Threats to slavery, even indirect ones like the Republican Party’s opposition to slavery’s westward extension, also posed a frightening public safety problem in the minds of many white Southerners. Because the institution of slavery rested on a foundation of force and violence, tensions always smoldered beneath the surface of southern society, where they kindled a contradiction that southern whites were forced to confront. 13 If slaves were truly happy in slavery, as proslavery ideologues insisted, then whites should have had nothing to fear from the approximately four million enslaved human beings who lived among them. 14 Yet the fear of slave revolt haunted white Southerners constantly, inflamed by actual uprisings such as the Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822, the Nat Turner rebellion of 1831, and John Brown’s failed uprising in 1859. White men, slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike, shared constant responsibility for ensuring community safety by serving together in slave patrols that safeguarded neighborhoods while also testifying to the community standing, commitment to slavery, and manhood of patrol members. 15 Southern whites generally coped with the contradiction between supposedly contented slaves and the concerted need for vigilance by assuming that slaves would not rebel of their own accord; they would have to be contaminated by northern ideas released into the atmosphere like infectious spores every time Northerners agitated on any aspect of the slavery question. Consequently, Republican claims to oppose slavery’s spread but not to touch it where it existed did nothing to assuage white Southerners’ concerns that slavery was in imminent danger in 1860.
Because most white Northerners did not want war, they clung to the comfortable belief that there would not be one, regardless of white Southerners’ warnings. Despite the concerns of some northern Democrats such as defeated presidential candidate Stephen Douglas, many northern onlookers dismissed the howl of protest from the South as theatrical posturing. Northerners had listened for decades to what they believed was southern saber rattling on the issue of slavery, but it had not led to war during the Nullification Crisis of 1828–33, the Wilmot Proviso crisis of 1846, or even the Nashville Convention in 1850. Troubles in Kansas showed that slavery could lead to violence, but most white Northerners preferred to believe that Southerners with their impetuous ways were simply bluffing again. 16 With the 1860 presidential race looming, some northern whites looked for signs of southern moderation. Lucius Brown, a draftsman from Columbus, Ohio, was working on a building project in Nashville, Tennessee, in November 1860. After watching a full day and night of torch-light processions on behalf of John Bell, a Constitutional unionist candidate who ran on a platform of saving the Union, Brown assured his father that “folks are very moderate here,” and he saw no “probability of…any trouble.” 17 Even after the election, the New York Daily Tribune claimed, “the secession strength in the South is over-rated. Vociferous, ostentatious and intolerant, it appears greater at the hustings than the polls.” 18 To go to war over such folly seemed neither wise nor probable. “War is the last, the very last argument to be resorted to among children of a common parentage,” warned the Chicago Tribune. “Let it be avoided by every sacrifice short of the legacy which our fathers left us in the Constitution of the United States.” 19
When southern states actually began to leave the Union, secession shifted from a melodramatic threat to a genuine danger to republican self-government. It repudiated the results of a fair and free election, the only basis on which self-government could function, and it was anarchy, according to newspapers, individuals, and President-elect Lincoln. Moreover, secession showed that a self-governing nation would self-destruct and betrayed the hopes for representative government shared by millions throughout the world. As South Carolina threatened secession, the New York Daily Tribune reminded readers that the United States was “engaged in trying a great experiment, involving not merely the future fate and welfare of this Western continent, but the hopes and prospects of the whole human race.” The American experiment would determine if “the democratic principle of equal rights, general suffrage, and government by a majority” was “capable of being carried into practical operation.” Secession over the embarrassing question of slavery would be regarded by onlookers throughout the world “as the first step toward the entire breakdown of our whole system of republican government.” 20
Once secession happened, more Northerners began to realize that if the nation was to avoid war, then the North would need to adopt some plan of action. A small fraction of the northern population advised allowing the southern states to depart in peace, but the more general urge in the early part of the secession winter was to search for a compromise. Congress hastily generated and considered piles of compromise proposals, as the public looked on expectantly. The Crittenden Compromise, named for the Kentucky senator who spearheaded the effort, consisted of a series of constitutional amendments and Congressional resolutions. It would have guaranteed perpetual noninterference with slavery; extended the Missouri Compromise line permanently across the continent, allowing slavery to spread south of 36° 30’ latitude; forbidden the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia without the consent of local voters, and only then if Maryland and Virginia had abolished slavery; prohibited Congress from exercising any authority over the interstate slave trade; channeled federal funds into compensation for slave owners whose runaway slaves remained at large in the North; and added an “unamendable amendment” to the Constitution which guaranteed that none of the Crittenden Compromise amendments could ever be amended once passed. 21
