Upon the Altar of the Nation (5 page)

For the prior thirty years, South Carolina had regularly proclaimed its right to secession. Now it sought fellow slaveholding states to join its cause. From the start of South Carolina’s agitation, the issue had never been just about states’ rights, but rather about states’ rights
and
support for slavery. South Carolina did not appeal to free states to join in secession, because her citizens saw the bond of states’ rights and slavery as indissoluble. Nor did they see slavery in any terms other than racial. From John Calhoun’s secessionist tract “South Carolina Exposition and Protest” (1828) forward, the most important states’ right had remained the prerogative to protect and extend slavery. In words typical of the period, John Townsend, a South Carolina planter, insisted, “The South alone should govern the South, and African slavery should be controlled by those who are friendly to it.”
²
Townsend’s use of the word “African” confirms how firmly racism would govern proslavery arguments.

South Carolina’s slaveholding elites were proud of their leadership role in the cause of secession. From the colonial period on, their state had remained the only one to contain a black majority, and their preoccupation with slavery, coercion, and racial superiority was all-consuming. Not surprisingly, they would lead the way in arguments for states’ rights, and their defense would be anchored in the need to defend African American slavery on a self-conscious platform of white supremacy.
³

South Carolinians prided themselves as well on their “conservatism,” a blanket term that encapsulated their differences from the “Unitarian” North. Their America was republican, not democratic, and this meant a society premised on the principle of ordered inequality—aristocratic hierarchy—not equality. In their world, all men and women were created unequal.
⁴
Such a social order established the planter masters at the top, the slaves at the bottom, and the yeomanry in between. Within the Southern worldview, therefore, slavery constituted a good that protected slaves in a race-based hierarchy of superior and inferior. Slavery appeared as a win-win, both for the black slave and the white owner. Proslavery apologists would argue that any republican society without slavery as its basis could not permanently survive.

Alongside political arguments for an unequal, slave-based republic came powerful religious arguments. Clerical voices—which mattered greatly as moral arbiters and upholders of a virtuous social order—so meshed evangelical Christianity with Southern republicanism that one seemingly could not exist without the other. The historian Stephanie McCurry aptly summarizes Southern planter ideology as “conservative Christian republicanism.”
⁵
In this view, evangelical Christianity, Southern republicanism, and “friends” to slaves existed in a galvanic and ultimately disastrous alchemy.

With the momentous close of 1860, the self-proclaimed “free and independent” state of South Carolina had good reason to believe that this time others would not only embrace their proclamation but also follow their lead. They would not have long to wait. On New Year’s Day 1861, the
Charleston Mercury
boldly proclaimed:

By February 1861 Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had joined the “little state” in secession. The seceding states adopted the Confederate constitution on February 8, conspicuously “invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God” in its preamble. Following these landmark events, Jefferson Davis, a former Mississippi senator and secretary of war, was inaugurated as provisional president of the Confederate States of America and commander in chief of Confederate forces.
⁶

At the start, many military officers, Northern opinion shapers, and ordinary citizens were more than willing to let the South secede peacefully. Without ever slackening in their denunciations of slavery and its evils, they nevertheless assumed that under the Constitution, slavery in the existing slave states was up to those states and no one else to abolish. If, instead of abolishing slavery, the cotton states chose to betray the Constitution and leave the Union, that was an evil they would have to answer for; but secession was not a cause for costly offensive military action.

On February 14, 1861, the
Independent,
a nationally influential religious weekly, began a column entitled “What Shall Be Done?” The writers had no doubt what America’s course of action should be—let the South leave. Slavery was the major issue dividing the nation, and by allowing the South to leave, “the problem of the perpetuity of slavery is coming to its solution. We have long feared an insurrection of the slaves. We now see an insurrection of the masters.” The only thing staying God’s vengeful hand from sinful slaveholders, the writers asserted, was their association with the God-fearing North. With secession, God would be freed to exercise “that retributive Providence which is ordering their dreadful destiny.”

On March 21, the writers’ opinion had not changed: “Let them go! How evident is it that God, for great and beneficent purposes of his own, has permitted this insanity to come upon them! Let them go, to work out their own destiny by themselves!”

In a fast-day sermon delivered on April 4, Zachary Eddy, a Congregational minister in Northampton, Massachusetts, was still not ready for war. Eddy reasoned that the North must let the “idolatrous” South go peacefully. Clearly they were already a new nation. After citing various offenses—including the seizure of federal property, the arming of state militias for self-defense, and the commission of foreign ministers—Eddy concluded that there could be only one response: “I submit that all these facts demonstrate an accomplished revolution—a revolution which will hardly go backward. It is high time to look the melancholy fact full in the face, that the union is actually dissolved.”
⁷

Some Democratic clergy in the North not only accepted secession but went so far as to say that the abolitionist Northerners were worse than the seceders and should be held primarily to blame. In Bath, Maine, the Congregational minister John Fiske had used the occasion of the January 4 fast to complain bitterly:

