Confederate Reckoning

In December of 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the United States with a unanimous vote. However, South Carolina was unique in that most of the state depended on a slaveholding, plantation economy, there was no real political competition, and “planters were systematically overrepresented” (41). In particular, South Carolina was alone among Southern states in using the federal government’s three-fifths system to count enslaved people toward the electoral representation of plantation owners. Still, even in South Carolina, fire-eaters (Southern politicians who supported secession) were anxious over and contemptuous of the popular vote and the political power of working-class whites, who did not have enslaved workers.

Because of this anxiety over opposition from non-slaveholding whites, fire-breathers organized the 1860 Association in South Carolina, which “aimed…to unify the public opinion of the state and the South behind secession as the proper response to the election of a ‘Black Republican’ president” (44-45). The 1860 Association published pamphlets like James D.B. DeBow’s The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Nonslaveholder, which rallied support by arguing that enslavement prevented poor whites from having to perform degrading labor and that, if enslavement were lost, the South would be subjected to “sexual and racial degradation that the rich white man could escape by emigration, but that nonslaveholders and their families would have to endure” (45). In speeches, fire-breathers appealed to poor whites as fellow “freemen” (45) and invoked fears that the events of the Haitian Revolution—in which enslaved Black people on the Caribbean island of Haiti violently overthrew their white enslavers—could be repeated in the American South. Poor whites were also recruited into patrols and militias tasked with controlling enslaved people, appealing to a shared identity as “citizen-soldiers” (47). These militias also enacted surveillance and oppression over pro-Union dissenters and voters. In South Carolina, presidential electors and many elected officials were chosen by the General Assembly, not by voters, and this anti-democratic system meant that there was no effective pro-Unionist presence in the state (49-50).

Despite these anti-democratic measures, the fire-breathers were still concerned about the elections for the state legislature and the delegates for the state secession convention. They mitigated this threat by making sure as many elections as possible were uncontested. “The voters must not be given any choice” (50). Even then, before the convention, Governor Gist of South Carolina had promised other Southern governors that, if Lincoln was elected, South Carolina would be the first state to secede. In other states, secessionists were similarly successful and used militia mobilization and voter suppression tactics, while elsewhere “the battle over the will of the people was open, direct, and violent” (53). In Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and Texas, secessionists won large majorities in state conventions. However, in Georgia, “the governor suppressed the electoral results in total violation of state law” (55) and later fraudulently rewrote the electoral results of Georgia’s convention on secession. Resolutions submitted by public meetings of citizens in Georgia opposed secession only after a convention of Southern states. In the end, despite Georgia’s Governor Brown deceptively manipulating the polling numbers, it seems “the people had rejected the secessionist solution by a tiny majority” (59).

Alabama governor A.B. Moore was a strong supporter of immediate secession, but he met firm opposition from Unionists and cooperationists (those who only supported secession if it came as a result of a convention between Southern states). In a fight during the secession convention, the cooperationist William R. Smith argued that the “straight-out” secessionists did not the represent the people. The leader of the straight-outs, William Yancey, admitted after the vote was held that he was “less interested in winning the consent of the people than in coercing conformity” (62). This is an example of how the fight over secession in Alabama and elsewhere was also a fight over democratic legitimacy and what “the people” meant.

This also became an issue with the “Upper South” states in which enslavement was still legal (Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, and Delaware). Unionists argued with justification that secessionism was an anti-democratic movement. McCurry notes that “the Upper South would do what the Deep South did not: engage in a process of substantive consultation with the people” (64). During the debate over secession, people were free to vote for all presidential candidates, and there was a vibrant debate between secessionists and Unionists. In Delaware, Kentucky, and Maryland, Unionists were successful in blocking secession conventions. Only Delaware saw the public decisively reject secession, but the conflict between secessionists and Unionists was intense. In Virginia, it was “paralytic” (65). However, many Unionists in the Upper South refused to accept the Lincoln administration’s strong opposition to extending enslavement in the United States’s western territories and would not agree to allow Union troops in their states to fight the Confederacy.

In Virginia, support for secession at the state secession convention was limited to the “high slaveholding counties” (71), mainly in eastern Virginia, while support for the Union was strong in the northwest and the Shenandoah Valley. This highlighted divisions between western and eastern Virginians, with the former accusing the latter of neglecting western Virginia. Delegates from western Virginia took the opportunity to push for a reform that would have enslaved people taxed in accordance with other property taxes. Secessionists turned to popular demonstrations in Richmond and threats of a coup against the governor. Under pressure from Lincoln to supply soldiers for the Union effort, the convention in Virginia voted for secession. However, the tensions exposed at the convention led western Virginia counties to secede from the state, forming the new state of West Virginia, with Harrison County trying to stay loyal to Virginia in what McCurry describes as “double secessions” (75). Similarly, while Kentucky tried to stay with the Union and Missouri went for “armed neutrality” (76), parts of each state tried to set up independent governments loyal to the Confederacy, with Missouri entering “a state of guerilla war” (76). In Kentucky, a breakaway pro-Confederate government claimed to represent the people even though it “never amounted to much more than a series of army camps and…a government legislative journal” (76).

Though the new state constitutions and the Confederate Constitution made it clear that enslavement was the foundation of the new republic, the truth was that only a small minority of the population had been allowed to vote for this new republic. Starting with South Carolina’s new constitution, citizenship was restricted to white men, with a man’s citizenship only extending to his wives. When Alabama extended voting rights to white men who were not citizens, their stated purpose was to ensure that only Black men were excluded from the franchise—explicitly laying out that the “only two classes” (80) would be white and Black. Even so, in the Confederacy, there was support for returning to the older system of limiting voting rights to men who owned land. In the Confederate view, they were not abandoning the principles of the United States. Instead, they were trying to replicate the original United States republic, which they believed held enslavement and white supremacy as steadfast, uncontested principles. McCurry notes the irony inherent in this view of the US as “a late proslavery nation launched at the high tide of commitment to abolition and the expansion of democracy” (83).