Three Books That Shed Light On the Causes of Secession in the Lower South: Part I

elektratig

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Setting the Stage

Arguments about why the southern states decided to secede from the Union in the winter of 1860-61 are typically unsatisfying because they so often reduce themselves to two possibilities: (1) it was all about slavery; and (2) it had nothing to do with slavery. Missing from the discussion is recognition of the fact that even the most mundane event is rarely the result of a single cause – the ice on the sidewalk, my inattention and those treadless slippers all contributed to my falling when I went to get that newspaper last winter. Why is it reasonable to think that an event as momentous as secession should be the exception?

Historians, too, sometimes fall into this trap. Pushing particular theories – whether incompetent politicians, differing economic or social conditions or southern honor – some minimize competing considerations. The best, however, offer an alternate way of conceptualizing the tensions that arose between the sections. Collectively, they suggest that there are many different ways, not inconsistent with one another, to understand why secession came to pass.

That said, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that slavery was at the center of the secessionist impulse in the lower south in 1860-61. To begin with, any explanation must account for the fact that the great division in the country became that between the north and the south, rather than, say, between the east and the trans-Allegheny west. All things being equal, the latter division would seem at least as likely, with the interests of urbanizing seacoast eastern elites increasingly diverging from those of rural Mississippi River-oriented westerners. The status of slavery in the sections would seem to be the obvious answer.

In addition, slavery permeates the story of the increasing tensions between the North and the South. Yes, South Carolina got excited about the tariff back in 1832-33, but the tariff issue died down after that. There were some complaints about the tariff now and again, but nothing that seems to have come close to generating the vehemence necessary to serve as a spark for so radical an act as disunion. Other than that, virtually the entire standard story line – from the Mexican War to the Wilmot Proviso and the Compromise of 1850, from Kansas to Harpers Ferry and the election of Lincoln – concerns slavery in one form or another.

Finally, I must say that proponents of the “anything but slavery” view do their case great harm by their categorical denials. It may well be that factors other than slavery figured into secession, but arguments that slavery was utterly irrelevant to the issue just do not pass the smell test. Southerners presenting the case for secession highlighted scenarios of race war and white degradation. Is it really credible to argue that all that was irrelevant?

And Yet . . .

And yet . . . doubts remain. For one thing, at least at the beginning (1860-61), secession seems to have been wildly popular throughout the lower south, and throughout all segments of the lower south. Planters did not have to drag farmers along. To the contrary, in many instances yeomen were in the vanguard. To modern readers, this phenomenon seems to violate all received wisdom about the importance of class-based self-interest. Why would non-slaveholders be inspired to defend property they didn’t own? Why did yeomen so enthusiastically back (or lead) a rich man’s crusade? Were they dolts? Or does it suggest that something else was going on?

Second, the south’s decision to secede in 1860-61 strikes me (and many others) as major-league crazy. What had poor old Abe Lincoln done, for goodness sake? The people elected him president in a fair election, Jacksonian democracy in action. Sure, he had made clear that he wouldn’t permit further expansion of slavery in the territories if he could help it, but he’d made equally clear that he didn’t believe he had the power to touch slavery in the states and had no intention of doing so. Given his reassurances, why on Earth would otherwise normal people (presumably) go so bonkers just because they lost an election, without even giving the poor guy a chance? Does it suggest that even the possibility, however slight, of forced emancipation, was so unthinkable as to drive southerners over the edge? Or does it, again, suggest that something else was going on?

Three books I have recently read shed valuable light on that “something else” and put the pieces in place in ways that make sense.

The Books

J. Mills Thornton’s Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1978) relates the political history of a single lower south state from initial settlement through the decision to secede. In many ways, it is a frustrating book. Portions are extremely detailed, going on, for example, at length about the positions of minor politicians whose names I have already forgotten. Conversely, Professor Thornton (University of Michigan) assumes basic knowledge that I, at least, lack. Where are the “wiregrass counties” – and what is wiregrass anyway? If you refer repeatedly to the “Black Belt”, please tell me which counties you are including in the definition. And if you’re going to refer to towns I’ve never heard of, it would be nice to have a map showing me where they are. Frequent excursions to the internet for maps and other information were necessary. More importantly, I would have liked more economic background. The book makes clear, for example, that there was a substantial economic upturn in the 1850s that had significant impact on the landscape leading to the decision to secede, but I wanted more detail than Professor Thornton provides.

In these respects, Lacy K. Ford’s Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry 1800-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press 1988) has better balance. Professor Ford (University of South Carolina) tells the corresponding political history of the upcountry of South Carolina (which necessarily involves a good deal of discussion about the low country as well). The book does not make unreasonable assumptions about reader knowledge; it is detailed but not to excess; and it successfully interweaves a good deal of economic history that explains and illuminates the political positions taken and battles fought.

Finally, in Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press 1995), Stephanie McCurry (currently at the University of Pennsylvania) conducts a similar study of the South Carolina Low Country. In particular, she sets out to identify the invisible yeomanry of the Low Country and to explore their conditions and values. She identifies, among other things, gender – in particular, the power that yeomen exercised over their wives – as an important, overlooked factor in understanding that world.

