American Nations

Whatever qualms Americans had about slavery in the 1850s, most people living outside of Yankeedom were willing to overlook it and the issues it raised. Spurred by their mission to improve the world, however, Yankees were not about to ignore it and the moral affront it presented and became the undisputed center of the abolitionist movement. A Connecticut Yankee, William Lloyd Garrison, founded and published the leading antislavery journal, The Liberator. Lyman Beecher’s daughter, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote the hugely popular Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which mobilized the public against federal laws requiring U.S. citizens to return runaway slaves to their masters. Frederick Douglass, an escaped Tidewater slave, found refuge in Massachusetts, where he became one of the American federation’s most powerful abolitionist voices. When the federal government decided to allow the citizens of the new Kansas Territory to decide whether they would allow local slavery, Bostonians created the New England Emigrant Society, which founded the Kansas towns of Lawrence and Manhattan and helped populate the territory with Yankees. When Appalachian-born residents sacked and burned Lawrence in 1856, another Connecticut-born Yankee, John Brown, slaughtered five men in retaliation; he later tried to provoke a slave rebellion by seizing a federal arsenal in western Virginia in an operation that established him among Yankees as a martyred freedom fighter and as a notorious terrorist to Deep Southern and Tidewater people.

Yankee abolitionists argued that the Deep South and Tidewater were autocratic despotisms. Slave lords’ absolute power over those under them, they argued, led to corruption of the family and Christian virtue. “The slave states are one vast brothel,” declared English-born Congregational minister George Bourne, in a pamphlet published in Boston. Slave masters and their sons raped their slaves, he and others charged, accounting for the large number of mixed-race children born to slave mothers. “It is so common for the female slaves to have white children that little or nothing is ever said about it,” Connecticut minister Francis Hawley reported from the Deep South in Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery as It Is, a best-selling abolitionist anthology published in 1839. Another contributor, a Connecticut justice of the peace, described how a Tidewater North Carolina planter offered a friend of his $20 for each slave he impregnated. “This offer was no doubt made for the purpose of improving the stock,” he added, “on the same principle that farmers endeavor to improve their cattle by crossing the breed.” Southern newspaper classifieds were reprinted in abolitionist publications to publicize the fact that slave families were regularly broken up to pay debts, often by selling off toddlers or even a spouse. The “domestic institution,” they argued, was a threat to domesticity itself.²

In 1860 Yankeedom voted overwhelmingly for the Republican presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, an Illinoisan of mixed Yankee, Midland, and Appalachian ancestry who opposed the creation of additional slave states. Lincoln won every single county in New England, the Western Reserve of Ohio, and the Yankee-settled Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania; he won all but a handful of counties in the entirety of upstate New York and the Yankee Midwest.³

Yankee politicians advocated the use of force to prevent the Deep South from seceding and represented the only national caucus to do so prior to the South Carolinian attack on Fort Sumter. During the war Yankeedom was the center of the Union cause, contributing the lion’s share of troops, arms, and materiel, including the most decorated black regiment in the Union Army, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry.

There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the Civil War to defend slavery, and its leaders made no secret of this motive. Slavery, they argued ad nauseam, was the foundation for a virtuous, biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states. When nineteenth-century Deep Southerners spoke of defending their “traditions,” “heritage,” and “way of life,” they proudly identified the enslavement of others as the centerpiece of all three. Indeed, many of their leaders even argued that all lower-class people should be enslaved, regardless of race, for their own good.

In response to Yankee and Midland abolitionists, the Deep South’s leaders developed an elaborate defense for human bondage. James Henry Hammond, former governor of South Carolina, published a seminal book arguing that enslaved laborers were happier, fitter, and better looked after than their “free” counterparts in Britain and the North, who were ruthlessly exploited by industrial capitalists. Free societies were therefore unstable, as there was always a danger that the exploited would rise up, creating “a fearful crisis in Republican institutions.” Slaves, by contrast, were kept in their place by violent means and denied the right to vote, resist, or testify, ensuring the “foundation of every well-designed and durable” republic. Enslavement of the white working class would be, in his words, “a most glorious act of emancipation.” Jefferson’s notion that “all men are created equal,” he wrote, was “ridiculously absurd.” In the Deep Southern tradition, Hammond’s republic was modeled on those of ancient Greece and Rome, featuring rights and democracy for the elite, slavery and submission for inferiors. It was sanctioned by the Christian God, whose son never denounced the practice in his documented teachings. It was a perfect aristocratic republic, one that should be a model for the world.⁴

