12 Secession and the Coming of the Civil War

John Brown, the antislavery zealot and Pottawatomie Creek killer, was never good at organizing. Imagining things was his specialty. For several years after he and his men abducted and murdered proslavery settlers in Kansas in 1856, he lay low and continued to agitate for a free Kansas. But at some point he concocted a plan to bring a war against slavery in the East.

Brown cast his eye on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. If he could seize the guns and ammunition stored there, he envisioned Virginia and Maryland’s enslaved people rising up to follow him out of captivity. In 1858, Brown and several dozen black and white associates held a convention in Chatham, Ontario, across Lake Erie from Ohio. There they agreed upon a “provisional constitution” that would govern a new republic of freed slaves. Brown would be the free republic’s founding father and the commander in chief of the army of liberation.

The Harpers Ferry Raid

Most abolitionists did not approve of Brown’s tactics. Many professed adherence to pacifism. But in light of Bleeding Kansas and the caning of Charles Sumner, some antislavery activists wondered whether violence against the Slave Power was their only option. Charles Stearns was a principled pacifist who had gone to Kansas to aid the cause of freedom in the mid-1850s. But the killing of an antislavery colleague in Kansas changed his mind about violence. “I am sorry to deny the principles of Jesus Christ, after contending for them so long,” Stearns wrote to antislavery leader William Lloyd Garrison. “But it is not for myself that I am going to fight. It is for God and the slaves.”

Brown was impressive enough to attract the support of an influential group of northeastern intellectuals and activists, collectively known as the “Secret Six.” All of them were abolitionists and reformers, with many connections to Harvard, Unitarianism, and Transcendentalism. Among them were Frank Sanborn, a Unitarian schoolteacher who tutored three of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s children; Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister who had heard Emerson deliver his notorious “Divinity School Address” (1838) in person; and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, another Unitarian minister for whom abolitionism became the core of his religion. Higginson had led the group that had tried to liberate escaped slave Anthony Burns from Boston’s federal courthouse in 1854. Parker spoke for most of Brown’s backers when he argued that “one held against his will as a slave has a natural right to kill every one who seeks to prevent his enjoyment of liberty.”

In 1858, Brown and the Secret Six discussed plans for Brown to begin the slave insurrection in western Virginia. Brown quietly set up operations at a rented farmhouse in Maryland, across the Potomac River from Harpers Ferry. His insurrectionary army only amounted to about two dozen whites and blacks. But he hoped word would spread among Virginia and Maryland slaves once Brown’s men had seized the armory.

The chief justification for targeting Harpers Ferry was not the armory’s proximity to slaves, for relatively few slaves worked in Appalachian areas of the South, including Harpers Ferry. The armory itself was what drew Brown there. Harpers Ferry was among the earliest industrialized towns in America and one of the centers of the South’s comparatively modest Industrial Revolution. In the 1790s, Congress had chosen Harpers Ferry and Springfield, Massachusetts, as sites for regional armories. These factories would produce and store weaponry for the US Army. Harpers Ferry, which stood at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers, also became a key railroad junction in 1839, with the construction of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad bridge over the Potomac.

Brown had worked previously with the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass on ideas for his provisional constitution. But when he approached Douglass about the Harpers Ferry raid, Douglass balked. Brown and Douglass met secretly at an old quarry in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in September 1859. Brown advised Douglass that the attack was imminent, and he urged Douglass to join the fight. “When I strike, the bees will swarm and I shall want you to help hive them,” he told Douglass. Douglass would not help. Furthermore, he urged Brown to abandon the harebrained plan. It would not work, Douglass warned. The prospect of violent revolution would turn many Americans, including white northerners, against the abolitionists. Harpers Ferry was a “perfect steel trap,” Douglass said. Brown and his pitiful army would “never get out alive.”

Brown was disappointed by Douglass’s reaction but not dissuaded. Brown mentioned trying to recruit a larger army, or at least trying to spread word of the revolution to the region’s slaves. Neither of these plans materialized. Brown and his men gave little thought to what they would do if they could capture the armory or how they might escape and haul out weapons. Nevertheless, Brown was convinced divine destiny was calling him forward and that God might do a great work in spite of the odds against him. Or perhaps God planned for Brown and his men to die as martyrs.

