Welcome to Part 3 of my little series on the cause (or primary or principal or overwhelmingly-more-important-than-anything-else cause, if you will) of the Civil War: slavery. In Part 1, we saw how the Confederate Consititution was especially concerned with perpetuating the institution of slavery, and protecting it from any future government restrictions. In Part 2, we saw how the states of South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas issued Declarations of the Causes of Secession, ALL of which spent an inordinate amount of time describing the abusive treatment slaveholders had received from anti-slavery forces in the North. Now it's time to look at another revealing episode: the activities of the secession comissioners as they tried to persuade other slave-holding states to secede.
First, let me say that I rely here on the excellent book Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War, by Charles Dew. It's a short but hard-hitting review of what these individuals did and who they were, and I recommend it highly to anyone curious about historical research on the Civil War. Block quotes are from his work, although much of it is in turn direct quotes of what the commissioners said and wrote.
Now, about those secession comissioners: as the states of the Deep South prepared to secede in late 1860 and early 1861 - and before the first shots were fired, at Fort Sumter - five Deep South states (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana) appointed 'secession commissioners' to advocate secession in other slave states. In Mississippi and Alabama the commissioners were selected by the governor, and were sent to EVERY other slave state in the Union. In the other three states, the state legislatures chose the commissioners; South Carolina and Georgia sent commissioners to nine and ten slave states, respectively (Louisiana only appointed one, to Texas).
All in all, over 50 men set out to encourage secession by other states. As the above should make clear, in everything they said and did they were acting in an official capacity as official representatives of their state governments. According to Dew,
These individuals were not, by and large, the famous names of antebellum Southern politics. They were often relatively obscure figures - judges, lawyers, doctors, newspaper editors - who had had modest political careers but possessed a reputation for oratory. Sometimes they were better known - ex-governors or state attorneys general or members of Congress. Often they had been born in the states to which they were sent; place of birth was clearly an important factor in the choice of a number of commissioners.
In other words, these men were firmly in the mainstream of Southern politics and thought in 1860 and 61. As such, the arguments they chose to encourage other states to secede, and to explain why secession was so important to the south, should be extremely useful in understanding the mind-set of the secessionist movement. Be warned: as members of the white Southern elite, talking directly to other members of the white Southern elite, they did not use euphemisms or code words or double-talk.
The Mississippi and Alabama commissioners made up the first wave. While some states, such as South Carolina, clearly had overwhelming secessionst sentiment, in others (such as Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia) it was not nearly as clear how the legislature or people might vote on secession, if it came to that. What words, what arguments, were used, to convince them to see the secessionist light?
William Harris, a sitting member of Mississippi's Supreme Court, was that state's commissioner to Georgia. Here's part of what he said to the Georgia legislature:
They [Lincoln's Republicans and the North] have demanded, and now demand, equality between the white and negro races...equality in representation, equality in the right of suffrage, equality in the honors and emoluments of office, equality in the social circle, equality in the rights of matrimony...Our fathers made this a government for the white man, rejecting the negro, as an ignorant, inferior, barbarian race, incapable of self-government, and not, therefore, entitled to be associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political, or social equality...[Mississippi] had rather see the last of her race, men, women, and children, immolated in one common funeral pile {pyre], than see them subjected to the degradation of civil, political, and social equality with the negro race.
Shortly afterwards, Alexander Handy, also a judge of Mississippi's highest court, had this to say to a Baltimore audience (the then-governor of Maryland, a pro-Union man, had refused to call the legislature into special session).
...the Republican platform 'revealed a clear intent to overthrow the constitution, and subvert the rights of the South'...To the 'black republican' claim that 'slavery is a sin before God and the world,' Handy posited a counterclaim: "Slavery was ordained by God and sanctioned by humanity...The first act of the black republican party will be to exclude slavery from all the Territories...The moment that slavery is pronounced a moral evil - a sin - by the general government, that moment the safety of the rights of the South will be entirely gone.'
Not to be outdone, a pair of Alabama comissioners addressed the North Carolina legislature at almost the same time.
The North 'proposes to impair the value of slave property in the states by unfriendly legislation,' they claimed, 'and compel us, as slaves increase, to abandon it, or be doomed to a servile war...the [white] children are now born who will be compelled to flee from the land of their birth, and from the slaves their parents have toiled to acquire as an inheritance for them, or to submit to the degradation of being reduced to an equality with them, and all its attendant horrors.'
Following its vote for secession, South Carolina's appointed commissioners fanned out across the South as well. The commissioner to Florida was one Leonidas Spratt, a lawyer and newspaper publisher, who had actually launched a campaign to reopen the African slave trade. Here's what he had to say to the Florida secession convention:
Within this government two societies have developed. The one is the society of one race, the other of two races. The one is based on free labor, the other slave labor. The one is braced together but by the two great relations of life - the relations of husband and wife, and parent and child; the other by the three relations of husband and wife, parent and child, and master and slave. The one embodies the social principle that equality is the right of man; the other, the social principle that equality is not the right of man, but the right of equals only...There is and must be an irrepressible conflict between them, and it were best to realize the truth.
