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.
Skimming through it, my immediate reaction would be that if implemented (assuming the CSA were operating under peacetime conditions), the system would fall apart or grind to a halt pretty quickly. Every disputed question would suddenly become a matter of secession. Its rejection suggests an appreciation of the fragility of federalism as a system when interests diverge.
(Aside: I've just noticed that it seems to imply that the States themselves are the ultimate interpreters of matters of constitutionality, and not the courts)
Shane, Neil and others,
I think the "fractured Confederacy" theme can be over stressed. You can look at the Northern states and find plenty of dissent as well. Overall the CSA hung together pretty well. Unlike, say Germany in the 1920s, CSA vets never grumbled about a "stab in the back" they attributed their defeat to the efforts of the Union armies. I don't think Dixie was betrayed.
Lee wanted an absolute national effort in war making to the point of emancipating slaves. All citizens were supposed to be in the army or supporting the army at home. Joe Johnston suggested recruiting a female nursing corps. Southern society was going to fall short of these absolute standards, and revolution in traditional gender and race roles.
inevitably, any society, except maybe the Nazis or Soviet Union would as well.
I don't want to downplay the strife in the border states, the tension between states rights absolutists and Southern nationalists, the disaffection of the regions noted by posters above. I just think it can be overdone.
Matthew, I've read often of men in the ranks of the CS doing exactly thta, blaming the "stay behinds" for failure... particularly the politicians. The more I've read the more I've discovered Davis was not the great hero the Lost Cause created. Many a soldier despised him. Over the years I came to the distinct realization that it was not "North against South" w/ some line drawn along the Mason Dixon line but something far more complex.
Part of the reason I upplay the dissent w/in the CS is that people like Beou & DJ don't seem to understand or believe that the South was anything but united; the reality is that it was anything but. The same was true of the North at the time.
Very shortly after the creation of the CS there began to be fractures and fissures w/in the ranks; large swaths of the CS wanted nothing to do w/ Secession and not only voiced their resistance but actually acted. And not small areas but whole areas. West Virginia, East TN, North Georgia, North Alabama, large tracts of NC and West TX. And while people like Battalion like to downplay Southern support for the US it was there and it was very significant. Every single "southern" state supplied troops for the US military w/ some supplying as many or more than a US state or two.
And along the same vhein there were CS soldiers from every state in the US though we may never know how many really.
To me, the more I learn about the reality of the war the more I lend crednce to the Russian Army saying that wars are not won by the most competant but by the least incompetant. It is a saying that applies to government every bit as much as armies.
__________________ Shane Christen
American Legion Post 352
SUVCW Camp Abernethy# 48
Lifetime NRA member
3rd MN VI
For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. Eccl 1:18
Dear UnionBlue, Oxkern, Johan_Steel and List Members,
UnionBlue, thank you so much for extracting the ammendment to the CSA Constitution of 1863. What it shows me, is that from 1861 up to the proposed ammendment; states/commonwealths were not allowed to secession away from the CSA, to do so would be met by force.
As Oxkern also picked up as I have, it is evident that there is no judicial oversight in the governmental process--like the US Consititution, the Administrative Branch, Legislative Branch (Congress) and Judicial Branch (Surpreme Court); the tri-affect is missing, which means there would be a tug of war, when issues were divided. Then, the vote would have to be concerning just 'state' votes.
As for Johan_Steele's latest post -- I have to agree that nobody in any state/commonwealth was 100% happy. A lot of Southern residents fled into Northern States and I'm sure those in the Northern States who were fiercely 'for Southern rights' and wished to fight for the Confederates, did so.
I would be interested in knowing how many Northern individuals went to the South to fight and their state/commonwealth of origin. What would throw off the information though, would be the state of birth--this is not a true test of which state they lived in and or decided to fight for.
