LINCON'S ELLECTION AND THE SOUTH
Date: Sun, 30 Jun 1996
From: MichaelB
[Editor's Note: Two posts from H-LAW. Thanks to Richard Jensen for calling these to my attention.-RPF]
A lot of this discussion really has been about political philosophy rather than history. But I thought I might make a couple of historical notes:
Re the South seceding on the slavery-in-the-territories issue, it was a lot more than that. White southerners saw the territorial issue as only one manifestation of the danger that antislavery people intended to use the powers they perceived to exist in the federal government to put slavery on the road to ultimate extinction, as Lincoln put it. And they were certainly right. The Republicans were conceded absolutely that the fed govt had no right to intervene re slavery within the states where it existed. But they either intended the following in 1861, or were certain to advocate them in the future:
1. No slavery in the territories
2. Abolition of slavery in Washington, D.C.
3. Repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act
4. Fugitive Slaves to be returned, if at all, only through due process of law in state courts
5. State court decisions or laws declaring all slaves free when brought into free states
6. A law or constitutional amendment to enforce the privileges and immunities section of the Art. IV of the Constitution. Certainly a reversal of Dred Scott and the recognitions of the citizenship of African Americans.
7. Control of the federal courts so as to render unconstitutional state laws barring distribution of antislavery material through the US Mail. Certainly an end to the executive policy of not delivering antislavery material in the mail. Probably a law making interfering with delivery of the mail criminal.
8. A court test of laws barring the entry of free blacks into the states, with federal courts manned by Republican judges. Possibly a law on the subject under Art. IV, sect. 2. Or even the interstate commerce power.
9. The possibility, sooner or later, of rules in federal court permitting African-American testimony. The development of doctrines favoring freedom in all cases involving slavery between citizens of different states. Consequently, a discount in the value of all negotiable instruments secured by specific slave property, which circulated throughout the United States.
10. The certainty of the appointment of southern antislavery people to federal positions, esp. postmasters, and the creation of a southern antislavery party to abolish slavery by state action, possibly sustained by a federal program of compensation to encourage state action.
11. As a result of the above, a dimunition in the value of slave property in the South and serious economic difficulties as a consequence.
I wonder if members of the list might see even more potential uses of federal and political power that would have threatened slavery. At any rate, secession was a response to such expectations, not a fit of pique at being unable to take slaves into the territories. Each and every one of the above steps could be sustained by orthodox nationalist constitutionalism, as articulated by Marshall, Story, and Whigs generally.
To avoid any confusion, I don't think these prospects justified secession morally and certainly hope that if I had been alive at the time I would have sustained the political party that would have sooner or later enacted them.
Les Benedict
****************************************************************************
[From: IN%"H-LAW@msu.edu" "H-Net and ASLH Legal History Discussion list" 29-JUN-1996 10:32:50.06] From: Chris Waldrep
I was most impressed by Les Benedict's list of the dangers the South faced after Lincoln's election. I was so impressed that I downloaded his list and plan to use it in my survey classes.
But I wonder about a couple of things. First, several of the items could not have been accomplished by Lincoln alone. In the 36th Congress (1859-1861), Republicans had control of the House but the Democrats had a comfortable ten-vote margin in the Senate. Would the Senate in the absence of secession have been willing to repeal the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law? Would the Senate have abolished slavery in Washington, D.C.? Even if northern Democrats joined the Republicans, couldn't southern Democrats have filibustered?
I remember when Bill Clinton won with less than 50 percent of the vote Bob Dole came close to saying his election was not truly legitimate by anouncing that HE (Dole) controlled more than 50% of the Senate and therefore had more claim to speak for the majority than Clinton. As Senate Republican leader, Dole managed to tie up Clinton's program in part, perhaps, because he could claim to speak for the majority more than Clinton. Lincoln in 1860 could only envy Clinton's 1992 margin. Lincoln took office with 39 percent of the vote. Had they retained faith in the political system, couldn't the southern Democrats have challenged Lincoln just as the Republicans blocked Clinton's program? [I'm hoping this modern comparison won't produce mail saying Clinton is no Lincoln. I'll stipulate.]
I also wonder about the appointment of federal judges (item 7). A new president obviously cannot immediately reshape the judiciary to his liking. Bill Clinton has certainly had an impact, but aren't most federal judges today Republican appointees?
In other words, isn't it true that many of the items Les argues prompted secession more a result of secession? By leaving the Union, southerners made a gift of the Senate to the Republicans. After secession Congress certainly did ban slavery in D.C. But that issue might have been only the result of secession rather than its cause.
