Stephens’s “Cornerstone” speech attained a national notoriety that surprised him. Anyone who had read southern publications over the previous five years would find little new or startling in the address. Yet coming as the new Confederate nation was attempting to establish its legitimacy, such ideas were bound to achieve a wide circulation. Jefferson Davis was furious with his vice president. The speech jeopardized the careful work of building the case for his country on the issue of state versus national sovereignty. Northerners and Europeans roundly condemned the speech, though Stephens’s words confirmed for many northerners the Republican charge that the Confederate States of America was nothing more than a slave republic. As one Republican editor wrote, the speech “was of incalculable value to us.”17
Davis himself subscribed to Stephens’s views. Many southerners did. In a speech to the Confederate Congress just after the war began, and with little national or international coverage, Davis placed the crisis squarely on the northern majority in Congress and its “persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States.” He praised slavery as an institution in which “a superior race” transformed “brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers. With interests of such overwhelming magnitude imperiled, the people of the Southern States were driven by the conduct of the North to the adoption of some course of action to avert the danger with which they were openly menaced.”18
Again, nothing new. Yet it seemed curious to identify slavery and the South as one and inseparable in order to forge a new nation and rally all southerners behind the government, given that a majority of white southerners did not own slaves. Plus, constitutional reforms in the southern states had increased the political power of the nonslaveholding majority. It would have seemed politic to broaden the appeal of secession. What benefits would disunion bestow on this large class of men and their families? Would a Republican administration tap into nonslaveholders’ discontents—articulated in great detail by North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper—and offer patronage positions in exchange for their support? Perhaps the growing immigrant population in southern cities would combine with native-born nonslaveholding whites to oppose secession. Or, the fiercely independent yeomen farmers and their families in the southern mountains—the Appalachians and the Ozarks—might disdain following their “betters” out of the Union.
Except for South Carolina, secession was not a certain thing. Even in the Palmetto State divisions existed that worried Low Country planters. James H. Hammond, the governor and former senator, warned fire-eaters to tone down their rhetoric for fear of alienating upcountry nonslaveholding farmers and townsmen who did not share their zeal for disunion. In Georgia, the secessionist governor, Joseph E. Brown, was so concerned about opposition to leaving the Union that he suppressed the statewide vote totals for delegates to the special convention called in January 1861. Not until 1972, when historian Michael Johnson uncovered the tally, did we learn that secessionist candidates carried the state by a very narrow margin, though Brown had reported the result as a “clear majority.”19
In convention delegate votes across the Lower South, secessionist candidates averaged fewer than 55 percent of the total vote, a majority but not an overwhelming mandate. These figures were unimpressive considering that the secessionists presented a clear program and controlled the press and much of the wealth and political power of their states, while their opponents divided on the conditions of cooperation with the federal government. Only one of the seven states that seceded by early February 1861—Texas—submitted its ordinance of secession to a popular vote. Across the Lower South, secessionists were strongest in those districts where plantation slavery predominated, a confirmation of the connection between the Confederate States of America and slavery, but also perhaps of the tenuous loyalty of the nonslaveholders.
It was easier to profess pro-Union sentiment in the Upper South. The situation in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas presented a great problem for Davis’s fledgling government, not to mention the border slave states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Without the states of the Upper South, particularly Virginia, the Confederacy could prove stillborn. Public expressions of contempt for secession and secessionists abounded in North Carolina and Virginia. Responding to South Carolina’s secession ordinance, a Wilmington, North Carolina, editor asked readers, “Are you submissionists to the dictation of South Carolina … are you to be called cowards because you do not follow the crazy lead of that crazy state?” A Charlottesville, Virginia, editor declared that he “hated South Carolina for precipitating secession.” When Virginia voted for its convention to meet in mid-February, only 32 of the 152 delegates identified themselves as secessionists. Tennessee went the Old Dominion one better by voting not to call a convention at all. On February 18, as Jefferson Davis prepared to take his oath of office, Arkansas voters elected to their convention a strong majority of Unionists. North Carolinians concluded the rout at the end of the month by joining Tennesseans in refusing to call a convention.20
The border states proved even less cooperative. A special session of the Kentucky state legislature voted decisively not to call a convention and promptly adjourned. In Maryland, Governor Thomas H. Hicks did not even bother to call a special session of the legislature on the subject. A unanimous vote in Delaware’s lower house expressed “unqualified disapproval” of secession. Missouri decided to hold a convention, but voters elected nary a secessionist to serve.21
The very arguments mobilized by secessionists—protection of slavery, economic independence, political sovereignty, and security—found life on the other side of the debate. James Robb, a New Orleans entrepreneur, wondered if secession would merely result in trading a northern master for a European master, as British industry would overwhelm nascent southern enterprises. Businessmen in Upper South cities were as concerned about competition from Charleston, Mobile, and New Orleans as from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Merchants who had cultivated commercial and financial connections with northerners opposed secession. Some slaveholders feared for their property more out of the Union than in it. Others worried that war and violence would inevitably accompany secession. A Presbyterian minister in Richmond warned that secession would precipitate “a horrible civil war,” and a fellow Presbyterian in Kentucky advised, “If we desire to perish, all we have to do is to leap onto this vortex of disunion.”22
Northerners followed developments in the Upper South closely. The squabbling reinforced the Republicans’ intransigence to compromise. Even the press in the seceding states expressed doubt about the secession of additional slave states by late February. “Virginia would never secede now,” a Charleston editor lamented. An excited Republican colleague wrote to William H. Seward, “We have scarcely left a vestige of secession in the western part of Virginia, and very little indeed in any part of the state.… The Gulf Confederacy can count Virginia out of their little family arrangement—she will never join them.”23
The optimism was misplaced. Northerners and Republicans in particular overestimated the strength of Unionist sentiment throughout the South and underestimated the attraction of slavery to a broad swath of the white population. In the Lower South, slaveholding households ranged from 49 percent of total white households in South Carolina to 27 percent in Texas. In South Carolina and Mississippi, the first two states to leave the Union, nearly half of all white households owned slaves. In those states in particular, what debate existed revolved around how best to protect the institution of slavery and avert economic disaster and racial warfare. Those who opposed secession were almost always those who held out for a constitutional settlement or compromise. Few white citizens in those states wanted to remain in the Union under Republican rule without new constitutional protections.