When Brown’s plan went into motion on October 16, 1859, the first part went remarkably well. The armory was virtually unguarded except for a night watchman. So John Brown and his men briefly captured the facility, giving them control of the armory and its millions of dollars’ worth of weapons. Word spread of the assault on the armory, and white citizens of Harpers Ferry began shooting at Brown’s men. They hunkered down in a stout engine house on the property, waiting for the inevitable backlash of military force that was coming.

The Buchanan administration ordered an available company of US Marines to come up from Washington to suppress the insurgency. Remarkably, the Marines were led by Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart, who would become one of Lee’s key commanders during the Civil War. Stuart tried to negotiate surrender with Brown, but the zealot refused. Lee immediately sent in his Marines, who battered down the door, killed two of Brown’s men, and captured Brown.

Brown was quickly tried and convicted of treason and insurrection and sentenced to hang. Six of Brown’s men were given the same sentence (a number of them had died during the siege). Even though Brown left behind incriminating information about the Secret Six, its members managed to avoid prosecution, some by leaving the country.

When Brown was sentenced, he gave a brief speech that cemented his legacy as an abolitionist martyr, albeit a delusional one. Brown insisted that he “never did intend murder, or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection.” Much of this was simply untrue by any plain understanding of the words he used. Perhaps Brown was alluding to his lack of extensive planning about the raid’s aftermath, but he certainly did hope to incite slaves to rebellion.

More poignantly, Brown made a Christian defense of his actions on behalf of the “least of these” (see Matt 25:31– 45.) He said that if he had acted decisively to save wealthy and elite Americans from bondage and confinement, people would have applauded him. Brown noted that witnesses swore on the Bible in the trial court. He reminded the assembly that this same Bible told him that “all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them [Matt 7:12]. It teaches me further, to ‘Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them’ [Heb 13:3]. I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say I am yet too young to understand that GOD is any respecter of persons,” Brown declared.

He was only acting as a Christian should, he said. “Now,” Brown reasoned, “If it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life, for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and MINGLE MY BLOOD FURTHER WITH THE BLOOD OF MY CHILDREN, and with the blood of millions in this Slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments,—I say; LET IT BE DONE.” When abolitionists heard of this last speech, they hailed Brown as a saint and a martyr. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that in death Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.”

Union troops would remember John Brown in their popular marching song “John Brown’s Body,” often sung to the same tune as Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The soldiers would sing

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave . . .

He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord,

His soul is marching on!

Many white northerners still regarded Brown as a fanatic and a madman. Even William Lloyd Garrison considered him foolish and “apparently insane.” There was no questioning Brown’s commitment to the abolitionist cause, though.

White southerners as well as many northern Democrats took a dim view of Brown and his raid. A Baltimore newspaper editorialized that it was “preposterous” for southerners to keep living “under a government, the majority of whose subjects or citizens regard John Brown as a martyr and a Christian hero, rather than a murderer and robber.” The Richmond Enquirer also suggested that Brown’s raid had brought the Union to the point of disintegration. Brown “has advanced the cause of Disunion more than any other event that has happened since the formation of the Government,” they argued. Aside from Lincoln’s election, John Brown’s raid was the most important event that precipitated the Civil War. Militant southerners argued that in their heart of hearts, every Republican was just like John Brown. National Republican power would mean destruction for the white South and slavery, they said.

The Pemberton Mill Collapse and Lynn Strike

Difficult though it may be to imagine, most Americans in 1860 were concerned with other things than the looming crisis of the Civil War. One of the most horrific—and much deadlier—incidents that supplanted the Harpers Ferry raid was the collapse of the Pemberton Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on January 10, 1860. Owners had kept piling more and more heavy machinery into the textile mill until the multistory building finally folded in upon itself, trapping almost a thousand workers inside, mostly women and girls. Many of them were recent immigrants from Ireland or Scotland. Eighty-eight of the workers died in the collapse, and hundreds more were injured or crippled. There were virtually no repercussions for the factory’s owners, and the workers had no insurance system on which to fall back. Southern critics of the northern industrial economy said this was a classic illustration of the brutal conditions under which these “white slaves” worked.

