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.
So you are saying Davis and Company were dumb enough to fall for it?
ole
So you are saying that Lincoln was a warmonger?
__________________ POWER & MONEY
"Your New-York bankers and merchants are shrewd people, but I never gave them credit for so much sagacity as when they took the Government Loan. It was not merely patriotism, it was a high stroke of policy. It has saved the Government, and what they will regard as equally important, saved them from a great financial disaster."
__________________ "In mortal combat, a man may and will become so infuriated by the din and dangers of a bloody fight that his heart will turn to stone and his every de sire [be] for blood."
John Hadley, 7th Indiana after the battle at Port Republic
I've gone through the same exercise you lay out, and of course you're right. Under even the most wildly optimistic scenario, an abolition amendment could not have passed until the 1890s at the earliest.
But I think that what your posts really highlight is the fact that secession was not primarily a logical or rational phenomenon. As a practical matter, people don't take action, much less radical action, based on something that might happen thirty years or fifty years hence.
Nor is this simply a deduction from human nature. In analyzing the arguments for and against secession in Alabama, Mills Thornton has pointed out that the secessionist argument really made no sense. I've quoted this passage before, but I can't resist quoting it again because it's absolutely brilliant:
"The careful reader will have observed a fundamental non sequitur in the southern rights case. If the great threat of free-soil was that it would trap southerners in the South amidst the rising tide of Negroes, how would secession remedy the predicament? Would not independence shut southerners out of the territories even more effectively than would the adoption of a free-soil policy by the federal government? . . . If getting access to that territory was the primary southern goal, southerners had certainly not selected a means which gave obvious promise of being efficacious.
"It is essential to note, however, that . . . Unionists almost never mentioned the difficulty. The solution to this paradox is the identification of which element in the southern rights case was the primary source of its force. Despite all the discussion about the effects of free-soil upon southern slavery, the threat of Negro inundation was not the chief terror with which the case conjured; and the Unionists knew it. . . . The essence of the case was not what would happen to southerners when they were excluded from the territories but was the fact that they were to be excluded. That the exclusion would wreak ill in the economic and social environment of the South was mere lagniappe [something extra, a bonus, a freebie -- I looked it up] to the argument; the true ills would be wrought in the hearts of those debarred. Free-soil was an issue basically because it would represent an overtly discriminatory action by the common government."
* * *
"Secession, then, was not really intended as a remedy for the consequences of free-soil . . .. It was to be revenge for the condemnation implied by the policy and the inequality inherent in it. Southerners were Americans and they wanted to be treated like Americans; we must never forget that they saw themselves as struggling to preserve the substance of the American dream."
H. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1978), pp. 225-27 (emphasis added).
Sorry for not responding sooner; I must have lost track of this thread in the blaze of postings here.
I agree. Secession was not an issue driven by sober thought and prudent calculation. It was primarily emotional in nature for most people in the South.
Regards,
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.
I didn't say that and you know it. My statement was clear. If Lincoln connived to start a war, then Davis and Company had to have been dumb enough to fall for it. Where does that translate into "Lincoln was a warmonger"?
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
Much appreciated the Mills excerpt. Whilst transcribing it to a retrievable format, a nagging thought kept interfering.
Quote:
The essence of the case was not what would happen to southerners when they were excluded from the territories but was the fact that they were to be excluded.
Who but slaveowners (less than 25 percent of the population) or wannabe slaveowners (percent unknown) would much care? Was Mills saying that southerners resented the idea of the ban more than the fact?
The Feds are welcome to debar me from owning a 50,000 sq. ft. mansion in the heart of The Craters of the Moon or the Mojave Desert; or to forbid me to park a 100-foot yacht just off Harpers Ferry. Somehow, I don't see anyone stirring me into even a touch of irritation about it.
Telling me I can't do something I don't want to do and couldn't do just doesn't bother me. I wonder if the resentment of "can't" is a bit overblown by Mr. Mills.
ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
Undoubtedly, the people of the south (and North) entered the war on the crest of popular emotion. But, the leadership of the South saw quite clearly what was at stake and although their emotions were inflamed, by a sense of betrayal and being anathamatized, they also accepted the fact that the south had indeed grown apart from the rest of the nation, politically, socially and to certain extent, economically. That what was good for one section, automatically threatened the stability of the other and vice versa.
The North, Democrats and Republicans had served notice that they could no longer accept slavery in America, without accepting it's eventual demiste.
The treasured way of life, based on slavery, that the southern leadership considered superior to the north, was being required to sigh its own death warrant as the price for remaining in the Union.
IMO the South's Leadership (if not it's people) made a logical decision, based on the facts ,as they existed and were percieved then, to break the Union, in order to preserve their 'peculiar institution' which made their society and themselves, not only unique but, more importantly, superior (in their own eyes, at least) to that of the North.
Much appreciated the Mills excerpt. Whilst transcribing it to a retrievable format, a nagging thought kept interfering. Who but slaveowners (less than 25 percent of the population) or wannabe slaveowners (percent unknown) would much care? Was Mills saying that southerners resented the idea of the ban more than the fact?
The Feds are welcome to debar me from owning a 50,000 sq. ft. mansion in the heart of The Craters of the Moon or the Mojave Desert; or to forbid me to park a 100-foot yacht just off Harpers Ferry. Somehow, I don't see anyone stirring me into even a touch of irritation about it.
Telling me I can't do something I don't want to do and couldn't do just doesn't bother me. I wonder if the resentment of "can't" is a bit overblown by Mr. Mills.
ole
Ole,
My apologies for not responding sooner. How goes it?
I have posted elsewhere a discussion of several books, including Mills Thorton's, in which I tried to distill the authors' views on what, to me, is among the most fascinating questions in American history: why did non-slaveholders in the deep south join in avidly in secession? I hope it will answer at least part of your question.
Shades of Chandra Manning! Her book very much uses the concept of yeoman manhood and superiority you describe. Excellent post, by the way. I've downloaded it for filing and future reference. It puts a nice finish on the subject.
ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
In fact, it's the other way round: Chandra Manning is shades of Mills Thornton. If I had to guess, Thornton's book, for all its obscurity, is probably among the half dozen most most influential books published in the past thirty years on what made southern nonslaveholders tick. Virtually every subsequent study of the pre-War south pays homage to him -- including Manning. Manning's opening chapters, describing the South immediately before and at the beginning of the War, are pure Thorton.
To give another example, if I recall correctly, in his Political Crisis of the 1850s, historian Michael Holt revealed that he had read Thorton's PhD thesis, which ultimately became Thorton's book, and admitted that he was basically using Thornton's theories as the basis for his understanding and description of southern attitudes and reactions to the national crises he was describing.
Failure to start preparing for war at the outset of secession.
Loss of power in the U.S. Congress. Once out of the Congress, the southern states had no control of policy or control over the federal budget.
Even R.E. Lee, was shocked at the huge appropriations for the U.S. Military, even by early 1863. No vote in the Congress; no affect on how much was spent.
If anyone thinks slavery was seeing its last days, one only need to understand the anguish of losing the slaves with no compensation.
If slavery were going out, the plantation owners would not have resisted, as they did, the impressment of slaves by the Confederate government.
If slavery were seeing its end days, why was slavery so important in the Constitution of the Confederate States. Slavery was not a dying institution in the minds of the Confederate founding fathers.
Maybe in the minds of the neo-confederates, who never seem to quote slavery sections of the Confederate Constitution.
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