Civil War History - Secession and PoliticsWas it Slavery, or was it States Rights? Perhaps it was the election of Lincoln? What were the real reasons for Southern Secession and what were the political issues in this time of war? Find your answers here in the Secession and Politics Disussion.
Southern Fear of Southern Democracy A Cause of Secession?
I’m currently reading a book of essays, entitled “The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War” (1994), by the historian William Freehling, several of which discuss the reasons that the South decided to secede. Presumably, Professor Freehling will amplify and update his views in Volume II of his work, “The Road to Disunion.”
In one of the essays, Professor Freehling asks precisely the question that has mystified me for some time: Particularly in view of the fact that President Lincoln had made clear that he did not intend to emancipate slaves in the states – indeed, “[i]n his Inaugural Address, the President-elect endorsed a proposed Thirteenth Amendment, which would have forever barred the federal government from coercively abolishing slavery in a state” – “Why had rebels against Union considered Lincoln so immediately threatening that a potentially counterproductive civil war must be risked?”
His answer, based upon his study of the Secession Conventions, makes enormous sense to me, particularly in light of Volume I of “The Road to Disunion”, in which he described the gradual decrease over the years in the numbers of slaves and slaveholders in the border South, and the corresponding concentration of slaves in the Deep South: Southern radicals were willing to risk civil war because they feared that the President would recognize and exploit their own internal weakness:
“Instead of imposing antislavery as an outsider, secessionists warned, Lincoln would enlist insiders to corrode slavery. By using patronage appointments to recruit southern politicians, the President would form a heretical southern wing of the Republican Party. Especially in the Border South, where only one in eight voters owned slaves, the thin slaveholding minority could not stop Southern Republicans’ demagoguery from nurturing the thick non-slaveholding majority’s nascent antislavery sentiments. Lincoln’s Border South wing would thus eventually eliminate slavery from the upper third of the South, while Lincoln’s northern majority would forbid the slavocracy from expanding into new territory. This process, if allowed to start, could never be aborted. After the number of free states sufficiently contracted, the Republican Party could – and would – end slavery by constitutional amendment.”
In another essay, Professor Freehling summarizes arguments in to the Virginia Convention to this effect:
“Lincoln could shorten slavery’s Upper South tenure, Virginia secessionists argued, not only by stopping slaveholder expansion to new territories, not only by intensifying the fugitive slave problem, but also by using patronage to establish a Southern Republican party. By enforcing free speech and a free press and by establishing Republican outposts within the Border South, Lincoln would provoke a southern internal debate over slavery. The President, predicted Jeremiah Morton, would shower patronage on all the border states and form a party in their midst, leaving ‘Black Republicans upon every stump, and organizing in every county; and that is the peace we shall have from this “glorious Union.”’
“Open debate over slavery would become ever less peaceful, Virginia secessionists feared, as proportions of nonslaveholders became ever more dominant . . .. ‘As the white population gains rapidly on the blacks,’ and as non-slaveholders’ ‘interest in the institution of slavery sinks almost to zero,’ concluded George W. Randolph, ‘the odds against us in the struggle will be tremendous.’”
Henry Benning, Georgia’s commissioner to the Virginia Convention, agreed. After noting the population trends (“some of our own slave States are becoming free States”), Benning painted a lurid scenario that ended in white extermination:
“’The consequence is, that it [slavery] will go down lower and lower, until it all gets to the Cotton States – until it gets to the bottom. . . . I fear that the day is not distant when the Cotton States, as they are called, will be the only slave States.’ Then, ‘the North will have the power to amend the Constitution.’ With the Deep South a black sea, concluded Benning, whites ‘will be completely exterminated, and the land . . . will become another Africa or St. Domingo.’”
It’s ironic that what seems to have impelled proponents of secession was the fear of democracy within their own borders.
I have Freehling's book Road to Disunion and enjoyed it very much. I have always found it surprising that those who support the idea of Southern democratic ideals as a reason for secession could voice such an idea after reading this book. Democracy was pretty much the last thing on the leaderships mind.
