America Aflame (33 page)

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 as 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.”

In a stirring conclusion, Palmer argued that only independence could fulfill the South's “providential trust”: the duty “
to ourselves, to our slaves, to the world, and to Almighty God … to preserve and transmit our existing system of domestic servitude, with the right, unchallenged by man, to go and root itself wherever Providence and nature may carry it.”
The sermon stunned the congregation with its candor and eloquent justification for a reviled civilization under siege. No longer shunned prophets in their own land, they were God's Chosen Nation. Thirty thousand copies of the sermon blanketed the South, creating “a very great sensation.” One southerner, years later, noted that Palmer had done more than “any other non-combatant in the South to promote rebellion.” Union General Benjamin F. Butler agreed, placing a bounty on Palmer's head when his troops occupied New Orleans in 1862.
31

Northerners were uncertain how to react to secession. Some uttered “good riddance”; others prayed for compromise; still others talked of coercion. If the president-elect had wanted to take the pulse of the northern public to help him determine a course of action, his findings would have been hard to interpret.

The editors of
Harper's
magazine, a bellwether of moderate northern public opinion, hoped for a rapid reconciliation, less for the sake of the departing Lower South states than for the northern economy, which stood to lose cotton exports valued at more than $180 million.
Harper's
solution was to allow secession to run its course and hope for a compromise to restore the Union. The editors supported almost any plan that raised that promise. They presented their own “Cornerstone” speech: “Our Government, like all other Governments,… rests upon the corner-stone of COMPROMISE—the yielding by each component part of something for the general good.” The editors were optimistic that in this advanced age something could be worked out: “It is not possible that in the present day of enlightenment, civilization, progress, and commerce these obvious truths [of the value of compromise] should be ignored.”
32

Northern moderates received the selection of Davis as president of the Confederacy as an encouraging sign of reason in the new government. Alexander Stephens's elevation to the vice presidency provided more optimism, as many northerners viewed him as “the most emphatic enemy of disunion.” The Confederate Constitution, an almost verbatim copy of the United States Constitution, generated hope that grounds for reconciliation existed. In the meantime, many northerners cautioned, “the enterprise of holding the Union together by force would ultimately prove futile.” Coercion would dash hopes for compromise and precipitate an economic debacle at a time when the financial panic of 1857–58 remained fresh in memory. Already southerners were canceling orders for northern goods; northern factories cut wages as demand dropped; and workers at several New England mills went out on strike, raising the specter of social unrest.
33

Expulsion of black and white abolitionists from Tremont Temple, Boston, December 3, 1860. (Picture Collection, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

Many abolitionists abjured compromise with the devil and rejoiced to be rid of the southern scourge. They not only agreed with moderates who dismissed coercion as an option but also argued for total disengagement. It was a curious position. Was slavery less of a sin if the South separated itself from the Union? Was abolition no longer a priority if the institution suddenly belonged to another country? Noted abolitionist Wendell Phillips declared in March 1861, “Every man who possesses his soul in patience, sees that disunion is gain, disunion is
peace
, disunion is virtue.” Much as secessionists perceived their action to be an atonement and a rebirth as a new and pristine nation, these advocates of letting go saw the opportunity of a reconstituted United States to at last justify its promise as a Chosen Nation, now rid of slavery and reborn cleansed of that awful sin.
34

Some northern clergy supported this view, though unlike in the South, the secession crisis did not create a consensus in northern pulpits. Joseph Bittinger, an evangelical minister from Cleveland, observed, “The feeling is gaining ground [among Christians] that it would be good riddance if the South went out.… God's people … favor … secession rather than … any more political compromise with slavery.” Some Republican politicians, recalling how southern collusion had shredded their legislative agenda in the previous Congress, now looked forward to a friendlier body. Others began to plan for life without the South, including moving the capital to a more appropriate northern location.
Harper's
offered New York City as a possibility, but Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Chicago received support as well.
35

A good many northerners, especially those with close business and political ties to the South, clung to the hope of compromise even if they believed that secession was illegal and ill advised. The enthusiastic northern response to the Crittenden proposals reflected a reservoir of support for a peaceful resolution. It also indicated a willingness to bend to southern demands that heretofore many had deemed unacceptable.