(At the risk of departing the theoretical and abstract and making this long message even longer, I actually know the real reason most southerners violated Art. III, Sec. 3. My great-grandfather was a Confederate soldier. Sadly, he did not live far enough into the 20th century for me to ask him why he would do such a thing. But my uncle (who died a month or so ago at the age of 92, a proud resident of Alabama to the end) was very patriotic and asked his grandfather how he could fight against the wonderful USA. My great-grandfather responded that he had to because the Yankees "came down here and started burning our BARNs and houses." Emphasis in the original. My uncle was struck by his stress on barns.)
Chris Waldrep
Eastern Illinois University
PS on the other line of discussion. I guess the right of revolution is also in John Locke. I know this must be true because I recently read it in Les Benedict, *Sources in American Constitutional History*, doc. 3:
"...when by Miscarriages of those in Authority, it is forfeited; upon the Forfeiture of their Rulers, or at the Determination of the Time set, it reverts to the Society, and the People have a Right to act as Supreme, and continue the Legislature in themselves, or erect a new Form, or under the old form place it in new hands, as they think good."
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996
From: David L. Carlton
About the Michael Les Benedict-Chris Waldrep exchange:
It strikes me that a major problem with assessing the justification
[as distinct from the motive] for secession is that fears for the future
scarcely suffice. As David Potter pointed out long ago, and Waldrep
reiterates, there really were no outstanding political issues related to
slavery at the time of secession; even with respect to the territorial
issue, Kansas had effectively been conceded to the Free States by the
Slave
States. More importantly, the "right to revolution" was one that any good
Jeffersonian knew could only be invoked in the gravest of circumstances,
not
for "light and transient causes." It was primarily for that reason that
fewer than half the Slave States seceded initially, the rest being
disposed to continue to work within the system--a "system" that, after
all, they had
traditionally relied upon to *protect* slavery, and which had done a good
job of both protecting and extending it. Secessionists, therefore,
needed,
like Jefferson, to demonstrate "a long train of abuses and usurpations,
pursuing invariably the same Object, [namely] a design to reduce them
under absolute Despotism."
Their response [if you look at the official statements of, say, the South Carolina Convention] is, interestingly enough, *not* to go after the federal government, but to attack the *people* of the Free States. I must confess that this was startling to me when I re-read these documents for classes last fall; we're so used to using bromides about "state rights" to analyze these problems. But the essence of the secessionist case was that the Free-State *people* couldn't be trusted to keep their word with the South, not because of what they *threatened* to do, but because of what they had already done. They had permitted people to speak and work against slavery; they had raised the issue in Congress; they had gotten their own states to enact laws defying the authority of the federal government with respect to fugitive slaves; they had applauded terrorist attacks on slaveholders launched from their territory; they had elected an avowedly antisalvery man as President. In no case could secessionists complain (at least before Sumter) that the federal government had broken its contract with them; the core of their argument was that the *people* of the Free States had.
Note, though, that most of what they accused Free Staters of doing was behavior protected by the Bill of Rights: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of petition, etc. The southern view was that the security of slavery took precedence over all of those: that the constitutional "deal" prohibited *any* interference with the institution, and that the public safety, as the supreme law, should take precedence over the Bill of Rights [Letting Garrison, etc. have free rein was equivalent to shouting fire in a crowded theatre]. This, BTW, explains why it was the *fireaters* who were most insistent that the federal government *positively* protect slavery, both in the territories and against Free State assertions of *their* "states' rights" to protect their own citizens.
Thus the secessionist challenge was far more radical than I, at least, ever thought it. The "states' rights" argument, as we know, emerged in its fullest form chiefly *after* the War. I'd suggest that was so because it was a means of *obscuring* the radicalism of secession--which was not so much rejecting the authority of the federal government but the very notion that there was a single political community called "the United States of America," a community in which people had the *right* to question slavery.
David L. Carlton
Associate Professor of History
Vanderbilt University
P.O. Box 1523, Sta. B
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN 37235
(615) 322-3326
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996
From: Joel Sipress
To add to David Carlton's thoughts on secession:
The bottom line argument for secession, as I read the documents, was that the election of a president unsympathetic to the institution of slavery was, is and of itself, evidence that slavery was no longer safe within the union.