Power and Politics in a Slave Society

Despite its faults, Professor Thornton’s book is a revelation. The buildup of detail in fact serves a purpose, supporting the author’s thesis as to why a southern state dominated by yeoman farmers seceded. The key lies in Alabamans’ understanding of freedom and the purposes of government. Freedom was the ability not to be dependent on any other person or group, an atomistic, indeed anti-social vision of society in which every white male citizen was equal to every other. The paradigm was the yeoman on his farm, acting as his own master and, in theory, utterly free from outside influence. “The society was structured so as to demand, and to appear to allow, the achievement of individual autonomy. Therefore, each man’s self-respect was absolutely essential to his existence as a part of the social organism.” (p.219)

This conception of freedom saw any accumulation of power, however benign we might think it, as tyranny. The role of government and politicians was to identify and destroy any potential threats to individual autonomy and equality. It was for this reason, for example, that in the 1840s Alabama had virtually no railroads and no banks. They were perceived as dangerous combinations by which men were trying to become tyrannical masters over others. Even in the prosperous 1850s, when railroads and banks finally began to expand, the most popular politician in the state became so by waging war against them.

Alabamans were obsessed with liberty and equality because they saw every day the state to which they would be reduced if they ever relaxed their vigilance: slavery, the absence of autonomy. An Alabaman’s entire sense of self-worth and self-respect depended on his being free and equal as he understood it. To lose autonomy and self-government was “to abandon the substance of liberty – to slip screaming down towards the [********] black mass which formed the sum of all hatred and fear.” (p. 444)

The free soil movement thus attacked the Alabaman at precisely his most vulnerable point: his sense of dignity and self-worth. Even Alabamans who owned no slaves viewed barring slavery from the territories as limiting their freedom. The Alabaman atomistic vision of liberty depended on the existence of a society based on slavery. Without chattel slavery, the territories would resemble the north, a society based on dependence where tyrannical combinations and forces ruled and white men were enslaved by other white men. As the south grew weaker, the rich and the landless might be able to flee, but the Alabaman yeoman would be trapped, overwhelmed and ultimately annihilated in a race war. In the alternative – because “slavery promotes equality among the free by dispensing with grades and castes among them, and thereby preserves republican institutions” – the white yeoman would himself become a slave. As the Montgomery Advertiser argued as early as 1851 (pp. 206-07):

“The total abolition of slavery would affect more injuriously the condition of the poor white man in the slaveholding States than that of the rich slaveholder; for the slaveholder, having the means which attends upon the possession of slaves, would be able to maintain his position, whilst the poor man would have to doff that native, free-born and independent spirit which he now possesses, and which he prizes above all wealth, and would have to become a virtual slave (barring color) of the rich man.”

But far more important was the fact that the free soil movement represented a direct threat to the core value of equality, which defined the farmer’s very existence. Northerners insulted and exhibited contempt for Alabamans, their institutions, even their churches. They made clear that they believed they were morally superior to Alabamans. This perceived degrading contempt was, perhaps, the most intolerable of all, for it showed that northerners believed that Alabamans were inferior, less than citizens. But if Alabamans were not equal citizens, they were slaves. Were northerners not treating Alabamans as such? And if Alabamans accepted this state of affairs were they not confirming their slavehood?

The election of Lincoln – not any acts he took – was the straw that broke the camel’s back because it represented the final confirmation, the proof, of all of these suspicions. The prosperity of the 1850s had, paradoxically, disoriented and shaken many Alabamans. For the first time, many entered the market economy; railroads, banks and some industry began to appear; towns were growing. These phenomena contradicted most Alabamans’ atomistic understanding of freedom. Even in their home state, tyranny seemed to threaten. At the same time, and related to these developments, there was increased intercourse with, and awareness of, the north. Now northerners were about to impose on Alabamans as master a man who had not even appeared on their ballot. The north was determined to enslave Alabama and the rest of the south; the shackles were already on, and they were about to snap shut. Although the December 1860 Alabama Convention included both “cooperationists” as well as “immediatists”, former Whigs as well as Democrats, there were no unionists. The citizenry – yeoman and planter, the Black Belt resident and the hill country denizen – uniformly believed that there was no choice but to secede. The alternative was slavery.

Origins of Southern Radicalism

Professor Ford reaches similar conclusions about the decision of the South Carolina hill country to secede. He emphasizes even more than Professor Thornton the unnerving contradiction between the new economic forces sweeping the state in the 1850s and the atomistic view of freedom. He also emphasizes somewhat more the fear that “abolitionism” would drown the yeoman in a sea of blood. But he, too, insists that South Carolinians’ understanding of freedom as based on absolute autonomy and equality was the crucial factor. Yeomen were freemen and expected and demanded to be treated as such. They were voters who exercised their franchise, they expected and demanded that they would be courted, and they punished candidates who failed to do so.

In the end, it was these values, Professor Ford argues, that compelled South Carolinian upcountry yeomen to secede (p. 372):

“Almost literally, Upcountrymen saw secession as the required defense of basic republican values. The republican citizen’s most cherished possession, his own independence and that of his household, was threatened by powerful external forces. One set of those forces [increasing economic activity and market participation during the 1850s] threatened to force him into slavery and degradation through the loss of his economic independence. The other set of forces threatened to free the entire black slave population to violate his home and family. Secession offered the independent citizen a chance to meet this challenge at the threshold, to defend the autonomy of his household by literally throwing himself across the doorway in defiance. This was the secessionist appeal that reached not just planters and slaveholders, but all whites who considered themselves entitled to liberty, and personal independence.

“In the final analysis, a unified South Carolina could secede because the dominant ideal in her society was not the planter ideal or the slaveholding ideal, but the old ‘country-republican’ ideal of personal independence, given peculiar fortification by the use of black slaves as a mud-sill class. Yeoman rose with planter to defend this ideal because it was not merely the planter’s ideal, but his as well.”
 
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