Upper South and Border States' secession

hawglips

Sergeant
Joined
Feb 20, 2005
I have long been intrigued by the response of the Upper South States during the secession era.

These States first rejected, then embraced secession.

Why did they do this? How does one explain their actions?

To kick things off, I'd like to post the thoughts of a Baltimorean who left school to fight for the Southern cause - Randolph Harrison McKim:

It is said, and widely believed, that the people of the South were not attached to the Union and were eager to seize upon an excuse for its dissolution. Even if it were conceded that the South had the right of Secession, or at any rate the right of revolution, we are told that if she loved the Union as she ought to have loved it, she would not have exercised that right.

In considering this assertion it will be necessary to distinguish in our reply between the States that first seceded and the border States of Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas, which later gave in their adhesion to the Southern Confederacy. As to the former--the cotton States--if it be true, as candid historians acknowledge, that their people "all held that the North was unconstitutionally and unjustly attempting to coerce the sovereign States"3; if it be true, as we have seen is now conceded, that the people of those States solemnly believed that their liberties were assailed, and that the war waged against them was a war of subjugation, then I submit that they were constrained to choose between their love of the Union and their love of liberty; and I do not believe that any brave and candid patriot of any Northern State will condemn them because, holding that belief, they made the choice they did. The judgment of the South may be impeached,1 but not her patriotism; not her love for the Union; if, shut up to such an alternative, she preferred liberty without Union to Union without liberty.

The case of the border States is somewhat different. Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, were all opposed to Secession. They refused to follow the lead of South Carolina. For example, as late as April 4 Virginia voted by eighty-nine to forty-five against the ordinance of Secession. They believed the Southern States had just grievances against the North, and that there was much to justify the fears which they entertained, but they were not prepared to dissolve the Union. They still hoped for redress within the Union by constitutional means. Moreover, the men who became our greatest generals, and our most illustrious and determined leaders in the Southern Confederacy, were, a majority of them, earnest Union men.

I think it may be said, too, that the States which furnished most of the munitions of war and most of the fighting men were opposed to Secession. The Union which their forefathers had done so much to create,1 first by the sword and then by the pen and the tongue, was dear to their hearts.

But there came a cruel issue. On the 15th of April, 1861, President Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 men to coerce the seceded States back into the Union. The border States were called upon to furnish their quota of armed men to march against their Southern brethren. Thus an issue was forced upon them which the future historian, however antagonistic to the South, must ponder with sympathy and emotion. The men of these border States were compelled to decide either to send soldiers to fight against their brethren, or to say, "We will throw in our lot with them and resist military coercion." Now, whatever division of sentiment existed in regard to the policy, or even the right, of Secession, there was almost complete unanimity in these States in repudiating the right of coercion. That right had been vehemently repudiated in the discussions in the Constitutional Convention by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Edmund Randolph. The South remained true to the doctrine of the fathers on this point.2

It is vain to ask at this date what would have happened
if that fatal proclamation of April 15 had never been issued, but it is impossible to repress the thought that perhaps, after all, the truest statesmanship rested with those who, like Edward Everett, and Horace Greeley, and William H. Seward, and General Scott, believed that the Policy of coercion was a political error. Certain it is that but for that policy those great States just enumerated would not have thrown in their lot with the Southern Confederacy, and it is a supposition by no means destitute of rational foundation that without their support the seven States which had already seceded would have ultimately sought readmission to the Union, and that the Union might have been saved, and slavery ultimately abolished, without the dreadful cost of a fratricidal war and without the unspeakable horrors of that Reconstruction period, when the star of liberty sank as if to rise no more on the Southern States,1 and without that act--the quintessence of injustice to the whites, and of unkindness to the blacks themselves --I mean the act which conferred the right of suffrage indiscriminately on the newly emancipated slaves.

But, waiving all this, I come back to the question, Can any blame attach to the people of the border States for choosing as they chose in the face of the cruel alternative, which was forced upon them by Mr. Lincoln's proclamation, to abandon the Union, or to draw their swords against their Southern brethren?

It has been well and wisely said by a recent historian (Mr. Rhodes) that "the political reason of Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky inclined them to the North, their heartstrings drew them to the South." I put it to any man with a heart to say, whether, when the bayonet is directed against the bosom of a member of one's own household, he is to blame for throwing himself into the breach in his defence, even though the bayonet be in the hand of the officer of the law? I affirm that the ties of blood and kindred are more sacred even than those which bind a man to the government of his country. Could the men of Virginia and North Carolina and Tennessee be expected to raise their hands against their family altars and firesides, whatever view they might have taken of the constitutional questions at issue? But the men of those States believed with great unanimity that the sovereignty of a State was inviolable by the General Government. That was the faith they had received from their fathers, from a long line of illustrious statesmen and political philosophers. Of this let one decisive example suffice. Though Robert E. Lee abhorred the idea of Secession and loved the Union with a passionate devotion, yet when he was asked by a member of a committee of Congress whether he did not consider that he was guilty of treason in drawing his sword in behalf of the South, he answered: "No, I believed my allegiance was due to the State of Virginia."

The people of the South believed, as we have said, that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. They believed the General Government had no rightful power of coercion. Their New England brethren had for many years confirmed them in that belief. Moreover they believed a union by force not the Union which the fathers had in view. A governmental fabric pinned together by bayonets did not seem to them a republic, but a despotism.


(Message edited by hawglips on October 26, 2004)
 
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