The Minds of the South
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Early 1861 found the
23-year-old Henry Adams in Washington, working as the private secretary
to his father, Charles Francis Adams, a representative from
Massachusetts. Adams was a keen observer even at that early age, and he
focused much of his attention on the Southern political delegations
going through the throes of secession. To Adams, the Southerners were
little more than madmen. In a Jan. 8 letter to one of his brothers, he
wrote, “I do not want to fight them … They are mad, mere maniacs, and I
want to lock them up till they become sane; not kill them. I want to
educate, humanize, and refine them, not send fire and sword among them.”
Such stereotypes,
though, ran counter to the way most Southerners saw themselves. To them,
they were among the best and the brightest of their time: they read and
wrote political philosophy, they studied statistics, they took an
interest in sociology, they travelled and kept up with the latest
European trends and they were fastidious Biblical and classical
scholars. Above all, they had regularly produced philosophically adept
politicians, not only in the earliest generation (Thomas Jefferson,
James Madison) and in the middle generation (John C. Calhoun), but in
the generation that opted for secession. To them the decision to secede
was not rash, but rational, the result of reasoned discussion. On Feb.
18, 1861, the South Carolinian diarist Mary Chesnut wrote, “This
southern Confederacy must be supported now by calm determination — &
cool brains,” and she did not doubt that the decision to leave the
Union evidenced a coolness of calm judgment.
She was not wrong.
Historical evidence abounds that Southerners were not stupid or
close–minded, let alone mad, but rather as capable of well-informed
analysis as anyone else (though also as capable of making the wrong
analysis). For good or ill, theirs was a culture which believed that
ideas mattered and had consequences. In this spirit, the case for
secession had been reasoned out over generations, in books, periodicals,
pamphlets, sermons and speeches. It was not something invented, in a
moment of panic after Lincoln’s election, but a machine made by many
hands, which needed only to be started up when the moment seemed right.
If secession was a mistake, as events were to prove, it was an
intellectual blunder, not because it was incoherent as an assertion of
political principle, but because it fatally mistook Northern resolve and
failed.
Library of CongressAn
1861 Currier & Ives cartoon depicting secession as a race off of a
cliff. “We go it blind!” yells the figure depicting Alabama.
Antebellum Southerners
had often disagreed with one another, and secession was no exception.
It is probable that, at least before the summer of 1861, more
Southerners opposed secession than agreed with it. Despite this habit of
dissent, however, a few ideas had focused debate on what it meant to be
a Southerner. Slavery was seen as fundamental to social order, though
opinion was divided about why. Almost everyone agreed that the Bible and
Christianity sanctioned the institution, some thought its contribution
to sustaining racial hierarchy was indispensable, and no one doubted
that the Southern economy would be wrecked by the elimination of forced
labor.
Like other Americans,
Southerners were interested in ideas of progress, thought themselves
modern and understood how deeply enmeshed they were in modern
capitalism. Most were earnest free traders. But, more than most
Americans, Southerners had a sharp sense that progress did not come
easily, that there were usually hard choices to be made about how its
benefits could best be shared. It would be nice, they said, if everyone
could painlessly benefit from progress. But many believed that tradeoffs
were a “necessity,” a term that cropped up frequently in debates: among
other “necessities,” they believed, was that in order for the majority
whites of European descent to prosper, many — including Africans,
Indians and Mexicans — had to lose out. A few Southerners felt guilty
about this, many were smug and not a few respectfully blamed God for
arranging life this way. The point is, they thought and argued about it,
at length and in depth. Contrary to Henry Adams’s impression, ideas
mattered in the Old South.
One idea in particular
had gained purchase by the end of the antebellum era. Southerners were
less interested in individualism than they had been in the 18th century,
and more interested in the proposition that community was desirable and
that a government which did not rest on shared social habits must fail.
The “South” was one such community, but states even more so. Whereas a
state in 1776 was mostly a polity, by 1860 it was thought to be a social
world, with its own literature, habits, character and cultural
institutions.
This emphasis on local
values was not always in conflict with Unionism; Calhoun, for example,
had been a dogged Unionist all his life, as well as a devoted South
Carolinian. For all that, the cultural institutions of the states grew
more elaborate, while those of the nation remained thinner. By 1860
there was a South Carolina Historical Society, but not yet an American
Historical Association. There was a University of Virginia, but not a
national university. So, when tensions within the Union grew
intolerable, Southerners had alternatives — their states, their South,
their version of American — ready to hand.
Indeed, the options
seemed all the more attractive because they seemed so conformable to the
political traditions of 1776. As Jefferson Davis put it in his
inaugural address as provisional president of the Confederacy, “Our
present position … illustrates the American idea that government rests
upon the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people
to alter or abolish a government whenever it becomes destructive of the
ends for which it was established.”
Related
Civil War Timeline
An unfolding history of the Civil War with photos and
articles from the Times archive and ongoing commentary from Disunion
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This contrasted with
prevailing Unionist ideas, articulated by Abraham Lincoln, which held
that first there had been an American people and a Union, and then this
Union had sanctioned the political subdivisions that were the states.
But Davis believed this was backward: first there had been the
individual colonies, which had broken with Britain and had established
themselves as sovereign states, and then these states had agreed to
create the United States as a workmanlike compact. The states that had
made the compact were entitled to unmake it, if they followed the
appropriate democratic procedures of consulting the popular will.
This was not just a
difference of convenience, but a philosophical division about the nature
of the state and time. Unionists were inclined to the view that, with
the creation of the American republic, history had stopped and that the
Union was literally perpetual, at least as long as the whole American
people found it satisfactory. Davis thought that history could move on,
that the political geography of God’s purposes for Americans could be
rearranged without serious damage to providence.
As William Henry
Trescot, one of the earliest proponents of secession, had put it in
1850, “We believe that the interests of the southern country demand a
separate and independent government … The Union has redeemed a continent
to the Christian world … It has developed a population with whom
liberty is identical with law, and in training thirty-three States to
manhood, has fitted them for the responsibility of independent national
life … It has achieved its destiny. Let us achieve ours.”
Today Americans
necessarily embrace the Unionist point of view of 1861, so that talk
like Trescot and Davis’s gets branded as extremist and incoherent. Yet
it was not always so: many American political thinkers before 1860
dissented from Lincoln’s version of history and thought Davis’s compact
theory to be, at a minimum, a cogent proposition.
This much is clear:
far from being a case of the crazy South splitting from the wise North,
in 1861 the balance of rationality and irrationality was poised. Both
sides had a delicate mix of wisdom and folly, clarity and confusion,
altruism and self–interest. Neither had a marked advantage when it came
to rationality or madness. And neither had the least idea what war would
mean, as is often the way with the best and the brightest.
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