In nearby Lynn, Massachusetts, in February 1860, shoe factory employees further illustrated the plight of many American workers when they initiated one of the first large-scale labor strikes in American history. Increased competition and duress from the Panic of 1857 had led factory owners to cut wages for many northern factory workers. By the time of the Lynn strike, male workers were often earning as little as three dollars a week, and some women earned less than half that amount. The strike at Lynn soon spread through New England, with 20,000 male and female workers participating. They said they would not go back to work unless the factories paid them better wages. Demonstrators carried banners with slogans such as “American Ladies Will Not Be Slaves.” As a presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln commended the strikers, saying that workers were not “obliged to labor whether you pay them or not.” In the end the short-term effects of the Lynn strike were few, but it heralded labor reform movements of the future.

The 1860 Election

Most of Lincoln’s attention in 1860, like that of most national politicians’, was devoted to the question of slavery. Brown’s raid made the 1860 election one of the most fearful and anxious that the nation had ever seen. The Whigs had already disintegrated because of the slavery issue. Now the Democrats fell into feuding sectional divisions. Stephen Douglas was regarded as the leading contender to become the party’s presidential nominee. President Buchanan, dogged by emerging evidence of deep corruption and bribes in his administration, had decided to retire after one term. But southern Democrats now regarded Douglas as a sellout since he would not support the legalization of slavery in all of the territories. Douglas remained doggedly committed to the doctrine of popular sovereignty, even after the debacle in Kansas and his opposition to its legally dubious Lecompton Constitution.

When the Democratic national convention met in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1860, the city was smoldering with talk of secession. Deep South delegates insisted they would never accept popular sovereignty. Their property rights in slaves were too precious to be put up to a vote, they said. When Douglas’s faction pushed through a platform committed to popular sovereignty, many southern Democratic delegates walked out. Alabama’s William Lowndes Yancey and other southern “Fire-Eaters” (secessionist zealots) justified the disruption of the Democratic convention by insisting that white southerners’ most basic rights were at stake. Yancey, the great orator of secessionism, led a crowd outside the convention in wild cheers for the founding of an “Independent Southern Republic.” Last-minute attempts to broker peace within the Democratic ranks failed. Militant southern Democrats formed their own convention and nominated Vice President John Breckinridge of Kentucky on a platform endorsing the extension of slavery in the territories. Northern Democrats and a minority of southerners nominated Douglas as their standard-bearer. Effectively, the Democrats were fielding a southern and a northern candidate. This boded ill for their electoral chances. A remnant of southern Whigs would nominate John Bell of Tennessee on the “Constitutional Union” ticket. In most of the South, the 1860 election represented a choice between Breckinridge and Bell.

In the North the alternatives were different. Northern Democrats coalesced around Stephen Douglas in spite of the meltdown at the Democratic convention. Republicans did not have a simple choice for their nominee, either. Many believed William Seward of New York would win the nomination, but his 1858 “irrepressible conflict” speech had given him a reputation for radicalism.

Abraham Lincoln was little known among northeastern Republicans until he gave a key speech at Cooper Union in New York City in early 1860. In this debut before a national Republican assembly, Lincoln reiterated his opposition to slavery in the territories. Yet he also struck a moderate tone. He repudiated John Brown as a fanatical delusionary and denied that Brown was a Republican. Lincoln argued that Republicans would not touch slavery in the South, where it predominated. “Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation.” But they would do all they could to keep it from spreading “into the National Territories,” and from overrunning “us here in these Free States.” Even though he did not propose to abolish slavery in the South, Lincoln denied that the Constitution affirmed the right to own slaves. This was a balanced posture for a Republican to take in 1860. Lincoln’s position, however, gave white southerners enough evidence to consider Lincoln a mortal threat to their way of life.

There was enough hostility toward William Seward outside the Northeast to send moderate Republicans looking for an alternative. Because the Republicans were only a sectional party, they would need to win all the free states to have any hope of winning the presidency. They could not afford to lose any northern states to the Democrats. Illinois was regarded as a Republican “swing state,” which could easily go for its longtime Democratic senator Stephen Douglas. Lincoln’s humble midwestern origins and gangly frame worked well to style him as the representative Free-Soil man. Supporters cast him as the “rail-splitter,” a hardworking, honest farmer, even though Lincoln had worked as a lawyer for most of his adult life.