Hammond mocked his Puritan critics as “learned old maids” who liked to “linger with such an insatiable relish” on bizarre and pornographic fantasies of masters raping slaves. The “proportion” of mulattos in the Deep South, he argued, was vanishingly small, and could be accounted for by the presence of Yankee perverts in the region’s larger towns. He called the sexual charges—an existential threat to the Deep South’s racially based caste system—“ridiculously false,” the product of “a game played too often on Tourists in this country.” But the charges were true, as Hammond well knew. Scholars later discovered in his private papers that in 1839 Hammond had purchased an eighteen-year-old slave and her twoyear-old daughter, commencing sexual relationships first with the mother and later with the daughter, and sharing both with his son. His wife—Hammond noted she could not satisfy “his appetites”—eventually learned of the affairs and left the household for many years. The children and/or grandchildren sired by the enslaved mother and daughter were kept on the estate, because Hammond could not tolerate the idea that “any of my children or possible children [would be] slaves of strangers. Slavery in the family will be their happiest earthly condition.”⁵

The planters celebrated slavery because it ensured the stability and perpetuation of a republican aristocracy. “The planters are a genuine aristocracy, who cultivate themselves in a leisure founded on slavery,” London Times correspondent William Russell reported from South Carolina on the eve of war. “The admiration for monarchical institutions on the English model, for privileged classes and for a landed aristocracy and gentry is undisguised and apparently genuine.” One planter told Russell: “If we could only get one of the Royal race of England to rule over us, we should be content.” Many others expressed regret for the revolution, noting they “would go back tomorrow if they could.”⁶

The planters’ loathing of Yankees startled outsiders. “South Carolina, I am told, was founded by gentlemen, [not by] witch-burning Puritans, by cruel persecuting fanatics who implanted in the north . . . [and her] newlyborn colonies all the ferocity, bloodthirstiness, and rabid intolerance of the Inquisition,” Russell reported. “There is nothing in all the dark caves of human passion so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees,” he continued. “New England is to [them] the incarnation of moral and political wickedness and social corruption . . . the source of everything which South Carolina hates.” Another planter told him that if the Mayflower had sunk, “we should never have been driven to these extremes.”⁷

Most people in the South shared the Deep Southerners’ credo of white supremacy and their distrust of Yankees, but many disagreed with their ideal of an aristocratic republic. Before the 1860 election the Democratic Party split over slavery at its annual convention, with South Carolina’s delegates leading their Deep Southern colleagues out of the convention hall. (“Slavery is our King; Slavery is our truth; Slavery is our divine right,” planter William Preston explained in his parting speech.) They were joined only by the Tidewater-dominated Maryland and Delaware delegations; Borderlander and northern delegations (most representing Catholic immigrants) remained in their places. Across “the South” there was considerable dissent, which broke not on state, class, or occupational lines but on ethnoregional ones. Appalachian sections—whether in northern Alabama, eastern Tennessee, or northeastern Texas—resisted secession. Deep Southern–settled ones—southern Alabama, western Tennessee, Gulf Coast Texas—were enthusiastically in favor of it. The Texas struggle pit South Carolinian Louis Wigfall against Borderlanders John Regan and Sam Houston. In Mississippi, Kentucky Borderlander James Alcorn led resistance to radical secessionist politicos under another South Carolinian native, Albert Gallatin Brown. The richest planters in Louisiana were the most ardent Unionists; they were not Deep Southerners but rather members of the New French enclave around New Orleans. (“New Orleans is almost Free Soil in its opinions,” one observer remarked. “Creoles . . . cannot be made to comprehend their danger until their Negroes are being taken from their fields.”) Running for the Mississippi senate in 1850, Deep Southerner (and future Confederate president) Jefferson Davis was rejected by the Appalachian-settled north of the state, which supported his rival, Knoxville native Roger Barton. By 1860 Appalachian districts in the Gulf States had elected Unionist representatives, who clashed with their lowland counterparts.⁸

Deep Southerners, where they were allowed to vote, overwhelmingly cast their ballots for the hard-line secessionist John C. Breckinridge. (So did South Carolina’s legislators, who did not deign to grant the populace a role in choosing their chief executive.) Breckinridge won every state under Deep Southern control, while moderates like John Bell and Stephen Douglas won only a scattering of counties, most of them around Atlanta, a city with a large number of residents from outside the region. Lincoln did not even appear on the ballot in Deep Southern–controlled states.

