Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (50 page)

2
. Steven A. Channing,
Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina
(New York, 1970), 282–85.

3
. For good summaries of the historiography of the question of popular support for secession, see Ralph A. Wooster, "The Secession of the Lower South: An Examination of Changing Interpretations, CWH, 7 (1961), 117–27, and William J. Donnelly, "Conspiracy or Popular Movement: The Historiography of Southern Support for Secession,"
North Carolina Historical Review
, 42 (1965), 70–84.

secession to ensure unity among at least the cotton-South states. These "cooperationists," however, did not fully agree among themselves. At the radical end of their spectrum were cooperative secessionists, who professed as much ardor for southern independence as immediate secessionists but argued that a united South could present a stronger front than could a few independent states. But they were undercut by the swiftness of events, which produced a league of a half-dozen seceded states within six weeks of South Carolina's secession. As a Georgia co-operationist admitted ruefully in mid-January, four states
"have
already seceded. . . . In order to
act
with them, we must secede with them."
⁴

At the center of the cooperationist spectrum stood a group that might be labeled "ultimatumists." They urged a convention of southern states to draw up a list of demands for presentation to the incoming Lincoln administration—including enforcement of the fugitive slave law, repeal of personal liberty laws, guarantees against interference with slavery in the District of Columbia or with the interstate slave trade, and protection of slavery in the territories, at least those south of 36° 30′. If Republicans refused this ultimatum, then a united South would go out. Since Republicans seemed unlikely to promise all of these concessions and most southerners would not trust them even if they did, the ultimatumists commanded little support in secession conventions.

The third and most conservative group of cooperationists were conditional unionists, who asked fellow southerners to give Lincoln a chance to prove his moderate intentions. Only if Republicans committed some "overt act" against southern rights should the South resort to the drastic step of secession. But while the ranks of conditional unionists contained influential men like Alexander Stephens, they too were swept along by the pace of events. "The prudent and conservative men South," wrote Senator Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana, who counted himself one of them, were not "able to stem the wild torrent of passion which is carrying everything before it. . . . It is a revolution . . . of the most intense character . . . and it can no more be checked by human effort, for the time, than a prairie fire by a gardener's watering pot."
⁵

Other southerners used similar metaphors to describe the phenomenon. "It is a complete landsturm. . . . People are wild. . . . You might

4
.
Rome Weekly Courier
, Jan. 17, 1861, quoted in Michael P. Johnson,
Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia
(Baton Rouge, 1977), 111.

5
. Benjamin to Samuel L. M. Barlow, Dec. 9, 1860, Barlow Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library.

as well attempt to control a tornado as to attempt to stop them."
⁶
Secession was an unequivocal act which relieved the unbearable tension that had been building for years. It was a catharsis for pent-up fears and hostilities. It was a
joyful
act that caused people literally to dance in the streets. Their fierce gaiety anticipated the celebratory crowds that gathered along the Champs-Elysees and the Unter den Linden and at Pica-dilly Circus in that similarly innocent world of August 1914. Not that the flag-waving, singing crowds in Charleston and Savannah and New Orleans wanted or expected war; on the contrary, they believed that "the Yankees were cowards and would not fight"—or said they did, to assure the timid that there was no danger. "So far as civil war is concerned," remarked an Atlanta newspaper blithely in January 1861, "we have no fears of that in Atlanta." A rural editor thought that women and children armed with popguns firing "Connecticut wooden nutmegs" could deal with every Yankee likely to appear in Georgia. Senator James Chesnut of South Carolina offered to drink all the blood shed as a consequence of secession. It became a common saying in the South during the secession winter that "a lady's thimble will hold all the blood that will be shed."
⁷

Cooperationists were not so sure about this. "War I look for as almost certain," wrote Alexander Stephens, who also warned that "revolutions are much easier started than controlled, and the men who begin them [often] . . . themselves become the victims."
⁸
But Stephens's prescient warning was lost in the wind, and he joined the revolution himself when his state went out. Before that happened, however, the cooperationists had demonstrated considerable strength in each state except South Carolina and Texas. In elections for convention delegates, candidates representing some kind of cooperationist position polled at least 40 percent of the vote in those five states. Many eligible voters had not gone to the polls in these elections, leading to a belief that the potential cooperationist electorate was even larger. In Alabama and Georgia, 39 and 30 percent respectively of the delegates voted against the final resolution

6
. Channing,
Crisis of Fear
, 251; Nevins,
Emergence
, II, 321.

7
. Donald E. Reynolds,
Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis
(Nashville, 1970), 174; E. Merton Coulter,
The Confederate States of America
1861–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1950), 15.