Critically for Lincoln, the Republicans held their national convention in Chicago. Chicago was incorporated in 1837 at a key transfer site between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed. The Illinois and Michigan Canal had opened in 1848, connecting Chicago to the Illinois River and the Mississippi beyond. With the establishment of the canal, Chicago became one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. Within a couple decades it had become the eighth-largest city in the United States, with an 1860 population of 110,000 people. About half of the city’s residents had been born outside the United States, many of them in Ireland or Germany. Lincoln had a home-field advantage at the Chicago convention, with throngs of boisterous supporters jamming the meeting hall.

After multiple ballots Lincoln surpassed the fading Seward and won the Republican nomination. The tens of thousands of attendees whooped their approval, “cheering with the energy of insanity.” The convention chose the New Englander Hannibal Hamlin as Lincoln’s running mate in order to balance the ticket. The Republican platform stood against the expansion of slavery but repudiated John Brown as a reckless criminal. It cautioned southerners to squelch talk of secession, which they regarded as treasonous.

Some radical abolitionists were not happy with Lincoln’s nomination. Wendell Phillips labeled Lincoln the “Slave Hound of Illinois” because he did not oppose the Fugitive Slave Act. Women’s rights activist and abolitionist Susan B. Anthony regarded Lincoln’s Republicans as “shamefully weak and trembling” on the need to abolish slavery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass attended an abolitionist convention in 1860 that nominated Gerrit Smith, one of John Brown’s Secret Six, for president. But Stanton and Douglass both ended up supporting Lincoln. Smith received virtually no popular support in the election. Northern antislavery advocates coalesced around Lincoln as the candidate most likely to push their agenda forward, moderate though he was. Frederick Douglass conceded that “Lincoln’s election will indicate growth in the right direction.”

The 1860 election was an exceptional one in the history of American politics. The sectional candidate Lincoln depended on deep divisions in national politics to have any hope of success. Often in American elections a major presidential candidate has received few or no electoral votes from a particular region of the country. But Lincoln was different. He literally got no popular support in most of the South. In ten slave states he was not even on the ballot. Most of the popular vote he did receive in the slave states came from one particular community, the German voters of the St. Louis, Missouri, area. In Kentucky and Virginia, where Lincoln did appear on the ballot, he received only about 1 percent of the vote.

John Breckinridge, the southern Democratic candidate, and John Bell, the “Constitutional Union” nominee, likewise received virtually no popular support in parts of the North. Stephen Douglas was the only one of the four candidates to receive a respectable level of support in all areas of the nation (although he only got 12 percent of the southern vote). Broad popular support was not the issue, however. Constitutionally, what a presidential candidate needed was support in a sufficient number of states to win the Electoral College. In the end Lincoln won the election by taking all of the free states except for New Jersey, which he split with Stephen Douglas. That gave Lincoln a strong majority in the Electoral College, though he garnered less than 40 percent of the popular vote nationally.

Secession

In the fall of 1860, white southerners, especially the Fire-Eaters, began to see the scenario unfold that could put Lincoln into the White House and made dire predictions about what Republican victory would mean. In the months before the election, the South trembled with rumors of slave insurrections and John Brown–type conspiracies. One Methodist periodical in Texas ran a column claiming the Republicans and abolitionists intended to “deluge” the slave states in “blood and flame . . . and force their fair daughters into the embrace of buck negroes for wives.” A Georgia newspaper warned, “Let the consequences be what they may—whether the Potomac is crimsoned in human gore, and Pennsylvania Avenue is paved ten fathoms deep with mangled bodies . . . the South will never submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.”

Some white southerners urged caution, however. Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who would become the vice president of the southern Confederacy, warned that seceding from the Union would threaten slavery’s existence more than anything else could. Slavery was “more secure in the Union than out of it,” Stephens argued. “We have nothing to fear from anything as much as unnecessary changes and revolutions in government. The institution is based on conservatism,” and slavery depended on the traditional structures of the American republic. “Revolutions are much easier started than controlled,” Stephens said. Remembering the murderous horrors of the French Revolution, Stephens reminded southerners that people who try to moderate a revolution’s effects often become casualties of it. Another conservative critic of the Fire-Eaters averred that destroying the Union would itself lead to emancipation and that secession was an “act of political suicide.” White Christians in the South sometimes took a more resigned view of secession. Reflecting on the possibility of disunion, future Confederate commander Thomas J. Jackson wondered, “Why should Christians be at all disturbed about the dissolution of the Union? It can only come by God’s permission, and will only be permitted, if for his people’s good.”