The Crittenden Compromise pleased almost nobody. It fell short of the heightened federal role in the promotion of slavery sought by southern states. Discussed as a series of Senate resolutions on slavery in early 1860 and then substantially adopted as the platform of southern Democratic presidential candidate John Breckinridge in the election of 1860, the desired federal slave code would have expressly forbidden either Congress or a territory’s own legislature from barring slavery from any U.S. territory, and it would have committed the federal government to the enforcement and protection of slavery in the territories. 22 By sidestepping demands for increased federal involvement with slavery, the Crittenden Compromise fell short of these requirements. At the same time, some northern Democrats found unamendable amendments difficult to square with strict-constructionist constitutional principles, while northern Republicans despised the way in which the compromise repudiated the platform of nonextension on which a candidate had just freely and fairly been elected. 23 To young farmhand Leigh Webber, compromise along the Crittenden lines amounted to allowing “an oligarchy of slaveholders,” not the electorate, to “rule our nation.” Simultaneously decrying the compromise proposals and chiding friends for not writing to him often enough, Webber announced, “I want no more compromise like the correspondence between you and me, or like a jug handle, all on one side.” 24
Meanwhile, as the U.S. government refrained from making military preparations for fear of alienating the Upper South and the border states that had not seceded, the newly established Confederate government adopted a wartime footing. On March 6, the Confederate Congress authorized the enlistment of 100,000 troops. Seceded states seized federal property such as forts and ports located within state borders, and appropriated the revenue from such properties, including customs duties, a major source of the nation’s income in an era that predated the personal income tax. By April, 60,000 Southerners were enrolled in military service and only four federal forts in seceded states remained in U.S. hands. One was Fort Sumter, and its soldiers were about to run out of food. Lincoln sent a ship of foodstuffs to Fort Sumter, despite South Carolina’s warnings that the state would regard any attempt to supply the fort as a hostile act. 25 As promised, South Carolina troops fired on U.S. soldiers located on federal property. The federal garrison surrendered, and Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion. Four more southern states, including the bellwether state of Virginia, seceded, creating an eleven-state Confederacy. 26
South
ern states’ seizure of customs duties and federal property had angered members of the northern public, but Fort Sumter proved to be the final straw. 27 After a winter of urging caution, the Wisconsin State Journal called the bombardment of Fort Sumter a “crowning act of wanton aggression,” which must “sweep at once away all further scruple or hesitation” in favor of a “vigorous policy” to suppress “treason and rebellion.” 28 New York City, a metropolis with strong southern ties, had been home to pronounced pro-southern sentiment throughout the winter, but after Fort Sumter, a quarter of a million people gathered to participate in a Union rally. In small towns and villages throughout the North, enthusiastic men, women, and children flocked to patriotic parades and ceremonies. 29
When President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion, northern communities responded eagerly. Addressing all “Patriots of Marshall County,” an Illinois recruiting poster urged local men to answer Lincoln’s call out of duty to “our God and our country.” 30 The response overwhelmed makeshift recruiting offices in Illinois and throughout the North. Similarly, white southern men all over the Confederacy rushed to join regiments, worried that the fighting would end before they had a chance to participate.
“If it had not been for…abolitionism…I would never have been soldiering”
While initially the desire for excitement and adventure may have been enough to propel many young men into the ranks, it did not take long for the novelty to wear off, leaving soldiers in both armies to think more deeply about how matters had come to war. Among other reasons, men on both sides justified the conflict by describing it as a defense of the memory of the American Revolution, although in both cases, the memory was selective. Union and Confederate soldiers alike believed that the republican government inherited from the Revolution derived its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, that it existed to preserve the ideals of liberty and equality, and that self-government could work only as long as the population remained virtuous. 31 Yet beyond these basic principles, they disagreed over whether the Revolution’s most worthwhile legacy consisted of the act of rebellion or of the government that the rebellion had created.
Confederates believed that their rebellion against a federal government that inadequately served white Southerners’ interest in slavery reenacted the colonies’ revolt against Great Britain. As Pvt. Ivy Duggan explained, “our Revolutionary fathers taught us…to resist oppression, to declare and maintain independence, to govern ourselves as we think best.” The British attempt to tax colonists’ tea without colonial representation in Parliament constituted far less of an infringement on colonial rights than hostility toward slavery did on white southern rights. If the revolutionary generation “could not endure a tax on tea because it violated a sacred principle, how could WE submit to be governed by those whose steady determination is to sacrifice our happiness, and even our lives, in the abolition of an institution guaranteed to us by the constitution of our fathers?” Duggan demanded. 32 The actual Union that the Revolution had created mattered less than the reasons for its creation.
