Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (51 page)

But the American Revolution, not the French, was the preferred model for secessionists.
Liberté
they sought, but not
égalité
or
fratemité
. Were not "the men of 1776 . . . Secessionists?" asked an Alabamian. If we remain in the Union, said a Florida slaveholder, "we will be deprived of that right for which our fathers fought in the battles of the revolution." From "the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights . . . which our fathers bequeathed to us," declared Jefferson Davis, let us "renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to the holy cause of constitutional liberty."
¹⁵

What were these rights and liberties for which Confederates contended? The right to own slaves; the liberty to take this property into the territories; freedom from the coercive powers of a centralized government. Black Republican rule in Washington threatened republican freedoms as the South understood them. The ideology for which the fathers had fought in 1776 posited an eternal struggle between liberty and power. Because the Union after March 4, 1861, would no longer be controlled by southerners, the South could protect its liberty from the assaults of hostile power only by going out of the Union. "On the 4th of March, 1861," declared a Georgia secessionist, "we are either
slaves in the Union or freemen out of it."
The question, agreed Jefferson Davis and a fellow Mississippian, was " 'Will you be slaves or will be independent?' . . . Will you consent to be robbed of your property" or will you "strike bravely for liberty, property, honor and life?"
¹⁶
Submission to Black Republicans would mean "the loss of liberty, property, home, country—everything that makes life worth having," proclaimed a South Carolinian. "I am engaged in the glorious cause of liberty and justice,"

14
. Emory M. Thomas,
The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), 31; Johnson,
Patriarchal Republic
, 39.

15
. Alabamian and Floridian quoted in James Oakes,
The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders
(New York, 1982), 240, 239; Rowland, Davis, V, 43, 202.

16
. Johnson,
Patriarchal Republic
, 36; Moore, ed.,
Rebellion Record
, VI, "Documents," 299; William L. Barney,
The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in
1860 (Princeton, 1974), 192.

wrote a Confederate soldier, "fighting for the rights of man—fighting for all that we of the South hold dear."
¹⁷

What stake did nonslaveholding whites have in this crusade for the freedom of planters to own slaves? Some secessionists worried a great deal about this question. What if Hinton Rowan Helper was right? What if nonslaveowners were potential Black Republicans? "The great lever by which the abolitionists hope to extirpate slavery in the States is the aid of non-slaveholding citizens in the South," fretted a Kentucky editor. How would they ply this lever? By using the patronage to build up a cadre of Republican officeholders among nonslaveowners—first in the border states and upcountry where slavery was most vulnerable, and then in the heart of the cotton kingdom itself. Governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia feared that some whites would be "bribed into treachery to their own section, by the allurements of office." When Republicans organized their "Abolition party . . . of Southern men," echoed the
Charleston Mercury
, "the contest for slavery will no longer be one between the North and the South. It will be in the South, between the people of the South."
¹⁸

The elections of delegates to secession conventions seemed to confirm this fear. Many upcountry districts with few slaves sent cooperationist delegates. In the conventions, delegates supporting delay or cooperation owned, on the average, less wealth and fewer slaves than immediate secessionists. The implications of these data should not be pushed too far. A good many low-slaveholding Democratic counties voted for immediate secession, while numerous high-slaveholding Whig counties backed cooperation. And of course cooperationism did not necessarily mean unionism. Nevertheless, the partial correlation of cooperationism with low slaveholding caused concern among secessionists.
¹⁹

17
.
Charleston Mercury
, Oct. 11, 1860, in Dwight L. Dumond, ed.,
Southern Editorials on Secession
(New York, 1931), 181; Michael Barton, "Did the Confederacy Change Southern Soldiers?" in Harry P. Owens and James J. Cooke, eds.,
The Old South in the Crucible of War
(Jackson, 1983), 71.

18
.
Kentucky Statesman
, Oct. 5, 1860, in Dumond,
The Secession Movement
, 117n.; Allen D. Candler, ed.,
The Confederate Records of the State of Georgia
, 5 vols.(Atlanta, 1909–11), I, 47;
Charleston Mercury
, Oct. 11, 1860, in Dumond, ed.,
Southern Editorials
, 179.

19
. Seymour Martin Lipset, "The Emergence of the One-Party South—The Election of 1860," in Lipset,
Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics
(Anchor Books ed., New York, 1963), 372–84; Potter,
Impending Crisis
, 503–4; Johnson,
PatriarchalRepublic
, 63–78; Peyton McCrary, Clark Miller, and Dale Baum, "Class and Party in the Secession Crisis: Voting Behavior in the Deep South,"
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
, 8 (1978), 429–57; and Ralph Wooster,
The Secession Conventions of the South
(Princeton, 1962), passim, esp. 259–66.