As Thanksgiving 1860 passed, key southern pastors gave their blessing and endorsement to secession. One of the most important sermons came from New Orleans Presbyterian minister Benjamin Morgan Palmer. Insisting that the spirit of abolition was “atheistic,” Palmer also cited the French Revolution. But Palmer compared the French Revolution to the victory of Lincoln and the Republicans. “This spirit of atheism . . . has selected us for its victims, and slavery for its issue. Its banner-cry rings out already upon the air—‘liberty, equality, fraternity,’ which simply interpreted mean bondage, confiscation and massacre. With its tricolor waving in the breeze,—it waits to inaugurate its reign of terror,” Palmer warned. He insisted that it was time for southerners to “throw off the yoke of this Union,” just as their revolutionary forefathers had done. Indeed, Palmer declared that their reasons for separation were more compelling than those of their patriot forebears. Palmer’s sermon was widely reprinted across the South and widely reviled in the North.

In spite of the Fire-Eaters’ loud talk, Republicans knew that white southern sentiment about secession was mixed. Plus, northerners had been hearing radical southerners call for secession since at least the nullification crisis of the 1830s. Thus, Republicans were inclined to interpret talk of secession as scare tactics rather than a real threat. It is hard to know what the Republicans might have done differently, anyway. Lincoln routinely assured white southerners that if he were elected, he would take no action against slavery in the South. Still, by the time Lincoln won, many southerners agreed with former president John Tyler, who said it signaled the “day of doom for the great model Republic.”

In spite of the reservations of some southern conservatives, the Fire-Eaters ruled in South Carolina, the staunchest hotbed of southern nationalism and slave-owning radicalism. Immediately after Lincoln’s election, the state initiated the process of secession. The state legislature summoned a secession convention, deliberately reversing the process by which South Carolina had ratified the Constitution in 1788. In December 1860, the convention voted unanimously to dissolve the political connection between South Carolina and the American Union. Citing the legacy of the Declaration of Independence, the secessionists claimed they were withdrawing from the Union to save themselves from tyranny. “A geographical line has been drawn across the Union,” the South Carolina convention declared, “and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that ‘Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free.’” Once the Republicans assumed control of the government, the delegates said, “The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.” They needed to get out of the Union before Lincoln took power.

South Carolina started a chain reaction of Deep South states seceding from the Union at the beginning of 1861. While Lincoln watched and waited to take office, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas seceded between January 9 and February 1. None of these states saw the kind of unanimous support for secession that South Carolina’s convention enjoyed. States such as Alabama and Georgia saw significant white resistance to secession. The secessionists typically explained the need to exit the Union as a move to protect the integrity of their state and the institution of slavery. Mississippi delegates explained, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. . . . A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.”

Texas likewise lamented the victory of

a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color—a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the [American] confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.

Although the southern states were certainly concerned about their diminishing power as states, by their statements at the time of secession they made clear that the threat against slavery was their primary concern.

South Carolina experienced the easiest path to secession. In neighboring Georgia the margin of votes determining the secession question was razor-thin. The pro-secession Georgia governor probably exaggerated when he claimed that 54 percent of voters had favored leaving the Union. Even in the 1860 presidential election, Georgia saw near-majority support for candidates (Stephen Douglas and the Constitutional Union candidate) other than Breckinridge, the southern Democrat. Georgia secessionists were worried about settling the question by a popular vote, or even a vote to elect a convention to discuss secession. North Georgia, where slavery was less prevalent, was a hotbed of cooperationist and pro-Union sentiment. Nevertheless, Fire-Eaters managed to get a pro-secession majority elected to the secession convention, and the initial vote to secede passed 166 to 130. Once Georgia separated from the Union, even before the creation of the Confederacy, the new Georgia legislature passed a treason statute defining support for the Union as a capital crime, punishable by death. Likewise, northern Alabama experienced considerable resistance to secession. But Fire-Eater William Lowndes Yancey warned that those who opposed secession would be regarded as traitors and “dealt with as such.” Sometimes, then, the secessionists had to concoct an image of pro-Confederate unity, but underneath the façade many white voters were in deep disagreement over it.