The opposition to immediate secession in the Upper South reflected in part the lower percentages of white slaveholding families in those states,
typically less than 20 percent. But even in states such as Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, the Unionist position was rarely unconditional. The votes and decisions thwarting secession in those states occurred before the various compromise plans failed. Many there assumed that their continued adherence to the Union could serve as leverage to broker a compromise between the incoming administration and the seceding states of the Lower South. Only a handful of Upper South Unionists would countenance military action against the Confederate states.
Abraham Lincoln had heard about Alexander Stephens’s pro-Union speech in Milledgeville in December and wrote to his old friend for a copy. Stephens complied but warned the president-elect that even Unionists would not tolerate interference with slavery where it already existed. Lincoln responded with surprise: “I wish to assure you, as once friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy, that there is no cause for such fears.” Stephens pressed the issue further in his reply: “We both have an earnest desire to preserve and maintain the Union” provided the administration followed the principles upon which that Union was founded. The great fear of the South and even of Unionists such as himself, Stephens explained, was Lincoln’s party, whose “leading object” was “to put the institutions of nearly half the States under the ban of public opinion and national condemnation.” He begged Lincoln to understand that the “Union under the Constitution” could not be maintained by force. At that point, the entire South, Unionists included, would join the battle.24
Stephens understood, if northerners did not, that every white person in the South, slaveholder or not, had a stake in the institution. The existence of slavery, its proponents had argued for more than two decades, benefited all white southerners. Slavery protected the South from the incipient class warfare brewing in the North between capital and labor. African slavery created a permanent working class laboring in the most menial positions. The system liberated whites to pursue higher occupations and opportunities for economic independence. As members of the superior race, all whites were masters. Race was the new class: no white was inferior to another white as long as Africans remained in bondage. In January 1861, J. D. B. De Bow summarized the racial appeal of the pro-slavery argument to nonslaveholders. “The non-slaveholder of the South preserves the status of the white man, and is not regarded as an inferior or a dependant.” Slavery also guaranteed republican government by conferring a broad equality on all whites. The South was a White Republic, and secessionists argued that only by leaving the Union and establishing a slaveholding nation could they preserve the political rights, the economic independence, and the superiority of all white southerners.25
The Republicans also threatened slavery where it existed, despite their protests to the contrary. They closed off the possibility of improvement by barring slaveholders from the territories. Secessionists emphasized how blocking the institution’s expansion could create a racial explosion. With Republican control of government agencies and the expansion of the number of free states, the South would be helpless to protect slavery. The Republicans’ alleged insistence on racial equality would remove the white man’s special status, wreck the South’s republican form of government with Negro rule, and precipitate racial conflict if not an all-out race war. As De Bow explained in January 1861, “In Northern communities, where the free negro is one in a hundred of the total population, he is recognized and acknowledged often as a pest.… What would be the case in many of our States, where every other inhabitant is a negro?” The end of the White Republic in the South meant the end of white liberty and equality.26
The secessionists’ oft-repeated threat of race war and insurrection registered throughout the white South, not as some hysterical rant but as a likely outcome of a Republican administration. Just as whiteness conferred automatic superiority on all whites, it would become the target of a racial conflagration. John Brown’s Raid, despite its bungled execution, had a significant impact on the white South. Coupled with the election of Abraham Lincoln, it signaled that northerners were insensitive to the political and racial vulnerability of white southerners. The testimony of former slaves indicated that the Republican victory in November 1860 resounded in the quarters. “It all diffrunt,” one slave reported after the election. Slaves noticed that the easy access into the Big House became less so, and masters, mistresses, and overseers became more guarded. An untoward glance, a sullen gesture, a slower gait became preludes to rebellion in the minds of some whites, whose peace of mind could only be assuaged by a quarantine of northern people, opinions, and government.27
Religion, as well as race, connected white southerners to each other. Secession was a cleansing operation removing the South and slavery from the contamination of northerners infected with the virus of abolition. The Rev. William O. Prentiss of South Carolina explained his state’s impending secession in December 1860: “We cannot coalesce with men whose society will eventually corrupt our own, and bring down upon us the awful doom which awaits them.”28
The cleansing metaphor proved especially powerful from southern pulpits. White southerners practiced an evangelical Protestant religion that had grown more insular following the church schisms in the 1840s. The clergy had rallied to slavery’s defense in the 1850s and now blessed secession. The Confederate States of America would aspire to be a Christian civilization of the highest order. While New England pulpits resonated with the righteousness of anti-slavery ministers, southern divines mobilized their influence for what they believed to be a holy cause.
