Coming Fury, Volume 1 (34 page)

Robert E. Lee was in Texas this winter, and late in January he wrote to his wife in gloomy foreboding:

“As far as I can judge from the papers we are between a state of anarchy & civil war. May God avert from us both. It has been evident for years that the country was doomed to run the full length of democracy. To what a fearful pass it has brought us. I fear mankind for years will not be sufficiently Christianized to bear the absence of restraint & force.” To his daughter, a few days later, he added the words: “If the bond of the Union can only be maintained by the sword & bayonet, instead of brotherly love & friendship, & if strife & Civil War are to take the place of mutual aid & commerce, its existence will lose all interest with me.… I can however do nothing but trust to the wisdom & patriotism of the nation & to the overruling providence of a merciful God.”
¹⁶

CHAPTER FOUR

Montgomery seemed an unlikely place for great events. It was a pleasant, unassuming country town, built on rolling hills at the head of navigation on the Alabama River, sheer bluffs rising from the water front, open marsh and meadowland stretching away on the far side of the stream. From the top of the bluffs Main Street, wide and sandy, went inland half a mile to the highest of the modest hills, where the white columns of a Greek revival capitol building rose as a landmark; a correspondent wrote that although the building was not particularly impressive, it nevertheless dominated the city, and he felt that it “stared down the street with quite a Roman rigor.” There were shaded streets with fine residences, and a reporter for the New Orleans
Delta
enthusiastically reported that these showed “much architectural skill and beauty,” with lawns and gardens and shrubbery “arranged in such order as to impress the beholder that these are the bodes of wealth, taste and refinement.”
¹
Montgomery, in short, was eminently suited to the part it had been playing—capital of a prosperous rural state, trading and commercial center for a thriving agricultural area. Now it had a new part to play. It was to become a world capital, in which men would say and do things that would affect American history for generations to come. On February 4, delegates from six of the states that had left the Union met in Montgomery to create and staff a government for the new Confederate States of America.

Montgomery was not old. It had existed for forty years, and so it was younger than many of the statesmen who assembled in it.
Its central location commended it as a site for the South’s great constitutional convention, and perhaps it was fitting that the new nation come to birth in a new country town (the cotton belt itself was new, only recently drawn from primeval wilderness, and of the seven states that would form the new Confederacy, only two had been in existence at the time of the American Revolution). But the city’s facilities were plainly inadequate. There were two principal hotels, the Montgomery and the Exchange House, both of them overcrowded and expensive, and one (by the testimony of survivors) decidedly uncomfortable, not to say dirty. The capitol building itself, although handsome, was not nearly large enough, and it would soon be necessary to take space in a commercial building, letting the President of the Confederacy hold office in a hotel parlor. (A little later this month the new Secretary of State, beset by an applicant for office, angrily took off his top hat, held it out, and demanded: “Can you get in here, sir? That’s the Department of State, sir!”) The intense eagerness to shift the capital to Richmond, a few months later, probably came at least partly from the general realization that Montgomery just was not big enough to be the capital city of a great nation.
²

Its inadequacy was not, however, immediately visible, for the great convention was not actually composed of a large number of delegates. Six states were represented at the start—Texas, the process of secession still incomplete, would be along a bit later—and these six sent but thirty-eight delegates, one of whom was delayed in his arrival. The other thirty-seven chose Howell Cobb, of Georgia, as their president and got down to work with a minimum of speech-making.

There was plenty for these men to do. They had to create a new nation, provide it with a constitution, name its chief executive, and then run the machinery which they had created; by turns they must be revolutionary committee, constitutional convention, electoral college, and national congress, all of these functions overlapping slightly, the specific legal authority for some of them being vague. This work had to be done under powerful pressures. There was first of all the pressure of time; it seemed essential to have the new government in operation, as a visibly going concern, by March 4, when the old government at Washington would install a new and
presumably hostile President. It seemed advisable, also, to move fast in order to check the South Carolina hotheads, who were quite likely to provoke a fight with Major Anderson at Fort Sumter and thus bring on a war while the Confederacy was still in the act of getting born. There was pressure, too, from public opinion in the outer world. It must be shown that what was done at Montgomery was done by sober and conservative men who would make no disturbance unless malevolent outsiders thrust a cause of action upon them. The border states must not be frightened off. It must be proved, both to the satisfaction of the delegates themselves and to the skeptical eyes of the strangers up North, that secession was wholly legal, that this new nation was of entire and unstained legitimacy, and in short that this revolution was really no revolution but was simply the quiet assertion of undeniable rights by men who had suffered much with great forbearance.

All in all, it was a very large assignment, and it was discharged with speed and competence. The delegates met on February 4, got down to serious work on the following day, adopted a provisional constitution on February 8, named a provisional President on February 9, and had a government on the job and functioning within a week thereafter. Few American deliberative bodies have done so much so fast and so smoothly, with less time out for oratory.

