The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (12 page)

During this period Toombs counseled war, Davis hoped for peace, and the Sumter crisis festered. Toombs did, however, have a hand in Confederate diplomacy. On February 13, Congress resolved to send a commission of three to Great Britain, France, and elsewhere in Europe to seek formal recognition and to open trade negotiations. The President then chose Yancey, Pierre A. Rost, and A. Dudley Mann to undertake the mission, and on March 16, Toombs wrote instructions dispatching the trio first to England, then to France.
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Toombs’ letter of instructions actually formed the basis of Confederate diplomacy throughout the nation’s brief life. The Secretary of State began by restating the rationale of secession and remarking upon the tranquility with which disunion had been accomplished. The Confederacy was already, Toombs emphasized, a
de facto
nation and asked only
de jure
sanction. To enhance his point, Toombs drew an analogy between the southern sections of the United States and Italy. The British government had recognized the right of Neapolitans and Sicilians to alter their government; surely the British would do the same for the Confederates. Toombs also emphasized the permanency of the break with the North and detailed the reasons why the Confederacy would confirm with blood its claim to independence if war ensued with the United States.
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Once the Confederate commissioners had secured official recognition from England, Toombs instructed, they were to commence negotiations leading to a treaty of “friendship, commerce, and navigation.” Such a treaty, Toombs declared, would be attractive to the British because the South produced large quantities of cotton and other staples and because the Confederacy had only a small revenue tariff. If international legalities and the inherent righteousness of the cause of Southern independence were not enough to convince British statesmen to recognize the Confederacy, then British self-interest would surely do so. After all, the South might choose or be forced by a blockade to cease shipping cotton to British mills. And in such an event, Toombs estimated that the value of English manufacturing would fall by $600 million. “A delicate allusion to the probability of such an occurence might not be unkindly received by the Minister of Foreign Affairs,” Toombs added. The Secretary of State closed by pointing out that the Confederacy had prohibited the foreign slave trade and only regretted that the Southern navy was not yet in a position to send patrol vessels to the West African coast to enforce the prohibition. Otherwise the Confederacy was willing and able to reaffirm all treaty obligations made while its member states were part of the United States.
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Naturally the Confederate message to Europe later became more expansive in scope and more refined in presentation. Yet Toombs wrote its essentials at the outset. The choice of European nations the Confederate commissioners visited and the order of these visits was significant. Britain and France possessed great navies and great appetites for Southern cotton. These circumstances and the priority given to Great Britain underscored the Southern belief that cotton was king in the real world of international relations. Having the king in captivity, the Confederates hoped to extract a heavy ransom from his industrialized subjects.
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It is also interesting to note in Toombs’ diplomatic correspondence the not so subtle treatment of the South’s peculiar institution. In his instructions to Yancey, Rost, and Mann, the Secretary of State wrote euphemistically about the slavery issue as a motive for secession. After discussing political liberty and free trade, Toombs alluded to “the attempt … to overthrow the constitutional barriers by which our prosperity, our social system, and our right to control our own institutions were protected.” Then, near the end of his instructions, Toombs carefully included mention of the prohibition of the slave trade. Thus did he anticipate and attempt to soften the objection of British abolitionists to official friendship with a republic of slaveholders.
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Two months after writing these instructions for the Confederacy’s European mission, Toombs composed a similar letter to John T. Pickett, who had just been appointed Confederate agent in Mexico, charging him to do essentially what the commissioners in Europe were to do: secure recognition and a treaty of trade and friendship. The rationale for this approach to the Mexican government was a bit different from that offered Great Britain. To the British, Toombs suggested the attraction between economic opposites and said little about the South’s peculiar institution. For the Mexicans, however, Toombs described a community of economic interest between two peoples engaged in extractive and agricultural enterprises. Toombs then added that “the institution of domestic slavery in one country and that of peonage in the other establish between them such a similarity in their system of labor as to prevent any tendency on either side to disregard the feelings and interests of the other.”
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The attempt on the part of Toombs to project what in effect was a split image of the Confederacy to the rest of the world was a bit naïve. His instructions revealed what became a chronic problem in Confederate diplomacy. Southerners could not be all things to all people; yet they tried to be so, and as a result the Confederate diplomatic image was often unfocused. The Southern nation was by turns a guileless people attacked by a voracious neighbor, an “established” nation in some temporary difficulty, a collection of bucolic aristocrats making a romantic stand against the banalities of industrial democracy, a cabal of commercial farmers seeking to make a pawn of King Cotton, an apotheosis of nineteenth-century nationalism and revolutionary liberalism, or the ultimate statement of social and economic reaction.