After Lincoln’s victory, South Carolina was the first to secede from the Union. The only states to join it prior to Lincoln’s inauguration were those controlled by Deep Southerners: Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. On February 8, 1861, this Deep Southern coalition met in Alabama to form a new government. Tidewater and Appalachian states did not join them—preferring, as we will see, to form a confederation of their own.

Had Deep Southerners not started attacking federal post offices, mints, customs vessels, arsenals, and military bases in April 1861, they very well might have negotiated a peaceful secession from the Union. Indeed, prior to the South Carolinian militia’s assault of Fort Sumter, Yankeedom was isolated, lacking a single national ally in its desire to put down the Deep Southern rebellion by force. President Lincoln pledged not to provoke open warfare, even as he declined to surrender U.S. military bases in the region. When Fort Sumter, which guarded Charleston’s harbor, ran low on supplies, Lincoln took a cautious approach: he sent food but not weapons and ammunition, and informed South Carolina in advance. If the Deep Southern Confederates attacked the fort or relief shipment, they stood to alienate supporters of a negotiated settlement in Appalachia, the Midlands, and New Netherland, a fact well known within the Confederate government. “There will be no compromise with Secession if war is forced upon the north,” Confederate secretary of state Richard Lathers warned President Davis. “The first armed demonstration against the integrity of the Union or the dignity of the flag will find these antagonistic partisans enrolled in the same patriotic ranks for the defense of both [and] bring every man at the North, irrespective of his party or sectional affiliations, to the support of the government and the flag of his country.” Davis, confident that the three aforementioned nations would side with the Confederacy in time of war, ignored Lathers’s advice. It would prove one of the worst miscalculations in North American history.⁹

Prior to the attack on Fort Sumter, New Netherland was eagerly supportive of the Deep South’s position. Recall that New Netherland had introduced the continent to slavery and relied on slave labor right into the early nineteenth century. In 1790 the region’s farming counties—Kings, Queens, and Richmond—had a higher proportion of white slaveholding families than South Carolina. Tolerance—not morality—was at the core of its culture, including tolerance for slaveholding, and left to its own devices, it probably never would have banned the practice. Unfortunately for New Netherlanders, by the nineteenth century they had lost control of New York state government to the Yankees, who by 1827 had eliminated slavery. (New Netherlanders clung to power narrowly in New Jersey, where there were still seventy-five enslaved people at midcentury.) But while the state as a whole was abolitionist, its biggest metropolis was not. Runaway slaves and free blacks were constantly being kidnapped by New York City’s many “Blackbirders,” slave-catching bounty hunters who deported their captures to the plantations. The city’s merchants and bankers had extensive ties with Deep Southern and Tidewater slave lords, and were loath to see them disrupted. As the local Evening Post reported in 1860, “The City of New York belongs almost as much to the South as to the North.”¹⁰

In the 1860 election every single county in New Netherland went for Lincoln’s opponent, Stephen Douglas, including northern New Jersey, western Long Island, and the southern Hudson Valley. In the aftermath, most New Netherlanders wanted to see the Confederate states leave the Union in peace. Some—including their senior political leadership—advocated seizing the opportunity to secede themselves to form an independent city-state modeled on the Hanseatic League, a collection of free cities in Germany. “While other parts of our state have unfortunately been imbued with the fanatical spirit which actuates a portion of the people of New England,” Mayor Fernando Wood told the city council after South Carolina’s secession, the city had not “participated in the warfare upon [the slave state’s] constitutional rights or their domestic institutions.” The city, he continued, “may have more cause of apprehension from our own State than from external dangers” and should escape “this odious and oppressive connection” by leaving the United States and, together with its suburbs on Long Island, becoming an independent, low-tax city-state. The proposal had the support of prominent bankers and merchants, at least one of the city’s Democratic congressmen, and at least three of its newspapers. A fourth, the influential New York Herald, published details of the governmental structure of Hanseatic city-states “for a better understanding” of how an independent New York City might organize itself. Had the Deep Southerners not attacked Fort Sumter, New Netherland might conceivably have gained its independence as well.¹¹

In the run-up to the war, New Netherland’s six U.S congressmen had voted with their Deep Southern counterparts on most important issues—the only New York representatives to do so. After South Carolina’s secession, Congressman Daniel Stickles continued to support the Deep South, telling his colleagues at the U.S. Capitol that “no man will ever pass the boundaries of the city of New York for the purpose of waging war against any state of this Union.” The city, he added, “will never consent to remain an appendage and a slave of a Puritan province.”