Many conservative white southerners saw the secessionist impulse as a destructive, raging flood. Judah P. Benjamin, a US senator from Louisiana and one of the most prominent Jewish politicians in nineteenth-century America, wrote fearfully in December 1860 about the Union’s impending dissolution. The “prudent and conservative men” of the South had tried to reason with the Fire-Eaters, but they could not stop “the wild torrent of passion which is carrying everything before it.” Trying to moderate the proslavery revolution was like trying to put out a “prairie fire by a gardener’s watering pot,” Benjamin told northern friends. But Benjamin and most like-minded conservatives reluctantly went along with secession. Benjamin would serve in several top Confederate cabinet posts, including secretary of state.

Was secession legal? President Lincoln—along with the normally pro-southern President Buchanan—argued that secession was illegal because the Union was “perpetual.” If the government continued “to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, the Union will endure forever,” Lincoln contended, “it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.” Not even Lincoln could deny that in extreme cases a people had the right of revolution. To refute that option would be to deny the legitimacy of the American Revolution. But Lincoln would not acknowledge that southern secession had even happened. He preferred to deem the Confederates as rebels or insurrectionists.

Lincoln’s position was understandable. An American president has no greater responsibility than to maintain the cohesion of the Union itself. But the legal legitimacy of secession is a murkier question. The Constitution, of course, makes no provision for the Union’s dissolution. But the Declaration of Independence, in justifying the colonies’ withdrawal from the British Empire, posited that in the face of tyrannical government, a people had the right to “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another” and start a new government. Whether we should call that a right of secession or a right of revolution seems more a question of language than of substance. The Confederates saw what they were doing as similar to what the patriots had done in 1776.

The Confederates were also careful to attend to the process of how to secede. They once had placed themselves under the authority of the Constitution’s frame of government, as ratifying states. In 1860–61, in conventions that mimicked the ratifying conventions of 1787–88, the southern states chose to withdraw from the Constitutional Union, as seceding states. It was difficult to dispute the legal logic of such a process. Whether the Confederacy’s cause was morally legitimate is another question: most Americans today would agree it was not.

Confederates were also keen to identify secession with the American Revolution, as Benjamin Morgan Palmer did in his Thanksgiving sermon in New Orleans. US senator Robert Toombs of Georgia said that if the Republicans tried to stop secession, then it would be up to white southerners to “make another war of independence, for that then will be the question; fight its battles over again—reconquer liberty and independence.” In the midst of the war, Confederate president Jefferson Davis explained, “We are in arms to renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to the holy cause of constitutional liberty. . . . To show ourselves worthy of the inheritance bequeathed to us by the patriots of the Revolution, we must emulate that heroic devotion which made reverse to them but the crucible in which their patriotism was refined.” Lincoln and other opponents of secession argued that southerners were destroying the hard-won legacy of America’s founders, not reenacting their revolution. To Lincoln the heritage of the patriot fathers was perhaps the best reason to keep the Union together.

Reactions to Secession

However Lincoln construed what the Deep South states had done, white southerners regarded themselves as having seceded from the Union. In his remaining months as president, Buchanan had insisted that secession was illegitimate. At the same time, he professed that the national government could do nothing to stop it. Lincoln, for his part, advised federal and military officials that when he assumed office, he intended to keep federal law in effect in the southern states. Most critically, he planned to maintain control of federal forts in the South.

Lincoln and Buchanan did not have much of a military to work with. Following the tradition that dated to the founding era, the nation generally kept the army and navy small during peacetime. The federal army stood at about 16,000 men on the eve of the Civil War. Much of their work entailed keeping peace and order on the southwestern frontier. Texas had continued to grow because of the cotton economy and because Texas became a key transit point on the route to California. Between 1850 and 1860, the population of Texas went from just over 200,000 to more than 600,000, with about a third of the population of the Anglo-dominated areas being slaves.

