Colin Woodard (35 page)

Yankee politicians advocated the use of force to prevent the Deep South from seceding and represented the only national caucus to do so prior to the South Carolinian attack on Fort Sumter. During the war Yankeedom was the center of the Union cause, contributing the lion's share of troops, arms, and materiel, including the most decorated black regiment in the Union Army, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry.

 

There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the Civil War to defend slavery, and its leaders made no secret of this motive. Slavery, they argued ad nauseam, was the foundation for a virtuous, biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states. When nineteenth-century Deep Southerners spoke of defending their “traditions,” “heritage,” and “way of life,” they proudly identified the enslavement of others as the centerpiece of all three. Indeed, many of their leaders even argued that all lower-class people should be enslaved, regardless of race, for their own good.

In response to Yankee and Midland abolitionists, the Deep South's leaders developed an elaborate defense for human bondage. James Henry Hammond, former governor of South Carolina, published a seminal book arguing that enslaved laborers were happier, fitter, and better looked after than their “free” counterparts in Britain and the North, who were ruthlessly exploited by industrial capitalists. Free societies were therefore unstable, as there was always a danger that the exploited would rise up, creating “a fearful crisis in Republican institutions.” Slaves, by contrast, were kept in their place by violent means and denied the right to vote, resist, or testify, ensuring the “foundation of every well-designed and durable” republic. Enslavement of the white working class would be, in his words, “a most glorious act of emancipation.” Jefferson's notion that “all men are created equal,” he wrote, was “ridiculously absurd.” In the Deep Southern tradition, Hammond's republic was modeled on those of ancient Greece and Rome, featuring rights and democracy for the elite, slavery and submission for inferiors. It was sanctioned by the Christian God, whose son never denounced the practice in his documented teachings. It was a perfect aristocratic republic, one that should be a model for the world.
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Hammond mocked his Puritan critics as “learned old maids” who liked to “linger with such an insatiable relish” on bizarre and pornographic fantasies of masters raping slaves. The “proportion” of mulattos in the Deep South, he argued, was vanishingly small, and could be accounted for by the presence of Yankee perverts in the region's larger towns. He called the sexual charges—an existential threat to the Deep South's racially based caste system—“ridiculously false,” the product of “a game played too often on Tourists in this country.” But the charges were true, as Hammond well knew. Scholars later discovered in his private papers that in 1839 Hammond had purchased an eighteen-year-old slave and her twoyear-old daughter, commencing sexual relationships first with the mother and later with the daughter, and sharing both with his son. His wife—Hammond noted she could not satisfy “his appetites”—eventually learned of the affairs and left the household for many years. The children and/or grandchildren sired by the enslaved mother and daughter were kept on the estate, because Hammond could not tolerate the idea that “any of my children or possible children [would be] slaves of strangers. Slavery
in the family
will be their happiest earthly condition.”
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The planters celebrated slavery because it ensured the stability and perpetuation of a republican aristocracy. “The planters are a genuine aristocracy, who cultivate themselves in a leisure founded on slavery,”
London Times
