Exhausted by unsuccessful attempts to promote slavery in the territories and statehood bills, Stephens resigned from Congress in 1859. A political supporter of Stephen A. Douglas in the Democratic Party’s race for the 1860 nomination, Little Aleck was a powerful state rightist who, nevertheless, opposed secession; still, he came to Montgomery in 1861, when asked by Georgia’s political leaders. Once there he played a leading role in scripting the Confederate Constitution.
To appease politicians in the Deep South (some of whom were anti-secession) and present a united front to the world, Stephens was chosen to be vice president beside Davis in the provisional slate of officers of the new Confederacy. Davis was a more astute politician, and the differences in political savvy emerged quickly. A month after the Montgomery inauguration, Stephens made a speech in Savannah, Georgia, to his friends in the Georgia convention. Given the chance for limelight and the fresh opportunity to summarize the meaning of the new Confederacy, Stephens took full advantage. Having cited the abolitionists’ shocking assertions about equality of the races, Stephens proclaimed, “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” 7 Davis was understandably upset at Stephens’s public remarks—not the remarks, but their public nature. It didn’t help that Davis was a simplistic analyst; in his mind, you were either for him or against him. Everything was black or white. Although Davis may have agreed privately, he would not do so publicly—to him, the issue of slavery would be covered under the mantle of state rights versus central government.
For the first weeks of his vice presidency, Little Aleck tried to make the case to the public that the South had attempted to thwart war, that it was Lincoln’s government that had brought it about. “No one can more deeply regret the threatening prospect of a general war between the United States and the Confederate States than I do,” he said. “Such an unfortunate result, if it should occur, cannot be charged to the seeking or desire of the Confederate States government. On the contrary, I feel assured in saying that every honorable means has been resorted to by the government to avoid it.” 8 Privately, Stephens was more candid. “Revolutions are much easier started than controlled,” he wrote a friend in late 1860, “and the men who begin them, even for the best purposes and objects, seldom end them. . . . The selfish, the ambitious, and the bad will generally take the lead.” 9 Stephens had little idea how prescient he was.
Among the Georgia circle that would congregate around the vice president was one Howell Cobb—a longtime rival of Stephens’s. Born on a plantation in Jefferson County in 1815, Cobb rose through the political ranks to become president of the First Confederate Provisional Congress, in Montgomery, where the obese, bearded politician presided over the formation of the South’s new government.
Two weeks before Davis’s inauguration, delegates from the seven original states that seceded flocked to the new capital to define the Confederacy and how it would work. Trains unloaded parties from South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas as—one by one—the men who would make a new government checked into dusty hotel rooms and into history.
These men were the seedlings of the Confederacy, each selected at secession meetings held in the individual states beginning in December 1860. The forty-three chosen ones represented their home states with the same relative force as representation in the old U.S. Congress, though when it came to voting, each state had only one collective vote. The mission for the Montgomery convention would be to elect a provisional president and vice president, draft a Confederate Constitution, and write the initial legislation of the New South that would ready it for war with the North.
The Montgomery convention, held in great style within the Alabama State House, assembled in secrecy and with a hell of a task ahead of it. Those gathered were largely attorneys and planters, many of them wealthy enough to own slaves, but by no means all motivated by the peculiar institution. About 60 percent were Democrats and 40 percent were ex-Whigs. The average age of the men was forty-seven. About half were Unionists who had been lukewarm, at best, over secession. Yet the fire-eaters, the rabid secessionists who rattled the door frames with their angry oratory, had no intention of compromising. Alexander Stephens described the men assembled for the convention as politicians of “substance, character, and, most of all, impeccable conservatism.” 10 But, as is often the case, one man’s “conservative” is another’s “radical.”
On the first morning of the Congress, Little Aleck awoke at his lodging and entertained breakfast before writing letters, chiefly to his brother Linton. Poised to make history, Stephens walked the half mile to the State House for the opening of the noontime session of the convention. The streets were jammed with visitors from the countryside, all of whom were in town to see the historic opening of the political meeting, and the cloudy, cold skies had opened up to splays of warm sunshine.
Burdened by his heavy coat and a hat awkwardly tipped upon his boyish head, Little Aleck marched past the throngs of curiosity seekers and up the steps of the State House. On entering the building, he walked straight into the rotunda and spied the Senate Chamber where the forty-three representatives would meet (though only thirty-seven were on hand that first day). Stephens walked into the octagonal chamber amid a flurry of others streaming into the building and awaited what would become the birth of the Confederacy.
Patriotic displays covered the white plaster walls inside the chamber. Desks were arranged so as to provide sufficient room for the delegates, and room for many visitors was reserved on the wooden benches in the third-floor balcony. The ladies of Montgomery had assembled an impressive spread of fruits, meats, and bread, all placed outside the chamber’s door so that delegates and visitors would not go hungry as they launched a revolution. Presiding over all was George Washington, who peered out of Gilbert Stuart’s portrait, hung prominently.
