MISSISSIPPI

The True Enemy

JANUARY 9

THE SECESSION OF SOUTH CAROLINA, COUPLED WITH MAJOR ANDERSON’S move to Fort Sumter, energized the advocates of disunion throughout the Deep South. Any indecision, any thought of pausing to give Lincoln a chance, was swept away by a surge of enthusiasm for independence from the hated North and an end to the sneering intrusion of Northern abolitionists. News of the Star of the West relief attempt would only intensify the South’s anger.

On Wednesday, January 9, Mississippi’s secession convention voted 84 to 15 in favor of immediate exit from the Union and became the second state after South Carolina to do so. The delegates were very clear about their motivation.

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world,” they wrote in their official declaration. “Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”

The delegates were convinced that Lincoln and the Republican Party planned to abolish slavery. “Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union,” the declaration warned; secession was their only alternative. “It is not a matter of choice,” they said, “but of necessity.”

A howl of indignation and hurt feelings rose from each of the fifteen claims in the declaration, each a single sentence long. All attributed the state’s action to the Union’s enduring “hostility” to slavery. The declaration depicted this hostility as a corporeal villain, an “it” having a multitude of destructive powers. “It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst,” one claim asserted. The next: “It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and the schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.”

It was an implacable enemy. “It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.”

The pace at which the Union began to disintegrate was breathtaking, and Lincoln had yet to set foot in Washington.

BUCHANAN DID NOTHING. On that Wednesday, he delivered an address that by its title, “Message on Threats to the Peace and Existence of the Union,” seemed to signal some form of decisive action. Instead, he offered what sounded very much like a capitulation.

After describing the damage the crisis had done to American prosperity and reiterating his belief that no state had a right to secession, Buchanan essentially threw up his hands and announced that the conflict between the states “has assumed such vast and alarming proportions as to place the subject entirely above and beyond Executive control.” It was up to Congress to save the day, he said. He did, however, assert a federal right to use force against “those who assail the property of the Federal Government,” calling that right “clear and undeniable.” When he referred to Major Anderson’s move from Fort Moultrie to Sumter, he called him “that gallant officer,” drawing both hisses and applause from the spectator gallery.

He closed his address on a wistful note. “I feel that my duty has been faithfully, though it may be imperfectly, performed; and, whatever the result may be, I shall carry to my grave the consciousness that I at least meant well for my country.”