Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 19:: Who were the Mississippi secessionists?

In the last post in this series, I discussed how Percy Rainwater in his essay An Analysis of the Secession Controversy in Mississippi, 1854-61 by Mississippi Valley Historical Review 24:1 (Jun., 1937) made clear the centrality of the slavery issue in the secession debate in the state of Mississippi.

That is heresy to the main Lost Cause narrative, which tries to minimize the role of slavery in secession, stressing instead abstract legal issues, or offenses to Southern Honor,or the difference between a Northern industrial economy and a Southern agricultural one. But Rainwater was put in the same situation as other Lost Cause advocates when they talk about the history leading up to the Civil War, they can't avoid talking about slavery. Even if they jump through hoops to argue that controversies over slavery weren't really over slavery.

One of the arguments he makes is that most slavewoners were cautious businessmen who were reluctant to embrace slavery:

From 1854 to 1861 agitation for secession in Mississippi increased with accelerated momentum. In the early stages of the renewed controversy, it was largely the active, restless, and politically ambitious element, represented by the lawyer-politician and the country editor, which incessantly rang the fire bells in order to arouse a not uneasy social order against the approaching and consuming blasts of abolitionism. Conservative men of property, desiring to be let alone that they might enjoy the fruits of their prosperity, not only held aloof but positively condemned the new agitation. But an equally loud and fanatical minority in the free states played, through the press and from the platform and the pulpit, quite unintentionally into the hands of the secession agitators in Mississippi, as elsewhere in the South.

As a historical description, this is fairly disingenuous on its face. All those named types - "the active, restless, and politically ambitious element, represented by the lawyer-politician and the country editor" - were very aware that the slaveowning planter class was the dominant social and political force in Mississippi. The notion that secession was somehow a demand of the common people against the planter class is, well, not very convincing.

This is a long-standing trope in the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause narrative in support of the post-Reconstruction Segregation 1.0 system. It was typical for white communities to blame lynchings or other racist violence against black people on the "rednecks out in the country." Certainly not the respectable white leaders of the town or city! "Redeemer" Mississippi Sen. L.Q.C. Lamar had his own version of this, giving moderate-sounding speech on North-South reconciliation in Congress, while agitating on the side of violent white supremacists back home in Mississippi. We saw an iteration of this in the 1950s and 1960s in the face of the Post-World War II civil rights movement, where business leaders tried to present themselves as the sensible moderates who disapproved of the "violent excesses" of the Klan rabble. Well, the businesspeople were at least probably less inclined to use the n-word.

Rainwater tosses out the Fanatics On Both Sides version of the run-up to the Civil War. But there were enough fanatics on one side to start a massive armed rebellion, seceding from the Union, seizing federal property, writing their own Constitution. I'm just sayin'.

Rainwater ties all this together with a version of yet another favorite segregationist revisionist view of history. If the secessionist rabble hadn't imposed treason and rebellion on their betters in the planter class, slavery would have had a better chance of surviving. Or, alternatively, it would have just faded away peacefully if those pushy, rude damnyankee fanatics hadn't been so obnoxious about the whole thing.

He does admit, though, in those speculations he is trying "to argue without the record."

Not exactly. The Republican program of halting the spread of slavery would have doomed the Peculiar Institution. And the power of federal patronage would have also given the Republicans a foothold to start building a party presence in the slave states.

The other possibility was unlikely. Because the Confederate defenders of slavery insisted on the superiority of slavery and were dead set on expanding it, not only geographically but even into industrial settings.

The latter is also a version of the eternal argument of the phony moderate, who claims to be in favor of some reform like desegregation, and praises the virtues of patience and gradualism. But their real ire is reserved for those who actively try to bring about the change. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter From Birmingham Jail" addressed just that kind of "moderate."