As noon approached, a weird and slightly bemused men’s club began to form. Delegates walked from desk to desk introducing themselves, some old acquaintances, but most strangers. After mixed conversations and much anticipation from the gallery above, the gavel struck at 12:30 p.m. to call the session to order. Six judges were present, twelve state legislators, twelve congressmen, seven senators, one governor, and two cabinet secretaries. 11
Alabama legislator Robert Barnwell served as presiding officer, welcoming delegates from sister states afar. After a blessing from a local reverend, Barnwell asked for a vote on a true presiding officer, a provisional president of the convention. “Howell Cobb of Georgia,” he suggested, and asked that the election be accomplished by acclamation. A journalist inside the room noted that Cobb, in making his acceptance speech, appeared like a “fat, pussy, round-faced fellow, who, although he has been Secretary of the Treasury, looks much more like spending money for the comfort of the inner man, than finding out where it comes from.” 12
Getting down to business, the body next elected other officers—a secretary, a doorkeeper, a messenger, and so on—and then Cobb brought down his gavel, with a storm of applause from the floor and from the gallery. The Confederacy had finished its first day of business.
Montgomery’s State House would serve as headquarters of the proto-Confederacy for weeks to come, each day witnessing Cobb’s opening remarks and the local reverend’s prayer. A national correspondent on the scene dubbed the building the “Temple of Mystery and Birthplace of Liberty.” 13 Business commenced at 10 a.m., and there was much of it. The work lasted through late afternoon, at which time either a supper break was called or the day was terminated. Some days the delegates returned to the State House to work long into the evening.
Throngs of spectators filled the galleries each day, wild with curiosity or looking for government work. The first major order of business was drafting a Confederate Constitution. This took all of
four days. The path to constitutionality might have taken two different avenues: sticking close to the old U.S. Constitution or radically striking out. The delegates chose the former, beginning their revolution conservatively and safely.
With the exception of some differences—significant as they were—the document the Southerners crafted was copied verbatim from the U.S. Constitution. The differences guaranteed state rights and protected slavery. The document explained how each state “acted in its sovereign and independent character” to make a “permanent federal government.” There was also hypocrisy: no formula for secession was allowed in the Confederate Constitution.
A provisional constitution in hand, Cobb and friends set about to elect a provisional president and vice president for the nation at large. Jefferson Davis was still on his Mississippi plantation, but in the meantime, Little Aleck Stephens was inaugurated as vice president on February 11, his forty-ninth birthday. Introduced to the delegation, the crowd, and the newspapermen in the chamber, he thanked the assembly briefly before deferring to the as-yet-missing President Davis.
WHEN Stephens and his comrades went home to their Montgomery hotels and boardinghouses, they had plenty to contemplate. Following the spark that ignited the fire, namely South Carolina’s secession on December 20, the entire nation had unraveled politically. While the Montgomery convention lumbered on, another meeting would be held in Washington, a so-called Peace Convention. At the request of the Virginia General Assembly, 132 representatives of twenty-one states came together to work out an eleventh-hour peace accord. But few had any hope that it would resolve anything. While President Buchanan remained in office as lame duck for another month, he was not about to do anything during the coming weeks—he would leave the mess for Lincoln.
As for the man from Illinois, a tall, gaunt figure, no one really knew much about him. To Southerners he was certainly that “black Republican” who would threaten their vital interests and ruin slavery. But Lincoln really hadn’t said a lot since his election; what he would do when he arrived in Washington was still unknown.
Although war loomed it certainly didn’t seem the only option. Many, including the influential New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, simply wanted to “let the erring sisters go”— to allow the Southern states that had seceded to keep their independence. Why fight to keep them in the Union if they really didn’t want to belong? Southerners were experienced as soldiers, skilled outdoorsmen, horsemen, and hunters. Should a war come, certainly a Rebel could lick ten Yankees. Even the Yankees seemed to acknowledge that would probably be the case. Perhaps letting the South go made sense.
Indeed, across Dixie, local militia units assembled, recruited, and drilled for the potential action that might come. Every town seemed interested in raising a company; every county seemed to be full of lawyers, clerks, farmhands, and planters primed and ready to take their respective places in the hierarchy of a fighting South.
Militarily, the center of attention was Fort Sumter, South Carolina, the most powerful and well located of several forts that guarded Charleston Harbor. Tensions at the Federal forts in Charleston had risen to alarming levels by late 1860, and the evening following Christmas 1860, Maj. Robert Anderson and his garrison of Yankees had moved from Fort Moultrie on the shore to the tiny Sumter, well out in the water. Despite his Southern sympathies, President Buchanan staunchly determined that Fort Sumter would not be abandoned to the South Carolina militia.
A few whispers of the trouble to come lay scattered around other locales. On the day Jefferson Davis was inaugurated, Bvt. Maj. Gen. David E. Twiggs, commanding the Military Department of Texas, surrendered military posts to the state militia. Twiggs was a senior general in the U.S. Army whose Georgia birth and proslavery sentiment were no secret. Even though he claimed to have surrendered at San Antonio under heavy pressure from state forces, authorities in Washington would have no part of his explanation and labeled him a treasonist. He would defect from the U.S. Army the day after his surrender, be dismissed by the army on March 1, and subsequently become a Confederate general officer.