To evangelical Christians in the South, the Confederacy represented a rebirth as they had been reborn in Christ. In early April 1861, Alabama minister T. L. DeVeaux blessed the new nation: “She will arise from her position cleansed from these sins, and clothed in the strength of God, manfully vindicate the right, and rescue it from the hands of destroyers.” The very motto of the new nation—Deo Vindice (God will vindicate)—proclaimed it as such. It was a new country assuming the missionary calling cast down by the old nation.29
The Rev. Benjamin M. Palmer offered the most compelling case for the divinity of the Confederate cause in his Thanksgiving sermon, weeks after the Republican victory. Palmer’s sermon received wide coverage throughout the South and helped to further the cause of secession, especially among those not yet convinced of the propriety of such action. At the same time, he indelibly connected the cause of slavery to the secession movement, and both to divine blessing. As one of the South’s most prominent Presbyterian clergymen, Palmer carried considerable influence among southern evangelicals, who read accounts of his sermons in both the religious and secular press.
Palmer was a native South Carolinian who received his divinity degree at Columbia (S.C.) Theological Seminary and spent fifteen years in the South Carolina capital pastoring the First Presbyterian Church. Although he supported slavery and southern rights, his sermons focused on theological issues. His political views, when they emerged, were more moderate than much of the prevailing opinion in South Carolina during the two decades prior to 1860. His reputation as a moving preacher of the Gospel spread throughout the South, and in 1856 he accepted a call to one of the region’s most prestigious Presbyterian churches, the First Presbyterian Church of New Orleans, housed in a commanding Gothic structure and boasting a membership that included most of the city’s Protestant elite, a number of whom were transplants from northern cities. As the reputation of his oratorical presence grew, the church began drawing non-Protestants and visitors from other parts of the country and the world. He preached to overflow crowds on numerous occasions. With the nation in crisis in November 1860, more than two thousand worshipers crowded into his church to hear a sermon that he titled “Slavery a Divine Trust: Duty of the South to Preserve and Perpetuate It.”30
The sermon touched on every major secession argument and also eloquently summarized more than two decades of southern nationalist thought. These included the essential incompatibility between North and South and that slavery enjoyed God’s blessing and served a
s the bedrock of southern civilization. Palmer told his congregation that the recent election confirmed that the North and the South had grown into two separate peoples, making their conflict indeed “irrepressible.” Slavery lay at the core of these differences. To southerners, slavery was a divinely sanctioned institution; to northerners, it was a damning sin. The South, Palmer preached, was fulfilling God’s command “to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of slavery as now existing.” As a blessed institution, slavery had become the South: “It has fashioned our modes of life, and determined all our habits of thought and feeling, and molded the very type of our civilization.” The North would destroy this institution, spurred on by an abolitionist movement that was “undeniably atheistic.” With “labor and capital grinding against each other like the upper and nether millstones; with labor cheapened and displaced by new mechanical inventions, bursting more asunder the bonds of brotherhood,” the North received the sympathy of the South, but attacked it in return to divert attention from its own deep problems.
Perhaps the most egregious sin committed by northerners was their substitution of God with man, the overweening pride of believing that they were beyond history, beyond sin, and beyond judgment. Yankee reformers presumed to strike every blot on earth. “The Most High, knowing his own power, which is infinite, and his own wisdom, which is unfathomable, can afford to be patient. But these self-constituted reformers must quicken the activity of Jehovah or compel his abdication.… It is time to reproduce the obsolete idea that Providence must govern man, and not that man shall control Providence.” The alternative was rampant individualism and unbridled democracy, both unchristian and untenable. Evoking the spirit of the French Revolution, Palmer declared, “Its banner-cry rings out already upon the air—‘liberty, equality, fraternity,’ which simply interpreted means bondage, confiscation, and massacre.”
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