The Story of the Confederacy

Reinhard J. Dearing
Adjunct Professor
University of Southern Mississippi

    The Confederacy was a belated attempt to exercise the right of a state to withdraw from the United States of America.

    Its short life was lived in war – it was war, with all that war can mean of waste and destruction, of misery and anguish, but, too, with all that it can mean of shining gallantry, of steadfast devotion.  These the Confederacy had – but it met a spirit backed with greater power.  And so, at the end of four years of struggle as human and moving as men might make, it failed.

    With its failure the United States of America that we know was born. The South, the Northern Republicans said, rebelled.  To crush the “rebellion” the North wrought a revolution.  The old union of states federated together for specific and limited purposes died, to be succeeded by a new nation in which the states, North and South alike, have contentedly sunk from the sovereignty they so jealously maintained in 1787 to become little more than convenient administrative subdivisions of government. 

    The men who through the long hot summer of 1787, by conflict and compromise of ideas, hammered out the Constitution of the United States thought that they had created a Federal Union.  The men of the state conventions, which ratified this strange new form of government, with misgiving and some trepidation insisted upon being reassured on that point.  Hamilton, great advocate of the national idea, and Madison, more than any one man the draftsman of the Constitution, did so assure them through the columns of the Federalist, and the instrument was ratified.  But all that, by 1860, had been a long time ago.  The thirteen states had ratified an instrument which by the necessities of the case left open a great many questions for the answers of the future.  During seventy years new forces, new ties had been writing those answers.  Thirteen separate and individual sovereignties, although there had been no change in the letter of the organ of government, had in fact become a nation.

    It was against this new sense of nationhood, the very existence of which was scarcely suspected by the leaders in the secession movement, that the Confederacy fought.  The states which first seceded and formed the new government at Montgomery, persuaded themselves that their departure was of no real concern to the people of the Northern States, who would be at liberty to carry on the old government if it suited them. The Southerners remained traditionalists and conservatives. I would like to quote from James McPherson.  In his Battle Cry for Freedom, he made some very clear statements. 

On Values:        “…the south remained bound by traditional values and networks of family kinship, hierarchy, and patriarchy.  The North – along with a few countries of northwestern Europe – hurtled forward eagerly toward a future of industrial capitalism that many Southerners found distasteful if not frightening; the South remained proudly and even defiantly rooted in the past before 1861.”

On the Constitution:             Thus when secessionists protested that they were acting to preserve traditional rights and values, they were correct.   They fought to protect their constitutional liberties against the perceived Northern threat to overthrow them.  The South’s concept of republicanism had not changed in three-quarters of a century; the North’s had.  With complete sincerity the South fought to preserve its version of the republic of the founding fathers…”

 An entirely logical position – there were never better logicians than the early secession leaders – but it ran against a state of mind, the most stubborn sort of fact.  With many thousands in the North, devotion to the Union, and a Union of continental proportions, had passed beyond logic to become an emotion, nay, a religion. 

    This was a question that had to be settled.  It was a bedrock question, going to the very nature of the government. But that was not the first time that it had arisen, nor the only form in which it had appeared.  In 1798 fear of both the ideas and the military power projected by revolutionary France led President John Adams to push through Congress his ignominious Alien and Sedition Acts.  This did nearly break the states of Virginia and Kentucky out of the Union in protest.  Their insistence that the new acts were unconstitutional led them to the doctrine that some federal laws could be nullified by individual states -- a significant first step down the long road to the Civil War.  Less than fifty years before the Civil War secession had received serious discussion and considerable support in New England, because

of bitter resentment of the effect of the War of 1812 with Great Britain upon the commerce of that section.  Less than thirty years before, South Carolina’s attempt to nullify the operation of a tariff law in that state had sharply raised the question of secession. Only fifteen years before the Civil War, New England men had again advocated leaving the Union because of dissatisfaction with the annexation of Texas and the policy of the War with Mexico.  Unfortunately, today many historians emphasize slavery as the sole cause of the War.  That is a false assumption.  Slavery was one of multiple causes of the War between the States.  And to be perfectly honest slavery was viewed primarily in economic not racist terms. 

    However it was also viewed in political terms.  After all, the U.S. Constitution protected slavery and Southern politicians firmly believed in a strict interpretation of the Constitution, including the rights of the states.  The fundamental question of the relation of the states to the government they had created was the same each time, but each time a final answer was avoided.  Such questions as tariff duties and embargo acts might involve reason and principle and self-interest, but not even self-interest moves men strongly enough to make them seek the final answer to a question which can be answered finally only by war.  That requires an emotional base – moral indignation, passionate conviction of right on each side, rankling resentment of wrongs, stinging epithets taken to heart, flaming phrases of orators and editors. 

    The tremendous acclaim in the North for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the martyr’s crown for John Brown, with his insane scheme for making Virginia another San Domingo – these and a thousand lesser indications were taken by the sensitive South to show the attitude of the people of the nation toward them. The roots of secession and the Confederacy are to be found in this human resentment – an emotional impulsion to action a thousand times stronger than carefully reasoned constitutional arguments on the nature of the compact under which the states had entered the Union. It was, truly, an “irrepressible conflict” so long as no man knew whether, at the last, his final allegiance was due to his state or to the Federal Union of States.

