Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 5: South Carolina's secession plea to Viriginia, 1860

The Hon. C.G. Memminger of South Carolina

One of the key arguments of Lost Cause pseudohistory is that slavery had nothing to do with the motivation of the Southern slave states to secede from the Union in 1860-61. The alleged fanaticism of abolitionists is held to blame for part of the problem. But in the Lost Cause version, even they were surely not motivated by real sympathy for the slaves but rather by their own perverse desire to subjugate the white people of the South.

What the Rebel leaders were saying leading up to secession and civil war was something very different. De Bow's Review, the leading Southern agricultural and opinion journal, in its December 1890 number presented the argument on behalf of the state of South Carolina by "the Hon C.G. Memminger" (Christopher Gustavus Memminger) to the Virginia state legislature, under the title "The South Carolina Mission to Viginia". Memminger (1803-1888) was a German immigrant who served as Secretary of the Treasury of the Confederate States of America from 1861 to 1864.

Memminger's argument had been presented earlier, on January 19, 1860, before the 1860 Presidential election was underway. The Honorable Gentleman was calling for Virginia to join South Carolina in calling for a convention of Southern state to consider secession. More specifically, as the Honorable Gentlement quoted from the authorizing resolution of the South Carolina legislature, "To request a conference of the slaveholding States, and the apointment of deputies or commissioners to the same on the part of Virginia." (my emphasis)

Memminger opens his plea by referring to a moment of solidarity between the two states a decade and more earlier, referring to 1851:

Four years before [1847], both States passed resolutions that they would not submit to the Wilmot Proviso [barring slavery in territory acquired from Mexico during the Mexican War]. In 1849 virigina had added to her declaration of 1847, that she would also resist the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. South Carolina concurred entirely in the sentiments of Virginia, and prepared to defend the position which had been taken, and which she supposed was the common position of the whole South.

The compromise measures adopted by Congress in 1850, so far from being satisfactory, in her judgment aggravated the injury. [my emphasis]

The reference here is to the Compromise of 1850 which further extended slavery in the United States. It also included passage of the odious Fugitive Slave Act, which required citizens of the free states under penalty of heavy fines to participate in posses to hunt down the human property that regularly escaped from the slave states. That Act notably overrode any consideration of "states rights", which the slaveowners were always willing to do in defense of the Peculiar Institution, slavery.

She regarded the admission of California, with a constitution prohibiting slavery, as in effect an enactment of the Wilmot Proviso; and the slave trade in the District of Columbia had been expressly probilited by one of the compromise acts of Congress. With these views, South Carolina proceeded to arm her people, and made the requisite arrangements for calling a convention to secede from the Union, or to adopt such other measures as the safety and welfare of the States might require. [my emphasis]

South Carolina secession agitation in the early 1850s, he said, was based on those two things: the admission of California to the Union as a free state, and the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, where it was a notorious disgrace to the country, taking place as it did within easy view of diplomatic representatives from all over the world. Those were the two things that drove the South Carolina legislature to consider secession a decade earlier.

Memminger goes on to recite the history of grievances of the South against the North. They include:

• The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 during the Articles of Confederation days prohibiting slavery in that portion of the country. Memminger recalls that at one point in the Congressionally appointed committee that drafted the orindance,there was a vote to strike out the prohibition on slavery with "every Southern State and every Southern delegate, except Mr. Jefferson, voting for striking out".

• The Nullification Controversy of 1833, in which South Carolina foolishly pursued a confrontation with President Andrew Jackson over the state's attempt to nullify a federal tarriff law within South Carolina. Although the tariff was nominally the topic of dispute, the ringleader of the action, John C. Calhoun, clearly understood it as a preliminary fight over the ability of slave states to defend slavery against federal action.

• The Louisiana Purchase of 1803. "The territory acquired was all slaveholding", Memminger explained, overstating the case extravagently. But more free states than slave states had emerged from that vast territory.

• The Missouri Compromise - not the compromise itself, but the fact that some representatives of the free states had objected to admitting Missouri as a slave state.