Sincerely,
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
To amplify your post somewhat, for those who haven't read Freehling, he suggests that there were two southern models of democracy: the Jacksonian "egalitarian" model, which viewed all free white males as worthy of the vote; and the Calhoun model, basically a throwback to aristocratic pre-Jacksonian 18th Century models, which considered only white males who owned real property as worthy of governing. While Calhoun and South Carolina exemplified the reactionary tradition, it was also embraced by conservative elements in other southern states, particularly eastern Virginia. Freehling has a wonderful 1843 quote from Virginian Abel Upshur, Tyler's Secretary of State, that illustrates the views of these men:
"How can a country be well governed, except by those who OWN it? The moment the right of suffrage ceased to belong to the SOIL, the axe was laid at the root of our institutions." (Emphasis in original)
Freehling believes that the antebellum history of the South can be understood as an ongoing contest between these two viewpoints, the "waxing and waning of colliding traditions":
"The tiny elitist, anti-Herrenvolk contingent of slaveholder republicans triumphed with the Founding Fathers, faltered before Jackson's Herrenvolk version of white men's republicanism, regrouped with Calhoun's Nullifiers in the 1830's, almost disappeared during Jacksonian Democracy's proslavery victories in the 1850s, seized control of the beginning stages of the southern disunion movement in 1860, and yielded to the more popular white egalitarian republicans after the secession revolution spread beyond South Carolina."
Elsewhere, Freehling outlines how the elitists seized control of the secession movement in 1860 (no doubt he will review this in great detail in Volume II of The Road to Disunion):
"Secessionists knew that in the whole South (including the Border South) immediately after Lincoln's election, most voters opposed secession. But the initial secessionists meant to guide this supposedly gullible antisecessionist majority. [They] maneuvered to have the first secessionist decision made not in some South-wide convention or referendum, where a southern majority would have trounced them, but in South Carolina, the state where they could most easily rally a majority for disunion. After . . . South Carolina . . . seceded, the majority in other southern statees would be forced to decide not whether secession was wise (most Southerners thought no) but whether Southerners should fire rifles at fellow Southerners (a very different matter). To ensure that the South Carolina majority forced the hand of the southern majority, the initial secessionists silenced South Carolina antisecession voices, especially that of the state's most powerful Unionist, U.S. Senator James Henry Hammond. As the secessionist most responsible for silencing Hammond explained, 'Whoever waited for the common people when a great movement was to be made? We must make the move & force them to follow.'"
Ole -- How's it going? The books I'm adding to my reading list are the proceedings of some of the southern conventions, starting with the Georgia Convention, which is conveniently available in an edition edited by Professor Freehling:
Fear of democracy (majority rule) was indeed a real concern for Jefferson Davis. He was afraid that if emancipation came while the majority of blacks in the U.S. remained in the South, then the whites would lose their power to them.
He made this fear clear in a March 8, 1850 speech to the U.S. Senate.
__________________ Member, Sons of Confederate Veterans
A completely fresh look at an old question. Certainly takes it out of the realm of simple. By the way, elektratig, I bought 5 of Freehling's books (I already had "Road to Disunion".) My wife wants to thank you in person (Do not divulge your address; she's first generation Sicilian.) -- something about a contract.
To placate your wife, tell her I've been to Sicily and that I think it's one of the most glorious places on Earth -- friendly people, magnificent Greek temples, and the pasta con sarde is to die for!
One story: When my wife and I drove from the airport into Palermo, we got lost, couldn't find the hotel. We ran into a bakery and, using pidgin Italian, tried to get directions. The flour-covered baker took off his apron, came out from behind the counter, jumped on his moped, personally guided us to the hotel, then drove off before we could even thank him.
One more: In Siracusa, we went into a harborside restaurant for lunch, where the fish were lying out for inspection. We pointed to one and asked what kind of fish it was. The beaming owner told us proudly that it was "a sea fish". Of course, we both had it!
Just to bring this old thread back to the top for those who have not seen it.
Tim
__________________ "Let us, then, consider all attempts to weaken this Union, by maintaining that each state is separately and individually independent, as a species of political heresy, which can never benefit us, but may bring on us the most serious distresses."
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, 1740-1824, Revolutionary War soldier, one of the authors of the US Constitution in 1787, speaking at the South Carolina Ratifying Convention in 1788.
CivilWarTalk.com -
A free and friendly Civil War community. 
Southern Fear of Southern Democracy A Cause of Secession? 
Linear Mode