correspondent William Russell reported from South Carolina on the eve of war. “The admiration for monarchical institutions on the English model, for privileged classes and for a landed aristocracy and gentry is undisguised and apparently genuine.” One planter told Russell: “If we could only get one of the Royal race of England to rule over us, we should be content.” Many others expressed regret for the revolution, noting they “would go back tomorrow if they could.”
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The planters' loathing of Yankees startled outsiders. “South Carolina, I am told, was founded by gentlemen, [not by] witch-burning Puritans, by cruel persecuting fanatics who implanted in the north . . . [and her] newlyborn colonies all the ferocity, bloodthirstiness, and rabid intolerance of the Inquisition,” Russell reported. “There is nothing in all the dark caves of human passion so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees,” he continued. “New England is to [them] the incarnation of moral and political wickedness and social corruption . . . the source of everything which South Carolina hates.” Another planter told him that if the
Mayflower
had sunk, “we should never have been driven to these extremes.”
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Most people in the South shared the Deep Southerners' credo of white supremacy and their distrust of Yankees, but many disagreed with their ideal of an aristocratic republic. Before the 1860 election the Democratic Party split over slavery at its annual convention, with South Carolina's delegates leading their Deep Southern colleagues out of the convention hall. (“Slavery is our King; Slavery is our truth; Slavery is our divine right,” planter William Preston explained in his parting speech.) They were joined only by the Tidewater-dominated Maryland and Delaware delegations; Borderlander and northern delegations (most representing Catholic immigrants) remained in their places. Across “the South” there was considerable dissent, which broke not on state, class, or occupational lines but on ethnoregional ones. Appalachian sections—whether in northern Alabama, eastern Tennessee, or northeastern Texas—resisted secession. Deep Southern–settled ones—southern Alabama, western Tennessee, Gulf Coast Texas—were enthusiastically in favor of it. The Texas struggle pit South Carolinian Louis Wigfall against Borderlanders John Regan and Sam Houston. In Mississippi, Kentucky Borderlander James Alcorn led resistance to radical secessionist politicos under another South Carolinian native, Albert Gallatin Brown. The richest planters in Louisiana were the most ardent Unionists; they were not Deep Southerners but rather members of the New French enclave around New Orleans. (“New Orleans is almost Free Soil in its opinions,” one observer remarked. “Creoles . . . cannot be made to comprehend their danger until their Negroes are being taken from their fields.”) Running for the Mississippi senate in 1850, Deep Southerner (and future Confederate president) Jefferson Davis was rejected by the Appalachian-settled north of the state, which supported his rival, Knoxville native Roger Barton. By 1860 Appalachian districts in the Gulf States had elected Unionist representatives, who clashed with their lowland counterparts.
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Deep Southerners, where they were allowed to vote, overwhelmingly cast their ballots for the hard-line secessionist John C. Breckinridge. (So did South Carolina's legislators, who did not deign to grant the populace a role in choosing their chief executive.) Breckinridge won every state under Deep Southern control, while moderates like John Bell and Stephen Douglas won only a scattering of counties, most of them around Atlanta, a city with a large number of residents from outside the region. Lincoln did not even appear on the ballot in Deep Southern–controlled states.

