Coming Fury, Volume 1 (32 page)

He had received satisfactory evidence, he told the Senators, that his state had formally declared its separation from the United States. His functions here, accordingly, were terminated; he concurred in the action of his people, but he would feel bound by that action even if he did not concur. He was offering no argument today. He had argued for his people’s cause before now, had said all that he could say, and nothing had come of it. A conservative who loved the Union, he had cast his lot with his state, and he still hoped that there might be in the North enough tolerance and good will to permit a peaceful separation; but if there was not, “then Mississippi’s gallant sons will stand like a wall of fire around their State; and I go hence, not in hostility to you, but in love and allegiance to her, to take my place among her sons, be it for good or for evil.”

So it was time for good-bys, and the hush deepened as Davis spoke his valedictory:

“I am sure I feel no hostility to you, Senators from the North. I am sure there is not one of you, whatever sharp discussion there may have been between us, to whom I cannot now say, in the presence of my God, I wish you well.… Mr. President and Senators, having made the announcement which the occasion seemed to me to require, it only remains for me to bid you a final farewell.”
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That night Davis prayed earnestly: “May God have us in His holy keeping, and grant that before it is too late peaceful councils may prevail.” To a friend he wrote that his farewell had been wrung from him “by the stern conviction of necessity, the demands of honor”; his words “were not my utterances but rather leaves torn
from the book of fate.” To another friend he wrote, in more bitterness: “We have piped but they would not dance, and now the Devil may care.” And to former President Franklin Pierce, in whose cabinet he had served, Davis confessed a deep pessimism and said bluntly that the Buchanan administration had mishandled the situation so badly that war was likely to be the result: “When Lincoln comes in he will have but to continue in the path of his predecessor to inaugurate a civil war, and leave a
soi disant
democratic administration responsible for the fact.” He himself would go at once to Mississippi, and he did not know what the future might hold: “Civil war has only horror for me, but whatever circumstances demand shall be met as a duty and I trust be so discharged that you will not be ashamed of our former connection or cease to be my friend.”
²

It was over. With Davis, the other cotton-state Senators took their departure, and a few more of the frail threads that bound the Union together were snapped. The immediate effect was surprising, although quite logical. The deep South no longer had a voice in the national legislature, and as a result the long-impending measure to admit Kansas to the Union as a free state was promptly brought forward and passed. The Kansas issue had been at the very heart of the whole controversy; it had contributed much to the fury and suspicion that were now tearing the country apart; and here, on the heels of the first acts of that secession which it had done so much to bring about, it was at last settled, leaving its own bitter legacy. Old states were leaving, the first of the new states was coming in, and the country hereafter would look very different.

There was no way to undo what was being done; and yet the steady drift toward separation and war was subject to curious eddies and counter-currents, and the pattern refused to become clear. By February, six states had left the Union and one more, Texas, was about to follow; yet the slave states were far from united, and only the cotton states of the deep South—the Gulf Squadron, as men called them, with some bitterness—had taken the decisive step. It was beginning to be clear that the border and middle-South states were not ready to secede. Some of them would not go at all; others would go only if they were pushed. The slave empire
was not monolithic, and it was beginning to crumble around the edges.

Early in January a roving commissioner from Mississippi addressed both houses of the legislature of slave-state Delaware, urging immediate secession and adherence to a Southern confederacy. The legislators heard him out, then unanimously adopted a resolution: “… we deem it proper and due to ourselves and the people of Delaware to express our unqualified disapproval of the remedy for the existing difficulties suggested by the resolutions of the legislature of Mississippi.” In Maryland things were no better. Pro-slavery Democratic leaders urged Governor Hicks to call a special session of the legislature to consider an ordinance of secession, and Hicks flatly refused. Both Northern and Southern extremists, he remarked, had said that secession would lead to war, “and no man of sense, in my opinion, can question it.” The governor had been ill, and he believed that he might not have long to live; “but should I be compelled to witness the downfall of that Government inherited from our fathers, established, as it were, by the special favor of God, I will at least have the consolation, in my dying hour, that I neither by word nor deed assisted in hastening its disruption.”
³
North Carolina, whose citizens had seized two forts in an excess of zeal and whose governor had promptly returned the forts to Federal control, held a plebiscite at the end of January. The legislature had presented a two-pronged bill for a state convention on secession; the voters could elect delegates to the convention, and at the same time they could say whether or not the convention ought to be held. In the end, they chose a substantial majority of Unionist delegates and also, by a narrow margin, voted against having a convention at all. The vote was not quite as solid a Unionist victory as it looked, because a great deal of the pro-Union sentiment would obviously evaporate if the Federal government made any move toward “coercion” of any Southern state. Still, for the moment, North Carolina was definitely refusing to join the procession.

In Tennessee the situation was somewhat the same. The legislature listened to much oratory, considered the problem at length, and at last resolved that delegates from all slave states ought to meet as soon as might be to work out some program by which
Southern rights could be protected through amendments to the Federal Constitution. It resolved that if such a program could not be obtained, the formation of a new Southern confederacy ought to be undertaken, and it summoned a state convention to meet late in February to consider the matter of secession; but it provided also that if the convention should adopt an ordinance of secession, the action would not be valid unless the people of the state ratified it at a special election. Tennessee, in short, would wait a while. It was a slave state and its sympathies ran strongly with the men from the deep South, but it was not yet ready to go out of the Union.