The South Carolina commissioner to Texas was one John McQueen, also a lawyer and a former U.S. Congressman. In keeping with recurrent theme of invoking the horror of racial equality, he informed the Texas convention that 'Lincoln was elected by a sectional vote, whose platform was that of the Black Republican party and whose policy was to be the abolition of slavery upon this continent and the elevation of our own slaves to an equality with ourselves and our children.'
Alabama's commissioner to Kentucy, Stephen Hale, a state legislator, focused his attention on Governor Magoffin because the Kentucky leislature was not in session. Hale's letter to Magoffin contained these sentiments:
...slavery was 'an institution with which is bound up not only the wealth and prosperity of the Southern people, but their very existence as a political community.' The Republican victory was 'the last crowning insult and outrage upon the people of the South,' because Lincoln and the Republicans stood for 'one dogma - the equality of the races, white and black.'
Lincoln's election was 'nothing less than an open declaration of war, for the triumph of this new theory of government detroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugarates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassination and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lusts of half-civilized Africans,' Hale wrote. 'The slave-holder and non-slave-holder must ultimately share the same fate; all be degraded to a position of equality with free negroes, stand side by side with them at the polls, and fraternize in all the social relations of life, or else there will be an eternal war of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting all the resources of the country.' What Southerner, Hale asked, 'can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters in the not too distant future associating with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality?'
Virginia was a prize ardently pursued by secessionists. As the most populous slave-holding state, its manpower and resources would be vital to a Southern Confederacy if it had to fight the Union (keep in mind that no shots had been fired at this point). Secession commissioners from across the Deep South converged on Richmond in February 1861 to adress the state convention on secession. One of them was John Preston of South Carolina, a former state legislator and famed orator. Here's what he had to say to persuade Viriginia to come over to the Confederate cause.
Preston began by assuring his audience that he would waste no time arguing the consitutionality of secession. South Carolina had surrendered none of its sovereignty when it ratified the Constitution...His primary purpose, he informed the crowded chamber, was 'to lay before you the causes which induce the State of South Carolina to withdraw from the Union.'
Aha! State's rights!
'For fully thirty years or more, the people of the Northern states have assailed the institution of African slavery. During these three decades 'large masses of their people' embraced 'the most fearful' path to emancipation: 'the subject race...rising and murdering their masters.'...There could be no doubt, he continued, 'that the conflict between slavery and non-slavery is a conflict for life and death'...The North and South consitututed two separate, distinct, and antagonistic civilizations...'The South cannot exist without African slavery,' he said. "None but an equal race can labor in the North; none but a subject race will labor in the South.' There were other 'repellent diversities' that made 'the political union...an unnatural and monstrous one,' but slavery, and race, formed the heart of the matter.
Whoops. Seems the one 'state's right' that mattered above all others was slavery.
Much more could be said about the activities of the secession commissioners, and once again I cannot do better than recommend Dew's book. I think, however, that it is quite clear what these men believed. Keep in mind that the arguments they presented were designed and intended to persuade their peers of the necessity for secession. So it is a fairly safe assumption that their themes were those they believed would resonate with the opinions and values of the other slave-holding states.
And what where those themes? Repeatedly and openly stating that slavery was a central, and even necessary, element of Southern society - that Southern civilization could literally not exist without slaves. Repeatedly invoking the 'horrors' and 'degradation' of equality with negroes. Invoking the specter of 'social equality.' Invoking the fear of 'servile insurrection' (for some reason, people might just get tired of being slaves and try forcibly to free themselves). And, of course, invoking the horror of blacks having intercourse with their wives and daughters (for some reason, they did not express concern about white men having sex with black women).
To be sure, much else was said and written by these men. And it is possible to find statements in defense of principles of state sovereignty, limited Federal government, property rights, etc.
But why is it so difficult for so many Confederate apologists to admit that the ONE state's right that mattered above all else - according to the secessionists themselves - was the 'right' to own slaves? That the one type of 'property' that they were concerned with, above all else, was the nearly 4 million slaves that they owned? Worth several billion dollars in 1860 money - which translates into the equivalent of how many tens of billions, today?
I believe that many people are in fact sincere when they say things like 'heritage, not hate' and 'it wasn't really about slavery.' But the only reason they can say these things sincerely, I believe, is because they are genuinely ignorant of what the secessionists themselves wrote and said to justify their cause. We are simply not taught these things in history classes in school, not shown the original speeches and documents, that make so clear what it was about. But with the 150th anniversary of the Civil War fast approaching, we are going to be bombarded with historical revisionism. The prattling of Governor McDonnell in Virginia and Governor Barbour in Mississippi is only the beginning. So we had best be prepared to confront the apologists with the words and documents of the secessionists. Ask them to explain the Confederate Consitutition's provisions on slavery. Ask them to explain the various declarations of the causes of secession put out by the states. Ask them to explain what the secession commissioners wrote and said, as official representatives of their states. And see if, once they are informed and educated, they can still bring themselves to romanticize the 'Lost Cause.'