The attack on Fort Sumter changed opinion overnight. As Lathers had predicted, New Netherland sections of both New York and New Jersey erupted in extreme U.S. patriotism. Mayor Wood, Congressman Stickles, the New York Chamber of Commerce, and the Herald immediately rallied to Lincoln and the Union. “The attack on Fort Sumter has made the North a unit,” Stickles wrote the federal secretary of war. “We are at war with a foreign power.” He himself would raise volunteer regiments and lead them into battle against the Confederates.¹²

Despite a long history of abolitionist sentiment, the Midlands had been ambivalent about Southern secession prior to the attack on Sumter. The Quaker/Anabaptist commitment to pacifism trumped moral qualms about slavery. Newspapers and politicians from Midland areas of Pennsylvania advocated allowing the Deep South to secede peacefully. Midland-controlled northern Delaware found itself at odds with the Tidewater-dominated south of the state, with some fearing violence might break out between the sections. Midland southern New Jersey had no intention of joining a slave-trading Gotham city-state, even if northern Jersey did.

In the 1860 presidential election the Midlands voted overwhelmingly for Lincoln, except for northern Maryland and Delaware, where he did not appear on the ballot. (In those places, Midlanders voted for the moderate Bell instead.) Lincoln easily won most of the Midland Midwest from central Ohio to southern Iowa, tipping Illinois and Indiana into his column. While Midlanders voted with their Yankee neighbors, they had no desire to be governed by them. Faced with the possibility of a national dissolution, most Midland political and opinion leaders hoped to join the Appalachian-controlled states to create a Central Confederacy stretching from New Jersey to Arkansas. The proposed nation would serve as a neutral buffer area between Yankeedom and the Deep South, preventing the antagonists from going to war with each other. John Pendleton Kennedy, a Baltimore publisher and former congressman, championed this “Confederacy of Border States,” which opposed both the Deep South’s program of expansion by conquest and the Yankee plans to preserve the Union by force. It was, he argued, the “natural and appropriate medium through which the settlement of all differences is eventually to be obtained.” Maryland’s governor, Thomas Hicks, saw merit in the proposal, which could preserve the peace in a state split between Midland, Appalachian, and Tidewater sections; he corresponded with governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Ohio, and Missouri (all of which had substantial Midland sections) plus New York and Virginia to lay the groundwork for such an alliance should the Union break up.¹³

But the Deep South lost all Midland support after Sumter. In Philadelphia, Easton, and West Chester—Pennsylvania communities that had previously been centers of secessionist sympathy—mobs destroyed pro-Southern newspaper offices, drove pro-Southern politicians from their homes, assaulted secessionists in the streets, and forced homes and businesses to display Union flags. In Maryland the Central Confederacy proposal became obsolete overnight; Midland and Appalachian sections rallied to the Union, Tidewater ones to the Southern Confederacy. Their flag attacked, Midland sections of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri threw in their lot with the Yankees.¹⁴

By midcentury, Tidewater had effectively been politically neutered, its people a minority in Maryland, Delaware, North Carolina, and even Virginia (until 1861, when West Virginia’s secession tipped the balance back into their favor). As friction increased over slavery, Tidewater found itself forced into the Deep Southern orbit for protection, despite their cultural differences. Unlike that of sugar and cotton, tobacco’s global market had weakened, and the Tidewater gentry had sold many of their slaves to Deep Southerners or simply moved their operations to the Gulf. The region’s elite felt besieged, and many embraced Deep Southern ideologies, even if they could not carry them out in their own states.

George Fitzhugh, scion of one of Virginia’s oldest families, became the region’s proslavery standard-bearer. In his voluminous writings, Fitzhugh endorsed and expanded upon Hammond’s argument to enslave all poor people. Aristocrats, he explained, were really “the nation’s magna carta” because they owned so much and had the “affection which all men feel for what belongs to them,” which naturally led them to protect and provide for “wives, children, and slaves.” Fitzhugh, whose books were enormously popular, declared he was “quite as intent on abolishing Free Society as you [Northerners] are on abolishing slavery.”¹⁵

As the conflict with the Yankees loomed, there was renewed interest in the old Tidewater theory that racial differences were to blame. In wartime propaganda, the Deep Southern elite was explicitly included in the allegedly superior Norman/Cavalier race in an effort to increase the bonds between the two regions, with the (decidedly un-Norman) Appalachian districts often embraced for good measure. For Tidewater in particular, casting the conflict as a war for Norman liberation from Anglo-Saxon tyranny neatly sidestepped the more problematic slavery issue. The Southern Literary Messenger, Tidewater’s leading journal, conceded in 1861 that “the Round-heads¹⁶ may gain many victories in view of their superior strength and their better condition” but assured “they will loose the last [battle] and then sink down to their normal position of relative inferiority.” The journal argued the Confederate aim was to create “a sort of Patrician Republic” ruled by a people “superior to all other races on this continent.”