As settlement moved north and west into the Texas interior, security against Native Americans became a more pressing issue. This led the US Army to establish a series of frontier forts following the Mexican War. These included north Texas’s Fort Worth, founded in 1849. (Dallas, Fort Worth’s neighbor to the east, was incorporated in 1856.) They also created a string of posts along the border with Mexico, including El Paso’s Fort Bliss in 1854. Texas’s frontier soldiers confronted raids by Comanches, Apaches, and other Indian tribes and also sought to eliminate marauding gangs of criminals composed of whites, Hispanic-background Texans, runaway slaves, and other west Texas drifters. Frustration with the lawless situation in the Texas interior spawned murderous hatred among whites for virtually all Native Americans. One army commander in 1850 told his Texas officers to execute Indian captives and not take prisoners. In any case, in 1861 most federal soldiers were stationed far away from the East Coast, where the Civil War would begin.

Northern and southern Democrats looked for ways to convince moderate southerners, especially in the Upper South, to remain within the Union. In late 1860, Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky introduced a package of amendments historians call the Crittenden Compromise. Although the laws proposed included a softening of the most objectionable parts of the Fugitive Slave Act, Crittenden’s “compromise” primarily entailed a series of constitutional amendments that would have guaranteed the long-term security of the Slave Power. The measures would have reintroduced the Missouri Compromise’s 36°30' border as the dividing line between slave and free states and territories, and prohibited Congress from tampering with slavery in Washington, DC, at federal installations (like forts) within slave states, or with the interstate slave trade. Most remarkably, the amendments asserted that the protections for slavery where it existed were perpetual; no future Congress could propose changes to them. The Crittenden Compromise envisioned slavery in America lasting forever. Congressional Republicans, taking a cue from the president-elect, did not support the Crittenden Compromise. Neither did the more radical southerners who were planning the formation of the independent southern republic. They saw the Crittenden Compromise as a distraction.

The Creation of the Confederacy

In early February 1861, delegates from the seceding states met in Montgomery, Alabama, to create a constitution and to appoint officers for the new Confederate States of America. The Confederate Constitution, which they finalized in mid-March, borrowed heavily from the model of the US Constitution. But the Confederates made clear that theirs was a union of sovereign states, committed to preserving the institution of slavery. They prohibited Congress from passing any laws “impairing the right of property in negro slaves.” Recalling the Dred Scott case, they affirmed that slave owners would be able to travel wherever they wished in the Confederate states and bring their slaves with them. They also added an explicit reference to God in the preamble, something the US Constitution had failed to do. Basil Manly, a Baptist pastor and former president of the University of Alabama, served as the convention’s chaplain and prayed at the inauguration of Confederate president Jefferson Davis.

The Montgomery convention had selected Davis of Mississippi as president of the Confederacy and Alexander Stephens of Georgia as vice president. Both had been reluctant about secession. This made them excellent choices to appeal to the moderate southerners of the Upper South. The Upper South states from Virginia to Arkansas had not seceded yet. It was not clear that they would unless the Lincoln administration provoked them into doing so.

Figure 12.1. Jefferson Davis

Davis had an impressive résumé: a West Point graduate, Davis had served with distinction in the Mexican War and had also been a member of Congress and secretary of war under Franklin Pierce. Davis seems to have preferred taking command of the Confederate military over becoming president, but politically he was a wise choice for the Confederates.

When the convention introduced Davis as the new president, the crowd sang “Dixie.” This song had become popular on the American minstrel show circuit, and became the Confederacy’s unofficial national anthem.

Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton,

Old times there are not forgotten.

Look away, look away, look away Dixie Land!

I wish I was in Dixie, Hooray! Hooray!

In Dixie Land I’ll take my stand,

to live and die in Dixie.

Away, away, away down south in Dixie!

On the night of February 16, Alabama Fire-Eater William Lowndes Yancey introduced Davis to a throng gathered outside his Montgomery hotel. Davis promised them that anyone who stood in the way of Confederate independence would have to “smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel.”