Just as the Confederate interpretation of the Revolution’s most important legacy downplayed the importance of the government that emerged from the Revolution, so did Confederate soldiers in 1861 pay surprisingly scant attention to the new government that their own rebellion created. The outlines of the new government took shape when a provisional congress drafted a provisional constitution in February and ratified a permanent constitution in March. The Confederate Constitution quoted the U.S. Constitution verbatim in most places. The small number of changes included increased executive power (through a longer presidential term, a line item veto, enlarged presidential control over appropriations and the budget, and other relatively minor provisions), limits on tariffs, prohibitions on most internal improvements, and bans on democratic electoral activities like public statements of party platforms. Most important, the Confederate Constitution contained explicit guarantees for the institution of slavery. The constitution then went to the states where it would be ratified by state conventions. In sum, the creation and ratification of constitutions occupied Confederate politics for the first months of the war. 33 These tasks did not, in contrast, occupy the attention of soldiers, whose letters and diaries virtually never discussed political principles such as states’ rights, or political practicalities like the foundation of a new government, despite the fact that the South was engaged in landmark tasks like ratifying a constitution. 34 For the men who filled the Confederate ranks, secession, the Confederacy, and the war were not about state sovereignty or whether the central government could levy a tariff or build a road. Secession, the Confederacy, and the war were about securing a government that would do what government was supposed to do: promote white liberty, advance white families’ best interests, and protect slavery.
When Confederate soldiers spoke of liberty, they referred not to a universally applicable ideal, but to a carefully circumscribed possession available to white Southerners. No mere abstraction, liberty had to do with the unobstructed pursuit of material prosperity for white men and their families. As one Virginian put it, liberty consisted of the “good many comforts and privileges” that his family could enjoy without outside interference. 35 While exclusive in terms of race, liberty was inclusive in terms of class. In other words, while liberty applied strictly to whites, it applied to all whites, regardless of present social class or economic condition, because all whites, by virtue of being white, enjoyed the right to individual ambition and aspirations of material betterment through means of their own choosing. To quell rising discontent among recruits, an article in The Missouri Army Argus (a Confederate regimental newspaper) appealed to this version of liberty by conflating every white man’s ambitions, regardless of social status, with the Confederate cause:
What interest has General Sterling Price or Governor Claiborne Jackson or General or Governor anybody else, in the cause of our common country, that you have not? How are they or the officers more interested than you or I? There is not a soldier in the army who is not a free man…. Not a soldier who may not become richor great…. One man has as much at stake—as much to gain or lose as another. 36
Good government should uphold white liberty; the Confederacy offered a better choice for white Southerners than the Union because it was better for white liberty as Confederates defined it.
In order to retain legitimacy, government must also serve the needs and interests of white families, according to Confederates. Georgia soldier Josiah Patterson explained to his young sons that he must “leave you and become a soldier” to make sure that the boys grew up under a government that would facilitate their “hopes of becoming great and good men.” 37 His fellow Georgian, Ivy Duggan, described “[our] homes and the sweet ones there” as Confederate soldiers’ main priorities, while Pvt. Thomas Taylor of Alabama agreed that what mattered most were “our dear wives and little children.” 38 The presence of Union troops on southern soil could, of course, have made Confederates look to their own homes and families, but to dismiss the Confederate focus on family interests as nothing more than a response to Yankee threats is to miss something central about Confederate soldiers, and also to misunderstand their expectations of the war in 1861. No Union soldiers appeared anywhere near central Georgia or Alabama, or the home of any Confederate soldier who lived any distance from the coast or the Union border, and most Confederate soldiers doubted that the Yankees could fight well enough to penetrate very far into the South before the Confederacy won the war. Therefore, while white southern men cared deeply about their families and feared that emancipation would endanger their safety, few of them viewed the arrival of Northerners in their neighborhood as likely, let alone as the cause of the war. With or without advancing hosts of Union soldiers, ordinary white southern men were most concerned about their own material interests and their families.
Confederates’ focus on individualistic and familial concerns endowed their cause with both str
engths and weaknesses. On one hand, Confederate calls to arms in 1861 worked in large part because southern white men believed that their personal interests were best served and their families best protected by fighting for a Confederacy more attuned to white Southerners’ individual needs and aspirations than the Union was. Further, if at some later date a soldier became disillusioned with President Jefferson Davis, the Confederate Congress, or any other branch of government, he was unlikely to turn against the Confederate cause if that cause had more to do with himself or his family than it did with the Richmond government. This trait gave Confederate patriotism a certain resiliency and imperviousness to political events. On the other hand, soldiers’ concentration on personal and family well-being could mean trouble if the needs of the Confederacy ever clashed with family priorities. Since few such conflicts arose in 1861, the potential for trouble remained latent, but it was present from the start.
What This Cruel War Was Over Page 4