This propaganda was embraced in the Deep South as well. In an 1862 speech, Jefferson Davis told Mississippi legislators that their enemies were “a traditionless and homeless race . . . gathered by Cromwell from the bogs and fens of the north of Ireland and of England” to be “disturbers of peace in the world.” The war, DeBow’s Review declared, was a struggle to reverse the ill-conceived American Revolution, which had been contrary to “the natural reverence of the Cavalier for the authority of established forms over mere speculative ideas.” By throwing off monarchy, slaveholders endangered the wondrous “domestic institution” that rested “on the principle of inequality and subordination, and favor[ed] a public policy embodying the ideas of social status.” Democracy “threw political influence into the hands of inorganic masses” and caused “the subjection of the Cavalier to the intellectual thralldom of the Puritan.” Other Tidewater and Deep Southern thinkers came to agree that the struggle was really between respect for established aristocratic order and the dangerous Puritan notion that “the individual man was . . . of higher worth than any system of polity.” As Fitzhugh put it, it was a war “between conservatives and revolutionists; between Christians and infidels . . . the chaste and the libidinous; between marriage and free-love.” Some even championed the dubious notion that the Confederacy was fighting a Huguenot-Anglican counterreformation against Puritan excess. Slavery was not the issue, they argued—defeating democracy was.¹⁷

In the 1860 presidential election, Tidewater was split between moderate Bell and secessionist Breckinridge, with Bell’s support concentrated on the eastern shore of Maryland and in Tidewater North Carolina. After South Carolina seceded, Tidewater wished to follow but was thwarted by other nations’ control over Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina’s state governments. Only after Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call to arms did Virginia and North Carolina secede; Maryland and Delaware never did. In all four cases, the attitude of Borderlanders, not Tidewater folk, was the decisive factor.

Greater Appalachia had the most ambivalent reaction to Deep Southern secession and the Yankee call to war. From central Pennsylvania to southern Illinois and northern Alabama, Borderlanders were torn between their disgust with Yankees and their hatred of Deep Southern planters. Both regions represented a threat to Borderlander ideals, but in different ways. The Yankees’ emphasis on the need to subsume one’s personal desires and interests to the “greater good” was anathema to the Appalachian quest for individual freedom; their moral crusades to change the behavior of others were extremely distasteful, especially their endless harping about racial equality. On the other hand, Borderlanders had already suffered generations of oppression at the hands of aristocratic slave lords and knew that they were the people the planters had in mind when they talked about enslaving inferior whites.¹⁸

In the run-up to the conflict, many Borderlanders were hostile toward abolitionists, breaking up their lectures, destroying their presses, and egging their politicians. Illinois governor John Reynolds likened abolitionists to the fanatical witch hunters of early New England, as did Indiana’s Hoosier press. At the same time, Borderlanders condemned the Fugitive Slave Law, which was, as one Hoosier put it, “converting the Freemen of the North into a gang of slave catchers for the South.” Kentucky-born James G. Birney, a slaveholder turned abolitionist, spoke for many Borderlanders when he denounced the Deep Southern system “by which the majority are to be made poor and miserable that the few may spend their useless lives in indolent voluptuousness.” Indeed, it sought to make ordinary people “lie down at the foot of the Southern Slaveholders ‘like whipt and trembling Spaniels.’ ”¹⁹

Caught between these threats to their freedom, Borderlanders became strong supporters of the notion of “popular sovereignty,” the principle by which local residents would decide if a new territory would have slaves or not. When this compromise failed to hold the Union together, many Borderlanders wished to either remain neutral or join the proposed Central Confederacy. When South Carolina seceded, Virginia’s Borderlander governor, John Letcher, told state legislators that the Union would split into four separate nations, with Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and other border and Midwestern states becoming “a mighty fourth force.” Appalachia’s leading political figure, former president James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, maintained the South should be allowed to go in peace but that the Union should defend itself if attacked. The region was deeply divided in the 1860 election, with the moderate Bell winning narrow majorities in four Appalachian-controlled states (Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and Texas), Lincoln taking the Appalachian vote in Pennsylvania, and Douglas capturing much of the Appalachian Midwest.

