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

the same powers it had temporarily surrendered by means of a similar convention in 1787, when South Carolina ratified the federal Constitution. As for the possibility that the federal government might do as Andrew Jackson had done in 1832 and treat the secession as an armed insurrection, South Carolinians sniffed in contempt. South Carolina senator James Chesnut even offered to drink all the blood that would be shed in any war over the Union. From New Orleans, J. D. B. DeBow assured the readers of his Review that Northerners would turn out to fight each other more eagerly than they would fight the South over secession. In the North, “people have no opinions or objects in life in common. So soon as the war with the South is concluded, it is probable she will be dismembered and split up into three or four independent states or nations.”74

South Carolina’s boldness carried the other states of the Deep South before it. Mississippi passed its own ordinance of secession on January 9, 1861, with Florida adopting a secession ordinance the next day, Alabama the day after that, and Georgia on January 19. On January 26, Louisiana followed suit, and Texas joined them on February 1. In less than the short space between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration, seven states had declared their union with the United States dissolved, convinced not only that the political situation of the South required disunion but also that the legal and cultural situation of the Union itself permitted it. The Augusta Constitutionalist explained that “the difference between North and South” had been “growing more marked for years, and the mutual repulsion more radical, until not a single sympathy is left between the dominant influences in each section.” Now that the national government has fallen into the control of the Republicans, “all the powers of a Government which has so long sheltered” the South “will be turned to its destruction. The only hope for its preservation, therefore, is out of the Union.”75

Yet the secessionists were not nearly as sure of themselves as their pronouncements implied. “A new confederacy, if the present Union be dissolved, it must be conceded, is a necessity,” advised the New Orleans Daily Picayune even before South Carolina had seceded. “The history of the world proves the failure of governments embracing very small communities.” The brave talk about the irreconcilable differences of North and South and the painlessness of secession notwithstanding, the South Carolinians immediately began casting around for support from their fellow Southerners. It was impossible to be sure how the federal government would actually respond; what was more, the elections of delegates to the various state secession conventions had given an uncertain sound to the enthusiasm of the Southern people for the secession movement. The Mississippi secession convention had voted strongly for secession but had also passed a resolution against reopening the African slave trade; the Alabama convention voted for secession by a bare majority of eight; in Georgia, it took ballot rigging by the secessionist governor, Joseph Brown, to ensure that enough pro-secession delegates would be elected to the secession convention. Standing alone, the seceding states might not be able to contain the forces they themselves had set loose, and as Hugh Lawson Clay of Alabama warned, something might “excite the people of N. Ala. to rebellion vs. the State and that we will have a civil war in our midst.” Most significant of all, the upper South and the border states were sitting tight. Virginia, Arkansas, and Missouri each called secession conventions, only to have secession resolutions go down to defeat (in Virginia by a two-to-one margin), while North Carolina and Tennessee voted to call no secession convention at all.76

So on December 31, 1860, in an effort to provide security for the future of the secession movement, the South Carolina secession convention elected commissioners to meet with commissioners from the other seceding states with a view toward organizing a cooperative mutual government. On January 3, the commissioners met and discussed their situation, and concluded their deliberations with a call for a general convention of all the seceding states to meet at Montgomery, Alabama, in one month’s time to form a provisional Southern government. The Montgomery convention, assembling on February 4, 1861, took just three days to create a new joint government for the Southern states. They adopted a new constitution, more or less based on the federal Constitution, but adding to the preamble the cautious reminder that “each State” was “acting in its sovereign and independent character.” They chose as the new government’s title (again, to underscore that it was a federation of independent powers and not a national union) the Confederate States of America. Two days later, the convention elected a president for the new Confederacy, the former West Point cadet, secretary of war, and senator from Mississippi, Jefferson Davis. Thus, in short order was born a Southern slave republic—but not without an ill-concealed case of nerves.77

The worries of the Confederates, however, were nothing compared to the woes of President James Buchanan, who became, in the lame-duck months of his unhappy presidency, the closest thing to an American Job. “Probably the unhappiest man, this day, within the whole limits of the Union, is James Buchanan, the President of these nearly disunited States,” jeered the New Orleans Daily Crescent. “In common with nine-tenths of the people of the North, he has been accustomed to regard the threats of the South as mere idle talk, which really amounted to nothing. He finds out, now, how much mistaken he is.” Wearied to death of the incessant din in Congress and in his own cabinet, Buchanan gradually lost whatever capacity he had to lay out a consistent plan of action and then follow it to the finish.

He detested the Southern disunionists and utterly repudiated any legal right to secession from the Union. In his annual message to Congress on December 3, 1860, Buchanan warned the South that the Union was more than a “mere voluntary