Other Northern arbiters of morality had their doubts. From their perspective, the Union embodied an idea and a rule of law that was unbreakable. This was precisely President Lincoln’s position in his First Inaugural Address:

One secession had led to seven. If seven states could secede, why not more? Union was not like marriage, Lincoln asserted; divorce was not an option.
⁹

 

Abolitionists occupied a conflicted position toward secession. Followers of William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833, had themselves urged Northern secession from a sinful slaveholding South.
¹⁰
After passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, Garrison publicly burned the Constitution. Many other abolitionists had pacifistic principles that discouraged all talk of war as a response to secession. Most doubted the rightness of a war fought solely to preserve the Union. If war were waged for universal and immediate emancipation, that would be just. But in a civil war launched simply for the Union, the cause was territory—not justice—and was therefore wrong.

Rare was the abolitionist who had much good to say about Lincoln. He seemed too timid about slavery. In Worcester, Massachusetts, an ardent abolitionist named Martha LeBaron Goddard made clear in her correspondence her pronounced dislike for President Lincoln and the cause of war. Even before Lincoln’s inauguration, she suspected his motives: “I think of nothing but the war, am heart-sick sometimes at the slowness and timidity of men around me—and sometimes fiercely indignant—at Abe Lincoln, whom I don’t trust and don’t like—and sometimes, thank God, glad in my soul for a word or act for freedom.” One month later, Goddard was willing to let the South go: “The Charleston article in the last
Atlantic
interested me, and made me feel anew how much better it would be to let south Carolina go, and any other states that wish to share her ‘outer darkness.’ ”
¹¹

Though abolitionists were highly vocal and widely identified in the South as the dominant intellectual and moral influence on the North, the numbers of radical abolitionists were small and not growing. They were more of a symbolic presence than a real numerical force. By 1861 subscriptions to Garrison’s Liberator had dwindled to twelve hundred.
¹²
Southerners envisioned abolitionists as all of the North—or at least New England—while Northerners saw them as extreme and hostile to the Constitution and its provisions supporting slavery.

 

Even if many in the white North were willing to let the South go in early 1861, large parts of the South outside of South Carolina were hesitant to secede.
¹³
Robert Lewis Dabney, a young Presbyterian pastor who would become Stonewall Jackson’s chief of staff and the preeminent champion of Confederate nationalism, feared secession outright.
¹⁴
In a letter to Richmond’s venerable Presbyterian minister Moses Hoge, written in 1860, Dabney styled himself a “Washington-Madison politician” who feared disunion and the “terrific” consequences of a war setting all adrift in “a sea which has no chart.”
¹⁵

On President Buchanan’s national fast day in January 1861, Hoge and T. V. Moore—the two most powerful Presbyterian clerics in Richmond—reflected antebellum strictures against “political preaching” and refused to speak to the national crisis from their pulpits. If their integrity as “prophets” was to be maintained, politics would have to be kept out of the pulpit. In a letter to Dabney, Hoge insisted that “Moore and myself do not mean to introduce anything political into our sermons, but wish to direct the minds of the people from man to God.... I think of taking for my text: Give us help from trouble: for vain is the help of man.”
¹⁶
In a letter to Princeton Theological Seminary’s Charles Hodge, a conservative former Whig who had voted for Lincoln, Dabney spoke for many in his city when he expressed hope for reconciliation between North and South. In a gracious reply, Hodge asserted that no “sane man” wanted war but preferred instead a “peaceable separation.” At the same time, he feared that “forcible separation is inevitably war.”
¹⁷

Until the provocative events at Fort Sumter, Lincoln himself did not believe there would be a war or, if there was one, that secession would be permanent or widely supported. Nor did he put much thought into how he might prepare for war. At that point, the newly elected Lincoln wanted desperately to avoid conflict of any kind that would probably lead to more secessions from the upper South.
¹⁸
He continued to hope for a redemptive core of “Unionists” who would put down the secession movement and expose a handful of renegade “rebel” planters to be a breed of troublemakers as rare to the South as abolitionists were to the North. Lincoln repeatedly made clear to all sides, from Southern “fire-eaters” to New England “abolitionists,” his willingness to entertain compromises that would sacrifice the interests and freedom of slaves for the prospect of saving the Union. He even lent his tacit support to a proposed constitutional amendment that would guarantee the right of the South to their slaves in perpetuity, and he supported colonization for those freed.

Lincoln would not budge on two issues, however: the right of states to secede from the Union and the expansion of slavery into the territories.
¹⁹
Neither was allowable or negotiable. Lincoln’s patriotism burned deep and informed his morality. Ever since the Senate campaign debates with Stephen Douglas and the presidential campaign that followed, Lincoln had made it plain that there was only one ultimate good that required unlimited loyalty—the Declaration of Independence and the Union that flowed from it. This loyalty was by no means an abolitionist platform, let alone a call for racial equality, but it did have profound implications for the spread of slavery into the vast United States territories.
²⁰