So they undertook a campaign to convince nonslaveholders that they too had a stake in disunion. The stake was white supremacy. In this view, the Black Republican program of abolition was the first step toward racial equality and amalgamation. Georgia's Governor Brown carried this message to his native uplands of north Georgia whose voters idolized him. Slavery "is the poor man's best Government," said Brown. "Among us the poor white laborer . . . does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense his equal. . . . He belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race of
white men."
Thus yeoman farmers "will never consent to submit to abolition rule," for they "know that in the event of the abolition of slavery, they would be greater sufferers than the rich, who would be able to protect themselves. . . . When it becomes necessary to defend our rights against so foul a domination, I would call upon the mountain boys as well as the people of the lowlands, and they would come down like an avalanche and swarm around the flag of Georgia."
²⁰

Much secessionist rhetoric played variations on this theme. The election of Lincoln, declared an Alabama newspaper, "shows that the North [intends] to free the negroes and force amalgamation between them and the children of the poor men of the South." "Do you love your mother, your wife, your sister, your daughter?" a Georgia secessionist asked non-slaveholders. If Georgia remained in a Union "ruled by Lincoln and his crew . . . in TEN years or less our CHILDREN will be the
slaves
of negroes."
²¹
"If you are tame enough to submit," declaimed South Carolina's Baptist clergyman James Furman, "Abolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands." No! No! came an answering shout from Alabama. "Submit to have our wives and daughters choose between death and gratifying the hellish lust of the negro!! . . . Better ten thousand deaths than submission to Black Republicanism."
²²

To defend their wives and daughters, presumably, yeoman whites therefore joined planters in "rallying to the standard of Liberty and

20
. Johnson,
Patriarchal Republic
, 48; Steven Hahn,
The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890
(New York, 1983), 86–87.

21
. Reynolds,
Editors Make War
, 125–26; Johnson,
Patriarchal Republic
, 47–48.

22
. Channing,
Crisis of Fear
, 287; Barney, Secessionist
Impulse
, 228.

Equality for white men" against "our Abolition enemies who are pledged to prostrate the white freemen of the South down to equality with negroes." Most southern whites could agree that "democratic liberty exists solely because we have black slaves" whose presence "promotes equality among the free." Hence "freedom is not possible without slavery."
²³

This Orwellian definition of liberty as slavery provoked ridicule north of the Potomac. For disunionists to compare themselves to the Revolutionary fathers "is a libel upon the whole character and conduct of the men of '76," declared William Cullen Bryant's
New York Evening Post
. The founders fought "to establish the rights of man . . . and principles of universal liberty." The South was rebelling "not in the interest of general humanity, but of a domestic despotism. . . . Their motto is not liberty, but slavery." Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence spoke for "Natural Rights against Established Institutions," added the
New York Tribune
, while "Mr. Jeff. Davis's caricature thereof is made in the interest of an unjust, outgrown, decaying Institution against the apprehended encroachments of Natural Human Rights." It was, in short, not a revolution for liberty but a counterrevolution "reversing the wheels of progress . . . to hurl everything backward into deepest darkness . . . despotism and oppression."
²⁴

Without assenting to the rhetoric of this analysis, a good many disunionists in effect endorsed its substance. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were wrong if they meant to include Negroes among "all men," said Alexander Stephens after he had become vice president of the Confederacy. "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 . . . is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth." Black Republicans were the real revolutionaries. They subscribed to "tenets as radical and revolutionary" as those of the abolitionists, declared a New Orleans newspaper. These "revolutionary dogmas," echoed numerous southerners, were "active and

23
.
LINCOLN ELECTED!
Broadside from Bell County, Texas, Nov. 8, 1860, McLellan Lincoln Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University; Thornton,
Politicsand Power in a Slave Society
, 321, 206–7;
Richmond Enquirer
, April 15, 1856, quoted in Oakes,
The Ruling Race
, 141.

24
.
New York Evening Post
, Feb. 18, 1861;
New York Tribune
, March 27, 1861, May 21, 1862.

bristling with terrible designs and as ready for bloody and forcible realities as ever characterized the ideas of the French revolution."
²⁵
Therefore it was "an abuse of language" to call secession a revolution, said Jefferson Davis. We left the Union "to save ourselves from a revolution" that threatened to make "property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless." In 1861 the Confederate secretary of state advised foreign governments that southern states had formed a new nation "to preserve their old institutions" from "a revolution [that] threatened to destroy their social system."
²⁶

This is the language of counterrevolution. But in one respect the Confederacy departed from the classic pattern of the genre. Most counterrevolutions seek to restore the
ancien régime
. The counterrevolutionaries of 1861 made their move before the revolutionaries had done anything—indeed, several months before Lincoln even took office. In this regard, secession fit the model of "pre-emptive counterrevolution" developed by historian Arno Mayer. Rather than trying to restore the old order, a pre-emptive counterrevolution strikes first to protect the status quo before the revolutionary threat can materialize. "Conjuring up the dangers of leaving revolutionaries the time to prepare their forces and plans for an assault on
their
terms," writes Mayer, "counterrevolutionary leaders urge a preventive thrust." To mobilize support for it, they "intentionally exaggerate the magnitude and imminence of the revolutionary threat."
²⁷