8
. Stephens to —— Nov. 25, 1860, in Ulrich B. Phillips, ed.,
The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb
, in
Annual Report
of the American Historical Association, 1911, vol. II (Washington, 1913), 504–5.

of secession despite the enormous pressures brought on them to go along with the majority.

This caused many northerners and some historians to exaggerate the strength of unionism in the lower South. As late as July 1861, Lincoln expressed doubt "whether there is, to-day, a majority of the legally qualified voters of any State, except perhaps South Carolina, in favor of disunion." A century later several historians echoed this faith in a silent majority of southern unionists. "It can hardly be said that a majority of the South's white people deliberately chose to dissolve the Union in 1861," wrote one. "Secession was not basically desired even by a majority in the lower South," concluded another, "and the secessionists succeeded less because of the intrinsic popularity of their program than because of the extreme skill with which they utilized an emergency psychology."
⁹

Though an emergency psychology certainly existed, the belief in a repressed unionist majority rests on a misunderstanding of southern unionism. As a Mississippi "unionist" explained after Lincoln's election, he was no longer "a Union man in the sense in which the North is Union." His unionism was conditional; the North had violated the condition by electing Lincoln. Cooperationists in Alabama who voted against secession cautioned outsiders not to "misconstrue" their action. "We scorn the Black Republicans," they declared. "The State of Alabama cannot and will not submit to the Administration of Lincoln. . . . We intend to resist . . . but our resistance is based upon . . . unity of action, with the other slave states." Or as a Mississippi coop-erationist put it: "Cooperation before secession was the first object of my desire. Failing this I am willing to take the next best, subsequent cooperation or cooperation after secession."
¹⁰
This was the position of most delegates who initially opposed immediate secession. It was a weak foundation on which to build a faith in southern unionism.

Was secession constitutional? Or was it an act of revolution? The

9
.
CWL
, IV, 437; Charles Grier Sellers, "The Travail of Slavery," in Sellers, ed.,
The Southerner as American
(Chapel Hill, 1960), 70; David M. Potter,
Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis
(New Haven, 1942, reissued 1962 with new preface), 208.

10
. Percy Lee Rainwater,
Mississippi: Storm Center of Secession
1856–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1938), 173; J. Mills Thornton III,
Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama
, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge, 1978), 416–17; Dwight L. Dumond,
The Secession Movement 1860–1861
(New York, 1931), 200–202.

Constitution is silent on this question. But most secessionists believed in the legality of their action. State sovereignty, they insisted, had preceded national sovereignty. When they had ratified the Constitution, states delegated some of the functions of sovereignty to a federal government but did not yield its fundamental attributes. Having ratified the Constitution by a convention, a state could reassert total sovereignty in the same manner. This theory presented a slight problem for states (five of the seven) that had come into the Union after 1789. But they, too, despite the appearance of being creatures rather than creators of the Union, could assert the prior sovereignty of their states, for each had formed a state constitution (or in the case of Texas, a national constitution)
before
petitioning Congress for admission to the Union.

Those southerners (mostly conditional unionists) who found this theory a bit hard to swallow could fall back on the right of revolution. Senator Alfred Iverson of Georgia conceded that while no state had a constitutional right to secede "each State has the right of revolution. . . . The secession of a State is an act of revolution." The mayor of Vicksburg described secession as "a mighty political revolution which [will] result in placing the Confederate States among the Independent nations of the earth."
¹¹
A Confederate army officer declared that he had "never believed the Constitution recognized the right of secession. I took up arms, sir, upon a broader ground—the right of revolution. We were wronged. Our properties and liberties were about to be taken from us. It was a sacred duty to rebel."
¹²

Sporting blue cockades (the symbol of secession), some of these enthusiastic revolutionaries even sang "The Southern Marseillaise" in the streets of Charleston and New Orleans.
¹³
Ex-Governor Henry Wise of Virginia, who urged the formation of committees of public safety, gloried

11
. GG, 36 Cong., 2 Sess., 10–11; Peter F. Walker,
Vicksburg: A People at War
(Chapel Hill, 1960), 43.

12
. George Ward Nichols,
The Story of the Great March
(New York, 1865), 302.

13
. Part of the lyrics went like this:

Sons of the South, awake to glory!
Hark! hark! what myriads bid you rise.
Your children, wives, and grandsires hoary,
Behold their tears and hear their cries.
. . .
To arms! to arms! ye brave,
Th' avenging sword unsheath! (Reynolds,
Editors Make War
, 184).

in his reputation as the "Danton of the Secession Movement in Virginia." Carried away by an excess of Robespierrian zeal, a Georgia disunionist warned cooperationists that "we will go for revolution, and if you . . . oppose us . . .we will brand you as traitors, and chop off your heads."
¹⁴