When the Gulf states voted for delegates to their respective January 1861 secession conferences, their Appalachian districts were opposed to the exercise. Kentucky refused to call a conference at all and remained neutral in the ensuing war. In February Appalachian-dominated North Carolina and Tennessee held popular referendums on whether to hold secessionist conventions. In both states the proposals were defeated. In Arkansas, Deep Southerners in the state’s lowland southeast threatened to secede after delegates from the Appalachian northwest blocked their proposal to leave the Union. When Virginia seceded in April, the Appalachian northwest of the state rebelled against the rebellion, seizing control of the strategically vital Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.²⁰

Once again Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s subsequent call for troops proved decisive, forcing Appalachian people to choose between two cultures they despised. Deep Southerners assumed Appalachia would rally to the Confederacy because of a shared doctrine of white supremacy. Instead, Borderlanders did as they always had: they took up arms against whatever enemy they felt was the greatest threat, and fought ferociously against them. To the planters’ shock, most Appalachian people regarded them as a greater threat to their liberty than the Yankees. Western Virginians set up a Union government in Wheeling, volunteered in large numbers for the Union army, and became a separate state in 1863. Voters in eastern Tennessee rejected the state’s secession referendum by more than two to one and tried to set up a Union government of their own; failing that, thousands fled to Kentucky to don blue uniforms while others sabotaged railway bridges. Residents of Appalachian northern Alabama established the Unionist Free State of Winston and fought as Alabama units in the Union army. Altogether a quarter-million men from Appalachian sections of the Confederacy volunteered for Union service, with regiments representing every state save South Carolina. In Pennsylvania, Buchanan declared for the Union, while tens of thousands of Scots-Irish volunteered to punish the Deep Southern traitors. In the Appalachian Midwest most Borderlanders regarded the attack on Sumter as treason and rallied to the Stars and Stripes. “I was a Kentuckian,” one Hoosier told a reporter, “but now I am an American.”²¹

The attack on Sumter pushed the Appalachian majority in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Indiana, and western Virginia into the Union camp. Other parts of Appalachia rallied to the Confederacy, regarding Lincoln’s call for troops as a direct attack on their communities. This sentiment was especially strong in lower-lying areas where Appalachian slaveholding was more common: central and western North Carolina, middle Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, and northern Arkansas. In the aftermath of Sumter, these regions supported secession ballot measures, causing their states to join the Confederacy three to four months after the Deep South had created it.²²

The Confederacy, of course, went down in defeat in 1865, its cities occupied by “foreign” troops, its slaves emancipated by presidential decree. Yankees hoped that out of the Union’s costly military victory, its occupying forces might carry out a massive project in state building, an effort to democratize the Deep South, Tidewater, and Confederate Appalachia along Yankee and Midlander lines. With its soldiers maintaining order, thousands of Yankee and Midland schoolteachers, missionaries, businessmen, and government officials were deployed to the three regions. They introduced public education, creating segregated elementary schools and black colleges (many of which exist today). They eliminated laws and practices that enforced the Deep Southern caste system. They ensured that newly freed slaves could vote and stand for office and that former top Confederate officials could not. Fifteen African Americans were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the former Confederacy between 1870 and 1877, and two represented black-majority Mississippi in the U.S. Senate.²³

But foreign occupiers have always found it difficult to fundamentally change a culture. The people of Tidewater, the Deep South, and Confederate Appalachia resisted the Yankee reforms as determinedly as they could, and after Union troops withdrew in 1876, whites in the “reconstructed” regions undid the measures. Yankee public schools were abolished. Imposed state constitutions were rewritten, restoring white supremacy and adopting poll taxes, “literacy tests,” and other instruments that allowed white officials to deprive African Americans of the right to vote. (As a result, the total presidential vote in South Carolina fell from 182,600 in 1876 to 50,000 in 1900, even as the state’s population increased.) Ku Klux Klansmen murdered “uppity” blacks who ran for office or violated the rules of the traditional caste system. Despite a war and a concerted occupation, Deep Southern and Tidewater culture retained their essential characters, setting the stage for future culture clashes in the century to follow.²⁴