Politics in the Wartime South

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Politics in the Wartime South

Constitution. The Confederate Constitution differed in several significant ways from its model, the United States Constitution. Most notably, the charter of government reflected a determination to prevent state sovereignty from giving way to consolidation of powers in the central government. Attempting to avoid the means by which centralization had increased since 1788, the Confederate Constitution omitted clauses authorizing Congress to levy taxes and make expenditures to promote the general welfare of the people. Appropriations for internal improvements were limited to projects in navigable waterways and were required to recoup government outlays. State legislatures could impeach some officers of the general government, and although the constitution authorized a Supreme Court none was created by Congress, leaving state courts to dominate the interpretation of the constitution. The amendment process enabled only three states to call a constitutional convention, as compared to the three-fourths of all states required by the United States Constitution, and did not provide for Congress to propose amendments to the states. The Confederate drafters also adjusted the branches of government. Cabinet officers were permitted to sit in Congress, and the president, who was to serve for one six-year term, was provided with line-item veto power. Finally, the constitution acknowledged the centrality of slavery to the new nation. The document candidly used the word slave, which had been carefully left out of the United States Constitution. One much-debated clause barred the international slave trade, reflecting the interests of slave-exporting states of the upper South. Other clauses revisited recent controversies over slavery by providing a slave code for any Confederate territories and prohibiting Congress from passing any laws “denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves.”

Nationalism. The creation of the Confederate States of America involved not only the design of political institutions but the development of a politically charged culture. Confederate nationalism was promoted in schools, in churches, and in popular songs and literature. In this stimulation of a collective identity, Southerners recognized themselves as participants in a nation-building process. Popular music of the era included several Southern adaptations of “The Marseillaise,” which the French Revolution had made the universal anthem of nationalism. Similarly, Secretary of State Robert Toombs compared the Confederacy to the unification of Italy, observing that Southerners had responded to “reasons no less grave and valid than those which actuated the people of Sicily and Naples.” The most important model for Confederate nationalism was naturally the most familiar. Notwithstanding their modifications of the inherited structures of government, Southerners left no doubt that they regarded the Confederacy as the authentic heir to the legacy of the American Revolution. The Confederate seal featured an image of George Washington. Jefferson

Davis, inaugurated on Washington’s birthday in front of a statue of the Founding Father, devoted much of his inaugural address to the parallels between 1776 and 1861.

Mobilization. As in the Union, military frustration prompted the Confederate government to depart from its original plans for waging the war. The Peninsula invasion threatening Richmond in the spring of 1862 led to a dramatic expansion of central government powers. The Confederate Congress enacted the first conscription law in American history in April 1862, requiring able white males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five to serve in the military for three years. The Congress also authorized President Davis to declare martial law and suspend the writ of habeas corpus in areas under attack, although the legislature guarded these powers by extending them to Davis only for several limited periods that totaled sixteen months over the course of the war. One year later, the Confederacy resorted to taxation to finance its bid for independence. The measure particularly antagonized Southerners because Congress provided for a “tax in kind,” consisting of 10 percent of a farm family’s nonsubsistence agricultural produce, to compensate for the rapidly deteriorating value of Confederate currency. The three thousand agents of the Confederate government required to collect the tax served as vivid reminders that the Southern quest for national independence could not easily be reconciled with the desire to limit the powers of the central government.

Class Tensions. In addition to clashing with the principle of state sovereignty, Confederate nationalism deepened Southern divisions about democracy within the states. Secession had been led by the slaveholding class that comprised about one-fourth of white families and especially by the planters, customarily defined as owners of twenty or more slaves, who comprised about 10 percent of white Southerners. Several Confederate policies fueled the resentment of yeomen (landowning farmers who had few or no slaves) who felt that privileged Southerners did not share fairly in the burdens and sacrifices of the struggle. The “tax-in-kind” despised by yeomen farmers, for example, did not extend to wealth held in slaves. Most notoriously, when Congress raised the upper age limit of the conscription law from thirty-five to forty-five in September 1862, subjecting more household heads to the draft, it exempted one white male for every plantation with twenty or more slaves. Defended as necessary to maintain order on plantations, the law became a focal point for the observation that the conflict was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” To be sure, the same refrain echoed through the North, where one of the most violent riots in American history exploded in New York City in July 1863 upon implementation of a draft that exempted anyone who could afford to pay a $300 commutation fee. But in the South the reinforcement of class hierarchy was not merely a social and economic fact but an ideological principle. In several states secessionist leaders sought to use the fresh start of the Confederacy to redress what they perceived as the recent democratic excesses of the United States. The paradoxical relationship between this conservative impulse and the imperatives of war was best illustrated in Virginia, where the legislature was simultaneously presented in November 1861 with measures calling on soldiers to reenlist and eliminating their right to vote if they were not property owners.

Opposition to the War. Pockets of Southern resistance to secession existed from the outset of the war. A referendum held by residents in western Virginia in October 1861 approved the detachment of their counties from the Old Dominion, and the new state of West Virginia entered the Union in June 1863. East Tennessee was a bastion of Unionist sentiment that Confederate authorities vigorously but unsuccessfully sought to suppress. As the war lengthened and class divisions deepened, other antiwar centers developed in Arkansas, northern Alabama and Georgia, and especially in western North Carolina. After the battles of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, editor William W. Holden of the Raleigh North Carolina Standard became the leading Southern spokesman for the view that the costs of the Confederate war effort were too much for the implausible prospects of success. Holden proposed that North Carolina open its own peace negotiations with the federal government, and in 1864 he ran for governor on a peace platform. Although he was defeated in the summer election, his assessment gained additional supporters after the string of Confederate disasters that began with the fall of Atlanta. But the Southerners who reconsidered their commitment did not include Jefferson Davis. As Abraham Lincoln had not wavered in his promise of emancipation or his resolution to continue the war until the Union was restored, Davis refused to contemplate any sort of peace that did not include recognition of Southern independence. As a result, hopes for political negotiations to end the war remained futile.

THE CORNERSTONE OF THE CONFEDERACY

Confederate president Jefferson Davis avoided celebrations of slavery for fear of antagonizing world opinion, but Vice President Alexander H. Stevens did not hesitate to proclaim the peculiar institution “the cornerstone” of Southern nationalism: . . . Not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other—though last, not least: the new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relation to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the ‘rock upon which the old Union would split.’ He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men ofthat day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away.

Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, 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 moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Source: Alexander H. Stephens, “Slavery the Cornerstone of the Confederacy” (1861).

Factionalism. Like many emerging nations, the Confederacy was eager to present to the world an appearance of unity rather than acknowledging internal political divisions. Political parties accordingly were not organized, consistent with a longstanding notion that true patriotism did not admit of partisanship. In practice, however, the absence of parties contributed significantly to the bitter factionalism that characterized Confederate politics. In the North, Lincoln was able to use the party system to rally supporters and deflect critics. Republicans disagreed, often strenuously, but in the end they usually came together to retain control of the government against a Democratic challenge. Davis in contrast could not count on other political leaders to advance their self-interest by coming to his defense, and he could not easily draw policy lines that separated friends and foes of the administration. In the absence of the framework that the two-party system provided for identifying and discussing issues, political conflict in the Confederacy most often centered on Davis himself. The resulting personal bitterness pervading public life only reinforced Davis’s tendency to immerse himself in the details of administration rather than drawing upon the abilities of other Confederate leaders.