LIKE his Montgomery brethren, Howell Cobb was well educated as a lawyer. He had married a wealthy plantation owner’s daughter, Mary Ann Lamar, and settled in Athens, Georgia. Elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1843, Cobb had served as state governor before being reelected to the House, in 1855. A close associate of all the Washington Democrats, he had been appointed secretary of the treasury by James Buchanan in 1857 before resigning during the secession crisis.
Cobb was a burly man, heavyset, with drooping eyes, a furrowed face, wiry hair that flowed over the back of his head, and a thick, gray beard. He looked and acted somewhat disheveled. Cobb was as furious a state rightist as you could meet, and he had campaigned intensely to sway pro-Union Georgia politicians to secede from the United States. In accepting his presidency of the Montgomery convention, which convened in the State House on February 4, Cobb had declared the separation from the old Union was “perfect, complete, and perpetual.” 14 By serving as the leader of the meeting that led to the First Provisional Congress, Howell Cobb had been denied the presidency of the Confederacy itself. Cobb’s brother Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb had accompanied him to the meeting and ended up contributing to the draft of the Confederate Constitution.
The spirit of the emerging Confederacy was intense. “I feel utterly unwilling ever again to live under a common government with the free-soil states,” a friend wrote Cobb. “Our pride is enlisted to prove to them and to the world that the South is not so poor, weak and destitute of resources as to be unable to hold her own in the great community of nations.” 15
For his part Cobb was willing to paint a shining picture of the new Confederacy to his old chief, President James Buchanan. “So far our movements in establishing the Confederate States upon a firm and lasting basis have been eminently successful,” he penned. “Our people are not only content but joyous and happy, and blessed beyond all calculation with prosperity in every department of business. Providence has smiled upon us, and with grateful hearts we go on our way rejoicing. This is not the picture which you had looked for as the result of disunion, and I confess, with all my sanguine feeling, it promises to surpass even my hopes and expectations.” 16
On the day of the inauguration, Cobb wrote, “There is no compromise that the seceded States would accept. There is not a single member of our Congress in favor of reconstruction upon any terms. . . . The idea of going back to the Union is ridiculed.” 17
“We are now in the midst of a revolution,” added Stephens. “That may be acted on as a fixed, immovable fact. It is bootless to argue the causes that produced it, or whether it is a good or bad thing in itself. The former will be the task of the historian. The latter is a problem that the future alone can solve. The wise man—the patriot and statesman in either section—will take the fact as it exists, and do the best he can under circumstances as he finds them, for the good, the peace, welfare, and happiness of his own country.” 18 The move had been made, and now it was up to the rest of the country to react.
As they sat on the State House platform, Stephens and Cobb listened attentively as Davis’s words, forced through his ragged throat, promised the South glory.
THE convention, by now called the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States, worked quickly to launch a new nation. It adopted the Stars and Bars, designed by Nichola Marschall of Marion, Alabama, as a national flag. It determined that Federal laws would remain in force until November 1861, unless they conflicted with the Confederate Constitution. It sent commissioners to Britain, France, and other foreign powers to start diplomatic relations, and it dispatched agents to Washington to discuss the status of Federal property in the South. Committees seemed to be forming everywhere—military committees, legal committees, financial committees—nearly every book in Montgomery in danger of being grabbed by Congress for study.
Two major areas of concern confronted Davis, Stephens, and the Congress: money and troops
. The most pressing matter was coming up with the dollars to finance both a new nation and a looming war. Davis did not want to impose taxes immediately, so he drew up plans for exorbitant loans. On the last day of February, the Confederate Congress issued $15 million worth of Treasury bonds, which would be sold for 8 percent interest over twenty years. Not only could buyers grab these government bonds with cash, which was in short supply, but they also could trade military supplies or farm goods for them. Other bond printings and the issuance of Confederate currency would come shortly, too.
Despite Northern fears of a natural Southern affinity for combat, raising the army was a huge challenge. Complicating matters, the Provisional Congress created both the Army of the Confederate States (the regular army) and the Provisional Army of the Confederate States (a volunteer army). The regular army was to be the permanent force, the provisional army the force required during the present war emergency. Officers could hold commissions concurrently in both services. This instantly created an administrative thicket, and few officers and troops ended up serving as “regulars.” Some 100,000 men were authorized as provisional soldiers to serve either six-month or one-year enlistments. Few realized at the time how inadequate this seemingly vast number would be.
In getting through the first bits of legislation, Davis learned he would have several vocal opponents in Congress. Chief among them was South Carolinian Robert Barnwell Rhett. A cranky, vitriolic man by the time of the oncoming war, Rhett, sixty, had been a lawyer in Charleston before rising to be a state legislator, attorney general of South Carolina, U.S. representative from South Carolina, and eventually U.S. senator. A bold speaker, incredibly self-assured, he filled the Senate seat vacated by John C. Calhoun, the firebrand of Southern politics, and quickly became a volcanic and unforgiving protector of all things Southern. Rhett offered an odd mixture of pride, obstinacy, and extreme self-righteousness. This made him attractive to many as a symbol of everything Southern, but was a real turnoff for many others.
Dixie Betrayed Page 3