After Lincoln's victory, South Carolina was the first to secede from the Union. The only states to join it prior to Lincoln's inauguration were those controlled by Deep Southerners: Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. On February 8, 1861, this Deep Southern coalition met in Alabama to form a new government. Tidewater and Appalachian states did not join them—preferring, as we will see, to form a confederation of their own.

Had Deep Southerners not started attacking federal post offices, mints, customs vessels, arsenals, and military bases in April 1861, they very well might have negotiated a peaceful secession from the Union. Indeed, prior to the South Carolinian militia's assault of Fort Sumter, Yankeedom was isolated, lacking a single national ally in its desire to put down the Deep Southern rebellion by force. President Lincoln pledged not to provoke open warfare, even as he declined to surrender U.S. military bases in the region. When Fort Sumter, which guarded Charleston's harbor, ran low on supplies, Lincoln took a cautious approach: he sent food but not weapons and ammunition, and informed South Carolina in advance. If the Deep Southern Confederates attacked the fort or relief shipment, they stood to alienate supporters of a negotiated settlement in Appalachia, the Midlands, and New Netherland, a fact well known within the Confederate government. “There will be no compromise with Secession if war is forced upon the north,” Confederate secretary of state Richard Lathers warned President Davis. “The first armed demonstration against the integrity of the Union or the dignity of the flag will find these antagonistic partisans enrolled in the same patriotic ranks for the defense of both [and] bring every man at the North, irrespective of his party or sectional affiliations, to the support of the government and the flag of his country.” Davis, confident that the three aforementioned nations would side with the Confederacy in time of war, ignored Lathers's advice. It would prove one of the worst miscalculations in North American history.
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Prior to the attack on Fort Sumter, New Netherland was eagerly supportive of the Deep South's position. Recall that New Netherland had introduced the continent to slavery and relied on slave labor right into the early nineteenth century. In 1790 the region's farming counties—Kings, Queens, and Richmond—had a higher proportion of white slaveholding families than South Carolina. Tolerance—not morality—was at the core of its culture, including tolerance for slaveholding, and left to its own devices, it probably never would have banned the practice. Unfortunately for New Netherlanders, by the nineteenth century they had lost control of New York state government to the Yankees, who by 1827 had eliminated slavery. (New Netherlanders clung to power narrowly in New Jersey, where there were still seventy-five enslaved people at midcentury.) But while the state as a whole was abolitionist, its biggest metropolis was not. Runaway slaves and free blacks were constantly being kidnapped by New York City's many “Blackbirders,” slave-catching bounty hunters who deported their captures to the plantations. The city's merchants and bankers had extensive ties with Deep Southern and Tidewater slave lords, and were loath to see them disrupted. As the local
Evening Post
reported in 1860, “The City of New York belongs almost as much to the South as to the North.”
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In the 1860 election every single county in New Netherland went for Lincoln's opponent, Stephen Douglas, including northern New Jersey, western Long Island, and the southern Hudson Valley. In the aftermath, most New Netherlanders wanted to see the Confederate states leave the Union in peace. Some—including their senior political leadership—advocated seizing the opportunity to secede themselves to form an independent city-state modeled on the Hanseatic League, a collection of free cities in Germany. “While other parts of our state have unfortunately been imbued with the fanatical spirit which actuates a portion of the people of New England,” Mayor Fernando Wood told the city council after South Carolina's secession, the city had not “participated in the warfare upon [the slave state's] constitutional rights or their domestic institutions.” The city, he continued, “may have more cause of apprehension from our own State than from external dangers” and should escape “this odious and oppressive connection” by leaving the United States and, together with its suburbs on Long Island, becoming an independent, low-tax city-state. The proposal had the support of prominent bankers and merchants, at least one of the city's Democratic congressmen, and at least three of its newspapers. A fourth, the influential
New York Herald
, published details of the governmental structure of Hanseatic city-states “for a better understanding” of how an independent New York City might organize itself. Had the Deep Southerners not attacked Fort Sumter, New Netherland might conceivably have gained its independence as well.
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In the run-up to the war, New Netherland's six U.S congressmen had voted with their Deep Southern counterparts on most important issues—the only New York representatives to do so. After South Carolina's secession, Congressman Daniel Stickles continued to support the Deep South, telling his colleagues at the U.S. Capitol that “no man will ever pass the boundaries of the city of New York for the purpose of waging war against any state of this Union.” The city, he added, “will never consent to remain an appendage and a slave of a Puritan province.”

The attack on Fort Sumter changed opinion overnight. As Lathers had predicted, New Netherland sections of both New York and New Jersey erupted in extreme U.S. patriotism. Mayor Wood, Congressman Stickles, the New York Chamber of Commerce, and the
Herald
immediately rallied to Lincoln and the Union. “The attack on Fort Sumter has made the North a unit,” Stickles wrote the federal secretary of war. “We are at war with a foreign power.” He himself would raise volunteer regiments and lead them into battle against the Confederates.
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Despite a long history of abolitionist sentiment, the Midlands had been ambivalent about Southern secession prior to the attack on Sumter. The Quaker/Anabaptist commitment to pacifism trumped moral qualms about slavery. Newspapers and politicians from Midland areas of Pennsylvania advocated allowing the Deep South to secede peacefully. Midland-controlled northern Delaware found itself at odds with the Tidewater-dominated south of the state, with some fearing violence might break out between the sections. Midland southern New Jersey had no intention of joining a slave-trading Gotham city-state, even if northern Jersey did.