In his inaugural speech at the Alabama State House, which would briefly serve also as the capitol of the Confederacy, Davis struck a more statesmanlike tone. He drew upon the Declaration of Independence and the memory of the patriot fathers to justify what the secessionists were doing. Since the American Union had become “perverted from the purposes for which it was ordained,” the Confederates had made recourse once again to the right of political self-determination. Davis smoothly avoided the issue of slavery and put the focus on the Republicans’ abuses (or anticipated abuses) of national political power. He concluded by urging the Confederacy to look to God for deliverance. “Reverently let us invoke the God of our fathers to guide and protect us in our efforts to perpetuate the principles which by his blessing they were able to vindicate, establish, and transmit to their posterity. With the continuance of his favor ever gratefully acknowledged, we may hopefully look forward to success, to peace, and to prosperity.”

Lincoln Inaugurated

Lincoln’s agonizing wait to become president finally ended in March 1861. He labored hard on his first inaugural address with William Seward, his onetime rival for the presidency, who would become his secretary of state. Lincoln, arguably the greatest wordsmith in the history of the American presidency, needed to balance firmness with conciliation in his inaugural speech. The Upper South still hung in the balance. Lincoln’s draft originally raised the prospect of armed conflict with the Confederacy, but Seward and others advised Lincoln to adopt a more moderate tone.

The first inaugural address of March 4, 1861, was longer and more technical than Lincoln’s more famous speeches, the Gettysburg Address and the second inaugural. He began by reemphasizing to southerners that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He also reasserted that the Union was perpetual and that the slave states could not break it up. Lincoln warned southerners that he intended to “hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts.” The federal government would keep its property and enforce its laws. However, “beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.”

In the brilliant closing of the speech, Lincoln registered tender ambivalence about the secession crisis and the sanctity of the Union. “I am loath to close,” he said. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” The battlefields and graves he referenced were those of the American Revolution. Should not the sacrifices of the patriot fathers be enough reason for Americans to hold the Union together? Lincoln asked. Confederates countered that they were the ones faithful to the tradition of the revolution.

Fort Sumter

The problem of federal installations in southern territory became the spark that ignited the Civil War. Major Robert Anderson commanded the garrison at Fort Sumter, in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor. South Carolina officials insisted that federal troops must evacuate Fort Sumter and turn it over to them. Anderson would not budge. Even President Buchanan agreed that the fort should remain in Union hands, and he authorized a mission to reinforce the fort with more troops and supplies in January 1861. South Carolinians opened fire on the supply ship, which fled. But Anderson’s men stayed put. Over the coming weeks the federal forces at Fort Sumter began to run out of supplies.

When Lincoln assumed office, he faced mounting pressure from his cabinet and senior military leadership to surrender Fort Sumter. But instead Lincoln advised the South Carolina government that he was sending in a ship carrying only supplies. This provoked the Davis administration into taking action against the fort before the supply ship arrived. The Fire-Eaters insisted that attacking Fort Sumter would embolden the Upper South states to go ahead and secede.

Early on the morning of April 12, 1861, Confederate forces in Charleston started bombarding Fort Sumter. Anderson’s worn-out men were unable to mount a successful defense. Though no deaths resulted from the barrage, the Confederate artillery forced Anderson to surrender the garrison. Three days after the assault began, Lincoln issued a summons to bring 75,000 volunteers into the Union army to prepare for a broader war.

There may well have been an “irrepressible conflict” between the North and South. Perhaps no one could have averted its eventual eruption. But radicals on both sides, from John Brown to the Fire-Eaters, no doubt longed to see that cataclysm over the future of slavery. Their actions hastened the journey to Fort Sumter, which inaugurated four long years of war and the nation’s greatest trial.

Figure 12.2. Fort Sumter, 1861.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bonner, Robert E. Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Dew, Charles B. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001.

Egerton, Douglas R. Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought on the Civil War. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.

Gustafson, Melanie Susan. Women and the Republican Party, 1854–1924. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Himmel, Kelly F. The Conquest of the Karankawas and the Tonkawas, 1821–1859. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999.

McCurry, Stephanie. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

———. Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief. New York: Penguin, 2014.

Ratner, Lorman A., and Dwight L. Teeter Jr., Fanatics and Fire-Eaters: Newspapers and the Coming of the Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Reynolds, David S. John Brown, Abolitionist. New York: Knopf, 2005.