Reading the Georgia secession debates, for example, I am struck by the extent to which secessionists and unionists were talking past each other. Unionists, such as Stephens, focused on the constitutional protections for slavery, the checks and balances, the benefits to the South for continued union. Secessionists, such as Cobb and Toombs, recited a litany of past wrongs as evidence that the "spirit" of the constitution had already been broken. As David Carlton points out, the message of the secessionists was that the people of the North, simply by electing Lincoln, had declared war on the institution of slavery.
Given Lincoln's repeated assurances that he had no intention of interfering with slavery where it already existed, why would so many in the South consider his election to be a declaration of war against slavery? Perhaps the secessionists understood better than the unionists that slavery was an intitution whose survival depended upon the ACTIVE support of the state. Lincoln might not act overtly against slavery. Could his administration, however, be counted upon to actively support slavery? Maybe not.
Perhaps, then, the secessionist assertion that the election of a president unsympathetic to slavery was, in and of itself, a grave threat to the insitution was absolutely correct.
Joel Sipress
University of Wisconsin-Superior
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996
From: Lawrence McDonnell
The justifications-of-secession thread becomes increasingly interesting, especially David Carleton's distinction between motives and justifications, and his stress on the essential radicalism of secession. That seems to me to be dead-on; perhaps we can take his point a little farther (on a tangent or a limb?)
Although we remain obsessed with the "why" of disunion, I'm amazed by how little we know of the practical "how"--certainly in comparison to the work of scholars of the English, French, Bolshevik, or Nazi revolutions. Is there anything on the Southern experience comparable to Allen's _Nazi Seizure of Power_ or _Red city, Blue Period_? Not that I know. We do have some interesting work on secessionist radicals (most of it pretty old), but even with a fine work such as Walther's _Fire-eaters_, there's little evidence that these guys had any impact on secession in a practical way in the months between Lincoln's election and Fort Sumter. So how did they get from A to B? If we don't really know how, how can we ever figure out why?
From looking at the situation in charleston, it seems that avoiding the whole question of justification and motivation was central to radical success. The path to safety was "a word and a blow," Lawrence Keitt declared, "and the blow first." Action, not talk, was crucial to keeping dissent down and spirits up--even apparently trivial actions like flag-raisings, serenades, etc., which contributed nothing practical (in a narrow sense) to pushing things forward. Those who wanted to talk--give reasons for supporting disunion--were often the most moderate and mischief-making men. In this light, we might reconsider the radicalism of some leaders of groups like the 1860 Association--Townsend, Gourdin, and Hayne were all seen as foot-draggers by the _Mercury_ crowd in the weeks leading up to secession- -perhaps they were right. This much seems certain: at the local level, real radicals didn't seem to feel the need to explain themselves. Talk was just beside the point. I suspect that, the more we study disunion at the local level, the more we'll find that mindset (or anti-mindset!). That seems to put a different spin on the meanings and dynamics of disunion-- leading back to carleton's point on the essential radicalism of the movement. It certainly puts the whole "why" question in a different light.
Larry McDonnell
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996
From: Anthony G Carey
To add my two cents to David Carlton's post, my reading of the secession crisis is that the single biggest attitudinal difference that separated Unionists/cooperationists and immediate secessionists was this: secessionists argued that the North was gone, hopelessly, irredeemably infected with antislavery fanaticism, determined to destroy the South and slavery, while Unionist/cooperationists retained varying degrees of hope that the danger might be temporary, the Republican victory a fluke, and thus argued that safety within the Union was still possible. I wholly agree that the problem that immediate secessionists perceived was not with the federal government per se, but with the people of the North who had elected a "Black" Republican to head that government, and all that act of election signified regarding the attitudes of Northern people toward the South and slavery. From this secessionist perspective, Unionist/cooperationist arguments about Lincoln and the Republicans' lack of power to do harm immediately were simply beside the point.
Tony Carey, Auburn University
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996
From: Joe Bauman
What about the notion that the differences between North and South were simply too great to foster a feeling of unity? Perhaps the tensions were severe enough that a fargmenting -- such as is happening today in several eastern European countries -- was inevitable. Maybe the South was looking for an excuse to assert its feeling of nationhood. I suspect cultural differences were so great on many counts that the United States no longer were.
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996
From: Weston M. Price
This is an excellent point. One has to look at the primary impetus of this conflict to receive any answers. Slavery left the hows and whys of a violent conflict a moot point. In fact, Bruce Catton (regardless of what you might think of him as a historian) made an excellent point when he stated that economic and political differences can always be resolved within the walls of Congress. Slavery was an issue wherein this attitude of "compromise" was not not feasible, but it was equally impossible.