    “I speak to Cobb,” said Lewis Cass, Secretary of State under Buchanan, “and he tells me he is a Georgian; to Floyd, and he tells me his a Virginian; to you, and you tell me you are a Carolinian.  I am not a Michigander; I am a citizen of the United States.” 

    Both sides were right.  Just a matter of difference of emphasis – but out of that difference came four years of war, a dozen years of bitter reconstruction and a new nation. 

    Therefore, to focus only on slavery and neglect the rest of the history of the antebellum South and its development since 1778, is wrong.  The issues of states rights, state sovereignty, and the 10^th Amendment to the Constitution dominate most of this development.  The Sectional Crisis did not begin in 1860; it began in 1778 – and it encompassed a variety of social, political and economic issues.  (I refer you to John R. Alden’s Fleming Lectures at L.S.U. and to Jesse T. Carpenter’s book The South as a Conscious Minority, among others.)

    To further explore what the Southerners fought for, please note that by 1863, many southern leaders (Lee, Longstreet, Cleburne, Benjamin, etc…) were willing to end slavery immediately in order to secure independence. In fact, Col. William Oates (of Gettysburg fame), Commander of the 15^th Alabama Infantry Regiment, wanted to free the slaves and give them the right to vote!  Therefore, I submit to you that Southern Independence not the retention of slavery, was the dominant motive for most southerners.  90% of Southerners did not even own slaves.  These men most certainly did not fight and die for a system they had no stake in.  

    The Emancipation Proclamation was issued for political and military reasons – to keep European nations from aiding the Confederacy and with the hope of inciting a slave rebellion in the South.  In fact, neither Lincoln, his senior generals, nor most of his Cabinet believed in Negro equality on any level. (General Grant did not free his slaves until the 13^th Amendment was passed.  It is interesting to note that General Lee and many other senior officers of the Confederate Army, didn’t own slaves.)

    It is also a fact that many southern blacks, both slave and free, supported the Confederate cause.  In 1861, ex-slave Frederick Douglass observed, “There are at the present moment, many colored men in the Confederate Army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and laborers, but as real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders and bullets in their pockets, ready to shoot down…and do all that soldiers may do to destroy the Federal government.”  In April 1861, a Petersburg, Virginia newspaper proposed “three cheers for the patriotic free Negroes of Lynchburg” after 70 blacks offered “to act in whatever capacity may be assigned to them” in defense of Virginia.  The State of Louisiana organized the first all black Confederate military unit.  The Louisiana Native Guard (C.S.A.) was composed of freemen of color with their own officers (most of whom were slave owners).  Horace Greeley, in pointing out some differences between the two warring armies said, “For more than two years, Negroes have been extensively employed in belligerent operations by the Confederacy.  They have been embodied and drilled as rebel soldiers and had paraded with white troops at a time when this would not have been tolerated in the armies of the Union.”  General Nathan Bedford Forrest had both slaves and freemen serving in units under his command.  After the war, General Forrest said of the black men who served under him “(T)hese boys stayed with me – and better Confederates did not live.” 

    Ultimately, in the words of Winston Churchill in his book A History of the English Speaking People, “the war was fought over complex political and constitutional questions.”  In simple language, the question was:  Who should be paramount in domestic affairs – the individual sovereign states or an all powerful central government? 

    The question to be decided being what it was, and men being what they are, it is difficult to see, even now, how that armed struggle called by the victors the War of the Rebellion, and by the losers the War between the States, could have been avoided. 

    The Confederacy lost and we now have an all powerful federal government. Not exactly what the Founding Fathers intended.  Former C.S.A. President Davis was both historian and prophet when he told the Mississippi legislature sixteen years after the war that “the contest is not over, the strife is not ended.  It has only entered upon a new and enlarged arena.”  One need only contemplate the status of the 10^th Amendment to the Constitution and look at the sprawling bureaucracy (and its accompanying regulations) of the Federal Government today, to see what 250,000 Confederate soldiers died to prevent. 

    For further reading, may I suggest The Land They Fought For, by Professor Clifford Dowdy;  M. E. Bradford’s Remembering Who We Are:  Observations of a Southern Conservative; Andrew Lytle’s From Eden to Babylon;  Richard Weaver’s The Southern Tradition at Bay; Jefferson Davis by Alan Tate; The Robert E. Lee Reader etd. by Stanley Horn;  The Confederate Republic by Prof. George Rable;  I’ll Take My Stand – The South and the Agrarian Tradition by Twelve Southerners (Robert Penn Warren, etc); North Against South by  Prof. Ludwell Johnson; The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience by Prof. Emory Thomas; The Story of the Confederacy by Robert Selph Henry; Look Away by William Davis; When In the Course of Human Events by Prof. Charles Adams; States Rights and Union 1776 – 1876 by Forrest McDonald; and Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War by Jeffrey Roger Hummel