Kentucky likewise would wait. Governor Beriah Magoffin told a commissioner from Mississippi that Kentuckians were strongly Southern in sympathy, and he predicted that if the Union broke apart, Kentucky would enter the Southern confederacy, but he believed that the prevailing sentiment “was unquestionably in favor of exhausting every honorable means of securing their rights within the Union.” The legislature, considering the matter in the final week in January, recommended a national convention to work out a solution for the problem and suggested that Senator Crittenden’s amendments might be a basis for a permanent settlement. In the direction of outright secession it moved not an inch.
⁴

In Missouri, also, people wanted the situation clarified before they took any action. When the legislature convened in mid-January, the retiring governor, R. M. Stewart, remarked that the state “cannot be frightened by the past unfriendly legislation of the North, or dragooned into secession by the restrictive legislation of the extreme South,” and the new governor, Claiborne Jackson, said that Missouri ought to stand with the other slave states but should remain in the Union as long as there was any hope of maintaining Constitutional guarantees regarding slavery. The legislature voted to summon a state convention for February 18, “to ascertain the will of the people,” with a proviso that any secession ordinances would have to be ratified by a state-wide vote.

Sentiment in Arkansas seemed to be divided, with Unionists strong in the northwestern part of the state and secessionists from the cotton counties displaying eagerness for action. (One reason the people of the northwest hesitated about secession was the presence along the border of powerful Indian tribes, which were held under
control only by the long arm of the Federal government.) Late in December the legislature called for an election on February 18, to determine whether there should be a convention to consider secession and to elect delegates if such a convention should be approved; meanwhile, secessionist leaders began to take things into their own hands. Early in February, disturbed by reports that the Federal government was going to reinforce the garrison at the Little Rock arsenal, several hundred armed citizens moved in to take possession of the place. Governor Henry M. Rector had had nothing to do with all of this, but to prevent an open fight he took control of this impromptu army and made formal demand, in the name of the state, for surrender of the arsenal. Captain James Totten, of the 2nd U. S. Artillery, a Pennsylvania-born regular, reflected on the matter for twenty-four hours and then agreed to turn the arsenal over to state authorities and to march his little detachment out of Arkansas—an action for which the grateful ladies of Little Rock presented him with a sword, along with a fancy scroll that told Totten: “You feared the danger of a civil war and the consequence to your country.” Totten took the sword and, to the chagrin of the Little Rock ladies, wore it later as a Union brigadier general leading troops against the South.
⁵

Only Texas was ready to act. Governor Sam Houston argued against secession, but late in January he yielded to pressure and called the legislature in special session. He was gloomy about what might happen, and to the secessionist leaders he had dark words of warning: “You may, after the sacrifice of countless thousands of treasure and hundreds of thousands of precious lives, as a bare possibility, win Southern independence, if God be not against you; but I doubt it.” Texas, however, refused to listen to him, and on February 1 a state convention passed an ordinance of secession by the lopsided vote of 166 to 8.
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Now there were seven states that considered that they had left the Union, and the formation of a new confederacy would proceed apace.

A great deal would depend on Virginia, traditionally a leader, a state with powerful Southern sympathies but also with a strong attachment to the Union. The new Southern nation that was struggling to be born needed Virginia as a man needs the breath of life. With Virginia it might in fact become a nation; without Virginia
it could hardly, in the long run, hope to be more than a splinter; and Virginia was by no means ready to act.

Governor John Letcher addressed his state legislature on January 7, and he spoke broodingly, like a man who looks into a dark future but refuses to give up all hope. He had about abandoned the notion that the Union could be preserved; still, it was not too late to make the attempt, and at the very least Virginia might be able to get Federal guarantees that would justify her in rejecting secession. With somber insight, he put his finger on the fantastic central point: “It is monstrous to see a Government like ours destroyed merely because men cannot agree about a domestic institution.” He felt that there should be a national convention of all the states, and he urged that a commission be sent to each of the Northern states (except those in New England, which he considered beyond the reach of reasonable appeal) to see whether they would agree to a program acceptable to Virginia. Such a program would include, roughly, guarantees of non-interference with the interstate slave trade, tightening of the fugitive slave laws, non-interference with slavery in the District of Columbia, Federal laws providing punishment for anyone who tried to get slaves to rise in rebellion, and a promise that the new administration would not, in the slave states, give Federal offices to anti-slavery characters.

For the rest, Governor Letcher made it clear that Virginia would resist coercion to the utmost. He would regard any attempt by Federal troops to pass through Virginia for the purpose of coercing any Southern state as an act of invasion, which Virginia would repel; a warning that contained teeth, since Washington could not easily send troops South without somewhere crossing Virginia’s borders. Governor Letcher did not think there should be a state convention just yet, but the legislature disagreed. It adopted his plea for a national convention, and it invited all the states to send delegates to a meeting in Washington on February 4 “to unite with Virginia in an earnest effort to adjust the present unhappy controversies in the spirit in which the Constitution was originally formed and consistently with its principles,” and it resolved that Virginia would resist any Federal step toward coercion; it also voted to call a state convention for February 13 to consider the matter of secession. At the same time it voted that if the attempt
to bring about an adjustment of “the unhappy differences existing between the two sections of the country shall prove to be abortive,” then Virginia ought to cast her lot with the slave states of the South.
⁷

Virginia, in short, like the other border states, would wait and see, but while waiting it would make an honest effort to get the whole quarrel settled. The state was balanced on a knife edge. Of unconditional unionism it betrayed not a trace, except for the western counties beyond the mountains—which, before long, would definitely be heard from—and it had given fair warning that it would leave the Union unless the present impasse got a strictly Southern solution; but it had not yet acted, and in effect it had provided the country with a little breathing spell, a brief extension of the time in which the drift toward war might be halted.

But more than time was needed. Among the leaders on both sides some evidence of an honest desire to make a compromise would have to appear unless the time gained should be wasted, and this evidence was lacking.