Weston M. Price
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996
From: Anthony G. Carey
To add my two cents to David Carlton's post, my reading of the secession crisis is that the single biggest attitudinal difference that separated Unionists/cooperationists and immediate secessionists was this: secessionists argued that the North was gone, hopelessly, irredeemably infected with antislavery fanaticism, determined to destroy the South and slavery, while Unionist/cooperationists retained varying degrees of hope that the danger might be temporary, the Republican victory a fluke, and thus argued that safety within the Union was still possible. I wholly agree that the problem that immediate secessionists perceived was not with the federal government per se, but with the people of the North who had elected a "Black" Republican to head that government, and all that act of election signified regarding the attitudes of Northern people toward the South and slavery. From this secessionist perspective, Unionist/cooperationist arguments about Lincoln and the Republicans' lack of power to do harm immediately were simply beside the point.
Tony Carey, Auburn University
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996
From: Wally Hettle
I've found the posts on Southern responses to Lincoln's election on the mark. But maybe the question is too easy--as we've seen, Southern politicians readily made the case against so called "submission" to the "Black Republicans." Lincoln was elected, however, because Southerners undermined his opponents, in particular Stephen Douglas.
I wonder why the South split the Democratic Party at the Charleston convention, effectively ensuring Lincoln's victory? What was so frightening about the prospect of a Stephen Douglas presidency? Could we draw up a list of grievances against the Democratic Party and Douglas that would present a reasonable (or even comprehensible) rationale for secession and war?
Wally Hettle
University of Northern Iowa
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996
From: David L. Carlton
>From: bau@desnews.com (Joe Bauman) > > What about the notion that the differences between North and South were > simply too great to foster a feeling of unity? Perhaps the tensions were > severe enough that a fargmenting -- such as is happening today in several > eastern European countries -- was inevitable. Maybe the South was looking > for an excuse to assert its feeling of nationhood. I suspect cultural > differences were so great on many counts that the United States no longer > were.
As with so many of these Civil War discussions, this is oft-plowed ground. Suffice it to say that the notion of basic cultural difference between North and South is dubious on numerous grounds. There is little evidence that there was any particular sense of separate nationhood on the part of an entity called "the South" up to the time of secession. Most white southerners considered themselves Americans, and quite proudly at that; they engaged in national politics, read books and magazines published in the North, and shared a broad range of common values and institutions with their nonsouthern brothers and sisters. The very fact that secession initially carried only in the Deep South, and even there by cloudy majorities, indicates that outright southern nationalism was hardly pervasive. So does the remarkably quick process of "reconstruction" after the war. Talk of "southern nationhood" always puts me in mind of the UCV Commander who offered his services to the federal government at the outset of World War I, declaring, "I fought for my country in 1861, and I'll fight for it now." If there was a basic cultural difference between South and nonSouth that cried out for embodiment as a separate nation, it certainly escaped him.
These discussions could also benefit from a clearer look at the phenomenon of nationalism itself. Claims of cultural distinctiveness have historically been less explanations of national feeling than rationalizations for it. Bosnia is a case in point--a land where neighbors and in-laws suddenly "discovered" that they were "ancient enemies," and started acting accordingly. Much the same thing happened here in 1960-61.
David L. Carlton
Associate Professor of History, Vanderbilt University
P.O. Box 1523, Sta. B
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN 37235
(615) 322-3326
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996
From: Benson_Lloyd/furman@furman.edu">Llyod Benson
> Joe Bauman writes: > [...] I suspect cultural differences were so great on many counts that >the United States no longer were.
Here is where the Immediatists the Cooperationists differed. Certainly the authors of the early secession declarations *perceived* that cultural differences had increased beyond reconciliation. But their image of the North was highly colored by two generations of their own, highly biased, anti-Northern and anti-Abolitionist rhetoric. Taken as a whole, the North was hardly over-run with the immediate emancipationism, religious liberalism, free-lovism, industrialism, Bloomerism, or other characteristics radical Southerners attributed to it. Midwestern farmers, for example, would seem to have more in common in economics, religion, and politics with their counterparts in Tennessee or Kentucky than with New Englanders. It should be said too that one of the things that so infuriated the Secessionists was their perception that Northerners had betrayed the nation's *common* inheritance.
For their part, the Cooperationists and Unionists still held on to the republic, retaining at least a nominal faith that differences were surmountable and that the political system would somehow continue to protect their domestic institutions. At least until Sumter there was a large group in the North that thought the same way. While Seward's notion of a common war against England was a bit bizarre, it did suggest that even some Republican party leaders thought Americans in both sections might still be counted upon to share a larger loyalty to the Nation.
