Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

desk. Between Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga, it was now beginning to be a good question in Confederate minds whether there was much of a war left to win.

THE PROBLEM OF THE CONFEDERATE NATION

For many Southerners, the secession of the southern states from the Union was the ultimate solution to the political and economic problems that confronted them inside the Union. On the other hand, it was also true that, like the soldiers in their armies, the Southern people were not always of one mind about which of those problems was the most important. For the Georgia secession convention, secession was an act of racial revolution, a necessary reconstruction of the republican ideology along racial lines so as to secure the existence of “a white man’s Republic” and keep African American slaves firmly in their place as slaves. Alexander H. Stephens told an enthusiastic audience in Savannah in 1861 that “our Confederacy is founded upon … the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man. That slavery—subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. Thus our new government is the first in the history of the world, based upon this great physical and moral truth.” One lonely Georgia Unionist was shocked to find how strongly Southern women agreed with Stephens. “I had rather every one of my children should be laid out on the cooling board,” snorted one, “than to have Yankees get my niggers.” One Georgian, interviewed in the 1930s after he had spent a lifetime drifting from one poorly paid farm job after another, still felt that “I’d rather git killed than have these niggers freed and claimin’ they’s as good as I is.” In the delirium of the hour, recalled John Singleton Mosby, “we all forgot our Union principles in our sympathy with the pro-slavery cause, and rushed to the field of Mars.”71

Other Southerners pulled shy of justifying secession from the Union solely for the sake of protecting slavery. Even among the elite of the planter class, there remained an acute sense of embarrassment over slavery as a necessary but unpleasant economic necessity. Robert E. Lee claimed after the war that he had seen “the necessity at first of… a proclamation of gradual emancipation and the use of negroes as soldiers.” Instead, Southerners such as Edward A. Pollard spoke about the preservation of a Romantic agrarianism, a culture of leisured and independent agriculture that was standing deliberately aloof from the hard-handed industrial money grubbing of the North. “No one can read aright the history of America,” said Pollard, the editor of the Richmond Examiner, “unless in the light of a North and a South: two political aliens in a Union imperfectly defined as a confederation of states.” The North, envious of the South’s “higher sentimentalism, and its superior refinements of scholarship and manners,” chose to divert attention away from its real animosity toward Southern culture “in an attack upon slavery,” but this was “nothing more than a convenient ground of dispute between two parties, who represented not two moral theories, but hostile sections and opposite civilizations.” In that light, it was the North that represented revolution against the past, and secession was the South’s cultural antidote to it.72

Then there were those for whom the basic justification for secession arose from neither slavery nor culture but from the more practical considerations of profits and politics. Southerners such as Alabama governor John Gill Shorter argued that for too long, Northern politicians and bankers had been fattening themselves off the tariffs they charged on the imports Southerners needed and the cotton Southerners consigned to their commission houses. Dissolving the Union, declared Shorter, would result in “deliverance, full and unrestricted, from all commercial dependence upon, as well as from all social and political complicity with, a people who appreciate neither the value of liberty nor the sanctity of compacts.” Once independent, the Southern states could solve the tariff problem for themselves, and swing firmly into the great network of transatlantic free-trade that was centered on the British textile economy.73 Henry L. Benning of Georgia was sure that

the South would gain by a separation from the North, for [by] the mere act of separation all these drains would stop running, and the golden waters be retained within her own borders. And the grand option would be presented to her of adopting free trade, by which her consumers would gain eighty millions a year clear money in the consequent lower price at which they could purchase their goods or a system of protection to her own mechanics and artisans and manufactures by which they would soon come to rival the best in the world.74

Or else, in a similar vein, Southerners simply complained that the Union they had played so large a role in creating in the eighteenth century was no longer listening to their concerns. Northerners “know that the South is the main prop and support of the Federal system,” declared the New Orleans Daily Crescent in January 1861. “They know that it is Southern productions that constitute the surplus wealth of the nation, and enables us to import so largely from other countries.” Knowing that, “they know that they can plunder and pillage the South, as long as they are in the same Union with us, by other means, such as fishing bounties, navigation laws, robberies of the public ands, and every other possible mode of injustice and peculation.” On those terms, it was high time for the Southern states to reclaim their individual sovereignty as states, assert the supremacy of “states’ rights,” and resume an independent status in which they could be sure of putting their own affairs first.75

But the southern states were not permitted the luxury of a peaceful and uncontested separation from the Union. So Southerners found themselves compelled to do two things that, as it turned out, flew straight in the face of the principles they held so dear. First, in the interests of survival, the Southern states were forced to