At the beginning Toombs confidently expected recognition from Europe. He was frustrated. The Confederate commissioners filled their dispatches with hope but also confessed the reality of British neutrality. Lord John Russell, British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, was cordial during his informal meetings with the Southerners but committed himself only to wait and see. Since English warehouses bulged with cotton from the bumper crop of 1860, England could afford to wait. When Rost spoke with the Count de Morny, a close friend of Emperor Napoleon III, the French response was similar to the English. In fact the two nations had agreed to act in concert about the “American question.” Both England and France recognized the “belligerency” of the Confederacy; that is, they accorded the Southerners the rights of a warring nation and extended captured Confederates the protection of international covenants regarding prisoners. But neither government would go beyond that point at that time.
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Toombs was frustrated in more than his expectation of foreign recognition. He also chafed at being in an administration which he did not lead. The President was polite to him, but neither Davis nor the other cabinet members paid sufficient heed to his advice and opinions. Since no foreign nation recognized the Confederacy, the Secretary of State could not exactly lose himself in his work. On one occasion Toombs thundered to a suppliant place monger that the Department of State existed only inside his hat.
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The most fertile field for Confederate diplomacy in the early spring of 1861 lay much closer to home than England or France. Eight slave states of the upper South—Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and Arkansas—were still undecided about secession. It was to these states that the Confederacy looked for new members or allies; the existence of slavery was the criterion by which the Southerners identified their friends and enemies. But these eight states shared more than the institution of slavery with the seven states of the Confederacy; they also shared some degree of commitment to Southern ideological values and thus an attraction to Southern nationalism. This created a serious dilemma, a crisis of identity, no less than that of deciding whether they were Southerners or Americans. The Confederates honored their heritage as Americans, but they had rejected the direction and values of the majority of their American contemporaries and had established an alternative nationality. Because the Confederacy existed as the national expression of the Southern world view, people in the border slave states, individually and corporately, faced a decision: to remain an American section or to embrace a Southern nation.

For some, such as Edmund Ruffin of Virginia, the decision was simple. On March 3, the day before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, Ruffin left Virginia and went to Charleston to “avoid being … under his [Lincoln’s] government even for an hour.”
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But for others in the border South the decision was agonizingly difficult. For example, Ruffin’s fellow Virginian Robert E. Lee pondered his fate for quite some time before resigning his commission in the United States Army. Lee opposed secession and war; “I recognize no necessity for this state of things,” he wrote. But when secession and war came, he made his decision: “With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have, therefore, resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State … I hope I may never be called upon to draw my sword.”
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Lee’s response was visceral and reasoned at the same time. Ultimately more Southerners identified with Lee than Ruffin.

On February 4, the same day that delegates from the deep Southern states met in Montgomery to create the Confederacy, Virginians went to the polls to choose delegates to a state convention. They elected forty-six secessionists and 106 moderates of varying tempers. For some time the convention’s moderate majority placed its hopes upon the Washington “Peace Convention,” a meeting of state delegates sponsored by Virginian ex-President John Tyler which unsuccessfully sought sectional compromise. The Virginia delegates sat during February and March, listened to speeches by deep South secessionists, and voted for continued union with the North. Governor John Letcher exerted little influence upon the proceedings because he was of much the same moderate mind as the delegates. Senator Robert M. T. Hunter was a cautious secessionist, while Hunter’s rival in state politics, former Governor Henry A. Wise, led the radical movement. In April, Wise, on the pretext that Virginia’s convention no longer represented the wishes of its constituents, organized a “Spontaneous Southern Rights Convention” to meet in Richmond on the sixteenth. Wise hoped that the well-planned, “spontaneous” meeting would prod the regular convention into action and would become the nucleus of a “resistance party” in Virginia. The radicals took heart when on March 2 the Washington Peace Convention broke up in despair and when a delegation from the Virginia convention secured no concrete concessions from President Lincoln. But even though support for the Union in Virginia’s convention eroded a bit in March and early April, Wise and the secessionist leadership were less than optimistic about immediate disunion. The radicals made more and louder speeches, but in the convention the moderates still had enough votes to keep Virginia in the Union.
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Because North Carolina was Southern more in terms of yeoman democracy than in terms of slaveholding aristocracy, the state shared little of the radical temper of its cousin to the south. Governor John W. Ellis led the secessionist movement, but his constituents were slow to follow. After considerable debate in the state legislature, a referendum bill summoned North Carolinians to the polls to decide on holding a convention and to elect delegates to the convention should it be held. On February 28 the voters rejected a convention by a very narrow margin and selected a strongly pro-Union slate of delegates. Among eighty-six counties, thirty voted secessionist; thirty-five voted unconditional unionist; seventeen voted conditional unionist; and four divided votes to the point of no decision. The vote was a fair index of sentiment in the state. As a rule, Democrats tended more toward secession than did Old Whigs, and secessionists were stronger in the eastern part of the state than in the Piedmont or Appalachian regions. When the Washington Peace Convention dissolved in failure, North Carolina despaired; but as long as the Union remained in a state of peaceable ambiguity, North Carolina remained in the Union.
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Tennessee moderate John Bell had carried his home state in the presidential election of 1860, and as a body Tennesseeans assumed essentially the same position regarding the secession crisis as did North Carolinians. As in North Carolina geography was an important factor in the population’s attitude toward disunion. The yeoman-dominated mountains of east Tennessee were unionist country; the planter-oriented flatlands of west Tennessee were more receptive to secession. Middle Tennessee was divided. Although Tennessee Governor Isham G. Harris, like North Carolina’s Ellis, was a secessionist, and Tennessee Democrats except for party leader Andrew Johnson tended more toward secession than did the Old Whigs for whom Bell was spokesman, on February 9 the voters soundly defeated a convention referendum and chose an overwhelmingly unionist slate of hypothetical delegates to the convention they decided not to call. As the Sumter crisis deepened in April of 1861, Tennesseeans watched and worried. But at that point not enough of them felt threatened enough by the Republican administration to leave the United States.
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On February 18, the same day on which Jefferson Davis took the oath as provisional president of the Confederacy, Arkansas voters went to the polls to vote on a state convention. Although they voted to hold a convention, they elected a slim but staunch majority of unionist delegates; the conservatives held an unshakable four-vote margin in the convention. After considerable wrangling and many fiery speeches, the Arkansas convention resolved to hold an August referendum on secession, and adjourned. The secessionists had tried their best and failed.
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