I do know in the case of Brig. General John Buford,(promoted to Major General on his deathbed,) was from Kentucky yet, he refused a commission of the CSA and made very clear--he was remaining in the Union Army and fight for the Union cause. His half brother, Brig. General Napoleon Buford refused the CSA's offer of a commission and fought for the North as well--even though family remained in Kentucky. The Buford brothers' cousin, Abraham Buford though--took a commission with the CSA and had the rank of Brig. General.
My personal observations though, many a soldier in the pre-Civil War Army had their own personal struggles as to where to remain--loyalties that is.
Everybody made their choices. Those choices came with consequences, regardless of sides.
Yet, throughout the post-Civil War, I am seeing how both sides saw each other with respect, as far as soldiers went. The healthy disrespect of politics, I feel--grew.
Just some thoughts.
Respectfully submitted for consideration,
M. E. Wolf
Dear Shane and others,
I'm not really disagreeing with you. But I think the dissent within the CSA as a cause of defeat can be overdone. Turn it around. The copperheads, the border states, the draft riots etc., you could just as easily done a book called The Union Betrayed.
The CSA didn't implode, but lost on the battlefield.
Shane,
I'm reading General Lee's Army right now, and I'm feeling a little more sympathetic to J. Davis. Dealing with Joe Johnson and Beauregard would have driven anyone around the bend, and Davis had a thankless task keeping all his political factions and prinna donna generals pointed in the same direction.
To win its independence, the Confederacy needed a government strong enough to make the most of all the available human and material resources, but some of the state leaders were no more willing to concede power to the Confederate government than they had been to the Federal government. Appealing to the principle of state rights, they resisted the efforts of the Jefferson Davis administration to control blockade running and manufacturing, to impress slaves and other property, and even to raise troops. Georgia was the locus of the greatest recalcitrance, Joseph B. Brown the most obstreperous of the governors, and Vice President Alexander H. Stephens the busiest fomenter and philosopher of resistance. North Carolina, under Governor Zebulon Vance, was the next most important center of obstructionism, but practically all the states had some occasion for expressing opposition to Confederate measures.
The most serious question was the constitutionality of the conscription acts (April/September 1862, and February 1864). Davis justified the legislation on the basis of the constitutional clause giving Congress the power to raise and support armies. But Brown and Stephens argued that the Confederate government could raise troops only by making requisitions upon the stares, which alone, they said, had the constitutional power to impose a draft. Stephens declared: "The citizen of the State owes no allegiance to the Confederate States Government.. . and can owe no 'military service to it except as required by his own State." Brown protested to Davis that conscription was a "hold and dangerous usurpation by Congress of the reserved rights of the States."
To enforce conscription, Congress authorized the president to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. To Stephens, this seemed as bad as conscription itself He denounced the suspension in resolutions which the Georgia legislature passed and which, along with speeches by Brown and Stephens's half-brother Linton Stephens, were printed and widely circulated. The legislatures of North Carolina and Mississippi adopted similar resolutions.
The question of constitutionality could not be referred to a Confederate supreme court, for there was none. In 1861 the Provisional Congress provided for such a court, with the power of judicial review, but the permanent Congress established only a system of lower tribunals. When Congress considered adding a supreme court in 1863, opponents objected to the potential subordination of the state supreme courts. These consequently were left to go on deciding the constitutionality of both state and Confederate laws. The supreme court in Georgia and in every other state except North Carolina upheld the Confederate conscription acts. "When Congress calls for the military service of the citizen," the Texas judges ruled," ... the right of the State government must cease or yield to the paramount demand of Congress."
Despite the pro-Confederate decisions of state courts, conflicts between the Confederate government and the state governments persisted. Texas objected to giving up control of state troops, as did Alabama, Mississippi, and all the Gulf states except Florida. A Florida judge, however, issued an injunction against Confederate officers who were ordered to take up some of the track of the Florida Railroad--and who disregarded the injunction.