Exactly how it was all done is not yet wholly clear, for this convention-congress voted at the start to conduct its more important deliberations in secret. When the convention became the Congress the habit was continued, and throughout the life of the Southern Confederacy the legislative branch did much of its work in executive session. In the long run this was undoubtedly a handicap; the open debate, the constant public examination of governmental policies and actions, out of which comes an informed public opinion, was very largely lacking, and the new government deprived itself of full grass-roots intimacy and understanding with the people back home—a deprivation that would finally be extremely costly. For the moment, however, there was no one to complain, except the reporters who were locked out, and also certain indignant ladies who had accompanied their husbands to Montgomery and now found that they could not sit in the galleries to watch, to listen, to applaud prettily, and to be admired. Alexander Stephens wrote long afterward
that this was the ablest group of its kind he had ever seen, and he felt that the delegates “were not such men as revolutions or civil commotions usually bring to the surface. They were men of substance as well as of solid character—men of education, of reading, of refinement, and well versed in the principles of government.… Their object was not to tear down so much as it was to build up with the greater security and permanency. The debates were usually characterized by brevity, point, clearness and force.”
³

Whatever was said in debate, the fire-eaters said very little of it. Never was a revolution made by men less revolutionary in manner; the new nation was presented as if its birth had been the mildest and most natural of events, and there was a good deal of sentiment to name it The Republic of Washington—opposed, indeed, by some who argued that the name should simply be the United States of America, as proof that it was the Northern states that had really fractured the old Constitution and destroyed the old Union. One member, recalling that the convention was at all times “quiet, orderly, dignified, with a deep sense of responsibility,” wrote that “there was a marked and purposed agreement with the Constitution of the United States.” This, he said, was an attempt to vindicate “the oft-repeated declaration that the States withdrew, not from the Constitution, but from the wicked and injurious perversions of the compact.”
⁴

The provisional constitution (which differed only very slightly from the permanent constitution of the Confederate States, adopted a month later) was indeed the old familiar United States Constitution with small but significant changes.

The famous “We, the people” opening sentence was modified so as to suppress the faint, haunting echo of Democracy’s trumpets; it was made clear that the people were acting through sovereign and independent states rather than just as people. Negro slavery was specifically mentioned, and was given permanence; there never could be a law “denying or impairing the right of property in Negro slaves,” and slavery was fully protected in territories then or later acquired. The old fugitive slave law was retained, and its mealy-mouthed locution about persons “held to service or labor” was straightened out to read “slaves.” The absence of true fire-eater influence, however, was visible in a constitutional prohibition
of the old African slave trade, which the more dreamy-eyed visionaries of slave-state empire had talked of reviving, and Congress was given power to prohibit the importation of slaves from non-seceding slave states.

But the delegates thought about much more than the simple protection of slavery. They tried, obviously, to build a government that would be better than the old one, and some of the reforms they brought forward had nothing at all to do with Southern rights. It was, to be sure, specified that there never could be a protective tariff, and Congress was barred from appropriating money for internal improvements, but most of the changes came from men who had been doing a good deal of abstract thinking on the way governments work. In some ways the President was given more power than in the United States; he could veto individual items in an appropriation bill without vetoing the entire bill, and Congress could appropriate money only by a two-thirds majority unless the appropriation had been specifically requested by the President. At the same time, however, the President was limited to a single six-year term, and Congress, if it chose, could give cabinet members seats on the floor of either house so that they could be questioned about departmental matters—a clear step in the direction of parliamentary authority after the British manner.
⁵

To a certain extent, at least, this concern over improving the machinery of government reflected a feeling that an aristocratic society must, in the very nature of things, be able to govern itself better than a democracy. Undiluted democracy, indeed, was one of the things from which the cotton belt was seceding, as an editorial in the February issue of the
Southern Literary Messenger
made clear. The creation of the new Southern republic, said this magazine, would leave the states that remained in the old Union “absolutely at the mercy of an unprincipled, cold-blooded, tyrannical, remorseless horde of Abolitionists, whose anti-slavery creed but thinly disguises mob-law and agrarianism which surely overtakes all free society and which is the root of all Republican offending.” Enlarging on this point, the editorial writer continued: “It is not a question of slavery alone that we are called upon to decide. It is the far greater question of civil liberty, of government of any sort. It is
free society
which we must shun or embrace.”
⁶

The new constitution was slightly odd in just one respect: it said nothing whatever about the right of secession. The states were recognized as sovereign powers, but whether any one of them could leave the Confederacy as simply as it had entered was left unmentioned; the right to secede may have been an article of Southern faith from the cradle upward, but it was not provided for in the Confederacy’s basic charter.