This is not to say that important cultural differences did not exist; rather, that Southerners differed greatly in their assessment of how extreme and how significant to the nation's future these differences were.
Lloyd Benson
Furman University
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996
From: Joan Browning
David Carlton, was the date at the end of your post, "1960-61" correct? I'm looking at regional differences in the 1960s civil rights movement, anf if you meant the twentieth, not the nineteenth, century, I'd like to know more ....
Joan Browning
Ronceverte WV
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996
From: Anthony G. Carey
Whether or not Lincoln won because of the Democratic break is debatable. In a literal sense, based on the 1860 results, Lincoln would have won even against a united opposition. He won by absolute majorities in every state he carried except California, Oregon and New Jersey--he could, of course, have lost those three and still triumphed in the electoral college. Whether or not Douglas would have run better in the North with a united Democratic party behind him and thus defeated Lincoln is an interesting, but unanswerable, question. As many scholars have pointed out, the Republican party had a lot of different things going for it in the northern states aside from its position on the sectional conflict; the fact that it remained the dominant party in the North for decades after the war would seem to support that idea.
On the Charleston question, a few thoughts. Hatred of Douglas for his role in the Lecompton debacle partially motivated some Southern Democratic leaders; the idea being, basically, that having such traitorous friends was as bad as having avowed Republican enemies. Fact was that Southern Democrats knew, and had known for a long time, that the majority of Northern Democrats were free soilers, in the sense that they expected and hoped that popular sovereignty would keep slavery out of the territories. Douglas was too prominent a symbol of this troubling fact, too closely tied to the business in Kansas, and too defiant to be supported. This was by no means the position of all Southern Democratic leaders, but it didn't take all of them to bring about the Charleston break.
More broadly, Southerners had become rather accustomed to having their way within the Democratic party. They believed that Dred Scott validated their position on slavery in the territories and wanted Northern Democrats to recognize that. Whether or not the issue of a Congressional slave code for territories was "real" or one advanced to kill Douglas is debatable. A case can and has been made that even Yancey and other hotspurs hoped, maybe even expected, that they would force Douglas out, get an acceptable nominee, and win the election. I think, without doubt, that that would have been the preferred outcome for most Southern Democrats before Charleston, and given the history of the party, they had good reason to think they might get what they wanted. Once the break occurred, positions hardened, and any "compromise" other than Douglas' withdrawal impossible.
At bottom, most Southern Democratic leaders felt so embattled and aggrieved for so many reasons by 1860 that they became determined to rule the party or ruin it. Northerners, for their part, had no intention of giving up on their champion, the strongest Democrat in the only part of the nation that really mattered, electorally, in November. The arguments of many Breckinridge men who became immediate secessionists should not be taken at face value, but surely many of them believed, as they said, that Douglas and many other Northern Democrats were as "unsound" on slavery as the Republicans. Which was another way of saying that a considerable majority of Northerners were too antislavery and anti-Southern--by Southern Democratic standards--to live in the same Union with and it was time to go--and they did.
Tony Carey, Auburn University
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996
From: JOEL M. SIPRESS
> > I wonder why the South split the Democratic Party at the Charleston > > convention,effectively ensuring Lincoln's victory? What was so > > frightening about the prospect of a Stephen Douglas presidency? > > Could we draw up a list of grievances > > against the Democratic Party and Douglas that would present a > > reasonable (or even comprehensible) rationale for secession and war?
All too often, the sectional crisis is discussed in terms of a conflict between an abstract "North" and an abstract "South." We must remember that both sections had their own internal political cleavages and dynamics. It was these internal dynamics that largely drove the sectional crisis.
The establishment Democratic politicians who walked out of the Charleston convention were probably less frightened by Douglas than they were by the fire-eaters. In the South of 1860, a politician could not afford to be seen as soft on the slavery issue. The fire-eaters used this fact brilliantly to egg the establishment into taking more and more militant positions-- culminating in secession.
The irony is that the fire-eaters achieved their goal of an
independent southern republic, but when that republic held its
founding convention, the fire-eaters were totally marginalized.
Jumping on the secessionist bandwagon allowed the establishment to
control the process of secession and the process of construcing a new
political order.
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996
>David Carlton, was the date at the end of your post, "1960-61" correct?
Nope--standard-issue screwup. It's "1860-61." DLC.
From: David L. Carlton
Humanities &
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