people to choose between two cultures they despised. Deep Southerners assumed Appalachia would rally to the Confederacy because of a shared doctrine of white supremacy. Instead, Borderlanders did as they always had: they took up arms against whatever enemy they felt was the greatest threat, and fought ferociously against them. To the planters' shock, most Appalachian people regarded them as a greater threat to their liberty than the Yankees. Western Virginians set up a Union government in Wheeling, volunteered in large numbers for the Union army, and became a separate state in 1863. Voters in eastern Tennessee rejected the state's secession referendum by more than two to one and tried to set up a Union government of their own; failing that, thousands fled to Kentucky to don blue uniforms while others sabotaged railway bridges. Residents of Appalachian northern Alabama established the Unionist Free State of Winston and fought as Alabama units in the Union army. Altogether a quarter-million men from Appalachian sections of the Confederacy volunteered for Union service, with regiments representing every state save South Carolina. In Pennsylvania, Buchanan declared for the Union, while tens of thousands of Scots-Irish volunteered to punish the Deep Southern traitors. In the Appalachian Midwest most Borderlanders regarded the attack on Sumter as treason and rallied to the Stars and Stripes. “I was a Kentuckian,” one Hoosier told a reporter, “but now I am an American.”
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The attack on Sumter pushed the Appalachian majority in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Indiana, and western Virginia into the Union camp. Other parts of Appalachia rallied to the Confederacy, regarding Lincoln's call for troops as a direct attack on their communities. This sentiment was especially strong in lower-lying areas where Appalachian slaveholding was more common: central and western North Carolina, middle Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, and northern Arkansas. In the aftermath of Sumter, these regions supported secession ballot measures, causing their states to join the Confederacy three to four months after the Deep South had created it.
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The Confederacy, of course, went down in defeat in 1865, its cities occupied by “foreign” troops, its slaves emancipated by presidential decree. Yankees hoped that out of the Union's costly military victory, its occupying forces might carry out a massive project in state building, an effort to democratize the Deep South, Tidewater, and Confederate Appalachia along Yankee and Midlander lines. With its soldiers maintaining order, thousands of Yankee and Midland schoolteachers, missionaries, businessmen, and government officials were deployed to the three regions. They introduced public education, creating segregated elementary schools and black colleges (many of which exist today). They eliminated laws and practices that enforced the Deep Southern caste system. They ensured that newly freed slaves could vote and stand for office and that former top Confederate officials could not. Fifteen African Americans were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the former Confederacy between 1870 and 1877, and two represented black-majority Mississippi in the U.S. Senate.
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But foreign occupiers have always found it difficult to fundamentally change a culture. The people of Tidewater, the Deep South, and Confederate Appalachia resisted the Yankee reforms as determinedly as they could, and after Union troops withdrew in 1876, whites in the “reconstructed” regions undid the measures. Yankee public schools were abolished. Imposed state constitutions were rewritten, restoring white supremacy and adopting poll taxes, “literacy tests,” and other instruments that allowed white officials to deprive African Americans of the right to vote. (As a result, the total presidential vote in South Carolina fell from 182,600 in 1876 to 50,000 in 1900, even as the state's population increased.) Ku Klux Klansmen murdered “uppity” blacks who ran for office or violated the rules of the traditional caste system. Despite a war and a concerted occupation, Deep Southern and Tidewater culture retained their essential characters, setting the stage for future culture clashes in the century to follow.
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