• The petition controversy in Congress beginning in 1835, when Congressman John Quincy Adams led the fight for Congress to simply formally acknowledge anti-slavery petitions being submitted to Congress by abolitionists, thus highlighting the increasing intransigence on the part of slaveowners to even debating their Peculiar Instistution. Stating the obvious as though he were revealing some dark secret, Memminger explain to the Virginia legislators that the aim of those anti-slavery petitions was to "adjust [apply] a lever which might reacht he institution of slavery within the States". Not only that: "such was distinctly understood to be the design of the movement"! Memminger declares the proper position for Congress to have taken against such a devious plan: "Stern rebuke, and unyielding rsistance, should have been offerd by Congress to all these attempts; and such was the course advised by Southern statesmen."

• The division of the Christian denominations into Northern and Southern branches. Memminger blames the damnyankees for this, though the Horable Gentlemen wouldn't stoop to such a vulgar term in addressing the Virginia legislators: "Inflamed with zeal, by imaginary wrong, and assuming as an article of the faith, that slavery was a sin, they denounced their brethren of the South as unworthy of meeting with them at the table of their common Maker." This was part of "the tidal wave of persecution" assailing the South from the North, the Honorable Gentleman whined, "and at each flow it surges higher and higer upon the South, without any interval of ebb."

• Yankees and foreigners griped about admitting Texas as a slave state, although that is what was done. The very fact that leading political figures like the Democrat Martin Van Buren and the Whig Henry Clay (Senator from Kentucky, a slave state) had opposed annexing Texas remained as a grievance in Memminger's presentation. Even though the "good sense of the country" which was "assisted by that appetite for territory which seems to belong to the Anglo-Saxon race" got Texas into the Union as a slave state.

• The Wilmot Proviso, which would have banned slavery in territory acquired from Mexico during the Mexican War, even though the Senate blocked its enactment into law.

• The settlement of Kansas territory by an anti-slavery majority: "It has ended in the complete delivery of Kansas to the North", in this case anti-slavery being synonymous with "the North" and pro-slavery with "the South". Even worse, he declares in outrage that "even the territorial legislature of Nebraska has ventured to pass an act excluding slavery from that territory. At every point, therefore, we are fairly at bay."

• The "outrage at Harper's Ferry", i.e., John Brown's raid of 1859, which Memminger declared was an "attempt to involve her [Virginia] in the horrors of servile and civil war". Fear of "servile insurrection" - slave uprising - had tormented the fears of white Southerners for decades. Memminger melodramatically expounds on that event at length.

Only one of those grievances, the Nullification Controversy of 1833, had nothing overtly to do with slavery. And even with that one, slavery was the main underlying issue. It's noteworthy that in 1860, the Honorable Gentleman had to go back 27 years to find such a North-South controversy that hadn't been overtly about slavery.

Not that he was particularly trying to do so. Lost Cause advocates today try hard, sometimes with notable imagination (of the pseudohistorical brand), to come up with such grievances. But the "fire-eaters" (secessionists) of 1860 knew very well that slavery was the issue over which secession was demanded. And they also knew that defense of slavery was the best marketing tool to persuade others to go along with them on secession.

There was another issue that occurred during Andrew Jackson first Presidential term, his most discreditable action as President, though it was a very popular one, on which there was a clear sectional alignment of North against South. The sectional alignment was even more pronounced than on the Nullification Controversy. That was the Indian Removal Act. And that one was even less about slavery than the Nullification Controversy.

But secessionists then and neo-Confederates now avoid using that example. Because in that case the Southern states backed Jackson's use of federal powers to override any consideration of "states rights", the legal fig leaf over the claimed right of secession. Also, the issue of Jackson's involvement with both issues was touchy for secessionists. Jackson's Party, the Democratic Party, had by 1860 clearly become the main vehicle for the politics of the Slave Power. And the memory of Jackson's Presidency, or at least a version of it, was still revered by many Southerners. So it was not convenient in invoking the Nullification Controversy as a grievance against the North to remind their audiences that Jackson had been a Southern President and a slaveowner who nevertheless put American patriotism and devotion to democratic nationalism above the defense of slavery.

It would have been even less convenient to remind people that in the Indian Removal Act, Southerners had backed the use of federal power over "states rights" to get what the South wanted, just as they had been doing in the previous decade since 1850 in using federal authority to defend slavery.

Tags: andrew jackson, christopher gustavus memminger, confederate heritage month 2009, old hickory, slavery, us civil war