More serious obstruction came from North Carolina, where Governor Vance took pains to "preserve the rights and honor of the State." He said it was "mortifying" to see North Carolinians "commanded by strangers"--that is, by men from other states--and he demanded that their officers be North Carolinians. Operating a state-owned blockade runner, Advance, he objected to the Confederacy's claim to half of the cargo space. He warehoused uniforms, shoes, and blankets for the exclusive use of North Carolina troops at a time when Robert E. Lees army in Virginia was suffering from the want of such supplies. State officials being exempt from the draft, he appointed thousands of men to state jobs to keep them out of the Confederate army.
Governor Brown of Georgia went even further in making unnecessary state appointments. Then, after enrolling ten thousand militiamen, he refused to allow them to enter the Confederate service even when in 1864 Davis attempted to requisition them--as Brown had previously said the president had a right to do. Brown now insisted he was protecting his state against both "external assaults and internal usurpations." The Confederate secretary of war compared him to the New England governors who had resisted the war effort during the War of 1812. Brown rejected the Richmond authorities references to "refractory Governors" and "loyal States." Such remarks were "utterly at variance with the principles upon which we entered into this contest in 1861," he said. The Confederate government was "the agent or creature of the States," and its officers had no business "discussing the loyalty and disloyalty of the sovereign States to their central agent--the loyalty of the creator to the creature."
The right of secession followed logically from such Calhounian doctrine. Vance, however, would nor hear of it when disaffected North Carolinians talked of calling a secession convention in 1863. Brown and Stephens declined when, after taking Atlanta, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman proposed a meeting to discuss Georgias leaving the Confederacy and making a separate peace. But Stephens wrote privately:"Should any State at any time become satisfied that the war is not waged for purposes securing her best interests ....she has a perfect right to withdraw." By early 1865, at least one Georgia planter had come to suspect that Stephens and his associates were plotting to "withdraw if possible this and two other States from the Confederacy and set up for themselves."
In fact, none of the states ever came close to seceding from the Confederacy, and most of them avoided an extreme state rights position all along. Nevertheless Davis had ample cause for complaint. In a private letter of December 15, 1864, he wrote that his difficulties had been "materially increased by the persistent interference of some of the State Authorities, Legislative, Executive, and Judicial, hindering the action of the Government, obstructing the execution of its laws denouncing its necessary policy, impairing its hold upon the confidence of the people, and dealing with it rather as if it were the public enemy than the Government which they themselves had established for the common defense, and which was the only hope of safety from the untold horrors of Yankee despotism.
Historians have differed about the importance of state rights as a cause of Confederate defeat. One writer has gone so far as to suggest that the following words should be engraved on the Confederacy's tombstone: "Died of State Rights." Others minimize its effects, pointing out that it was a symbol of more fundamental grievances (as, indeed, it had been throughout American history). Some have even argued that it was an asset rather than a liability to the Confederate cause, since, they say, it served as a safety valve for possibly disruptive discontent.
The doctrine may have influenced the outcome through its effect on Davis personally and directly. He prided himself on being a state-rightist and a strict constructionist, and though his state rights opponents accused him of dictatorship, he was generally careful to confine himself to the letter of the Confederate Constitution. The Times of London said in 1865 that one reason for the defeat of the Confederacy was his reluctance to "assume at any risk the dictatorial powers" that were "alone adapted to the successful management of revolutions."
Afterward Davis agreed with Stephens about the basic issue of the war. In A Constitutional View of the Late War between the States (1868--1870) Stephens maintained: "It was a strife between the principles of Federation, on the one side, and Centralism, or Consolidation, on the other" In The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881) Davis held that the Confederates had "fought for the maintenance of their State governments in all their reserved rights and powers." Both men forgot that the preservation of slavery had been the object of state sovereignty, state rights, secession, and the formation of the Confederacy.
__________________ "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
__________________ "There must be more historians of the Civil War than there were generals figthing in it... Of the two groups, the historians are the more belligerent." David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered (1961)
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