Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 7: South Carolina's Declaration of Secession

The last two days' posts discussed a presentation by the Hon. Christopher Gustavus Memminger of South Carolina to the Virginia legislature early in 1860 cataloguing the grievances of the South against the free states.

The Honorable Gentleman later in 1860 a key player in the South Carolina secession. The Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union was adopted by a secessionist state convention on 12/24/1860. It spells out the state's motivation for secession along the same lines as his speech to the Virginia legislature did 11 months earlier.

The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. [my emphasis]

The reference here is to laws passed by various free states to impede the enforcement of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: South Carolina justified its secession on the grounds that free states were asserting states rights to impede the national government in its task of defending slavery.

In many of these States the fugitive [slave] is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia [accused supporters of John Brown]. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.

The ends for which the Constitution was framed are declared by itself to be "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."

These ends it endeavored to accomplish by a Federal Government, in which each State was recognized as an equal, and had separate control over its own institutions. The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening [sic] them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor escaped slaves].

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions [slavery]; and have denied the rights of property [in human beings] established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign [remove] the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States [Abraham Lincoln], whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens [African-Americans]; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

On the 4th day of March next, this party [Lincoln's Republicans] will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States. [my emphasis]

Of course, Lincoln at the Republicans had no intention of waging a "war against slavery" in the states where it existed. That was just a lie.

Contemporary documents like this show many times over how ridiculous it is for advocates of the Lost Cause dogma to claim that the Confederate states seceded from the Union not over slavery but over the cause of states rights. As South Carolina's declaration shows, slavery was not only the cause of that state's secession. But a large part of their pro-slavery litany of grievances had to do with free states asserting "states rights" against slavery.

If one reads the South Carolina declaration closely, it's pretty clear from the passage just quoted that it takes the position that it was against the meaning of the US Constitution in the Slave Power's reading of it for any state to outlaw slavery within its own borders: those states "have denied the rights of property [in slaves] established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution."

It also contains a protest based on the Supreme Court's atrocious Dred Scott decision when they complain that free states have been "elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens". The Dred Scott decision had held that African-Americans had no rights under the Constitution that whites were bound to respect.

Tags: christopher gustavus memminger, confederate heritage month 2009, slavery,south carolina, us civil war

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 6: Fears and assumptions, 1860

Runaway slave, 1837

We looked back to 1860 in yesterday's post to a message by the Honorable C.G. Memminger (Christopher Gustavus Memminger) on behalf of the South Carolina legislature to the Virginia legislature in 1860, encouraging them to join South Carolina in convening a Southern Convention in the event of Abraham Lincoln's election as President. His remarks were published in a post-election issue of the influential Southern journal, De Bow's Review Nov 1860, under the title "The South Carolina Mission to Viginia".

John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, even though it was a failure as a military operation and as a political operation in the sense that it was intended, set off real panic among Southerners. It can be hard to know in any individual case whether a particular speaker or writer believes his own claims. But the panic was widespread and real.

The Hon. C.G. Memminger was more than willing to fan the flames. And his language about Harper's Ferry and its implications offer some real insight into the fevered, paranoid defensive frenzy into which many Southerners were working themselves in 1859-60.

In the following passage, the Honorable Gentleman cites two events that pro-slavery agitators linked in their minds and their propaganda. One was Brown's Harper's Ferry raid and the aftermath. The other was the revelation that several leading Republicans in 1859 had decided to distribute excerpt's from the anti-slavery book by Hinton Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How To Meet It (1857). Memminger refers here to a controversy then very familiar, in which the Democrats had blocked the election of Republican Congressman John Sherman to the Speakership of the House of Representatives for the Session that began in December 1859, because Sherman had specifically endorse Helper's book. The Honorable Gentleman complains bitterly that their Northern enemies had refused to denounce John Brown, although leading Republicans politics had been denouncing him all over the place:

In our country, so far from there being any proper indication of disavowal [of Brown], the indications are the other way. Elections have taken place at the North since the Harper's Ferry invasion, in which the public sentiment has been exhibited. Those who maintain the abolition views have proved stronger than they ever were before. In New-York they have triumphed over the other parties combined together; and in Boston, notwithstanding an attempt to stay the tide, the same result has followed. In Congress, the same lamentable exhibition is afforded. More than one hundred members prefer to keep the government disorganized, rather than abandon a candidate whose recommendation of a book inviting a combined effort to introduce anarchy and servile war [slave insurrection] at the South, makes him obnoxious to the South: and of these some sixty have signed a recommendation of the same book; and there they stand, and have stood for more than six weeks, with unbroken front, refusing any kind of concessions to the outraged feelings of the South.

Although De Bow's Review doesn't give the actual date, Memminger delivered his message to a joint session of the Virginia legislature on January 19, 1860.

This undated paper by David Brown of Sheffied University, "We have whipped out Sherman and the Helperites": Hinton Rowan Helper, the Speakership Contest, and the Origins of the American Civil War, gives some background on the controversy over John Sherman's candidacy for the Speakership and the Helper book and on how the Harper's Ferry raid and the Republicans' support of the Helper book were so closely related in the fears of pro-slavery Southerners. Brown's paper as of this writing gives a misleading impression of Helper's phrase in the book about waging an "exterminating war" against slavery. It's clear he is speaking about exterminating the institution of slavery, not the slaveowners themselves.

Defenders of slavery were desperately afraid of two things, slave revolts and anti-slavery sentiment among Southern whites. Freedom of speech and the press for whites in large parts of the South had ceased to exist on the issue of slavery and everything touching it. Not only were abolitionist articles or books not allowed to be published or sold. But overt critics of slavery were persecuted harshly by both nominally legal and blatantly illegal means.

Fear of slave revolts, though largely unrealistic given the particular conditions prevailing in the South, had become endemic to the slave system. By compelling non-slaveowning whites to take part in regular "slave patrols", they were also trained in fear and hostility toward slaves. It was one method among others that the slaveowners used to try to maintain practical solidarity between slaveowners and non-slaveowning whites.

Brown's raid had sent many Southerners into a frenzy over both worries, slave revolts and anti-slavery white Southerners. The Honorable Gentleman's account of the intentions of John Brown's guerrilla group was factually false, but nevertheless revealing about the fears of many white Southerners. He described Brown's mission as follows. Reciting the glorious history of the state of Virginia and its contributions to America, he said:

... yet all this could not preserve her [Virginia] from the invasion of her soil, the murder of her citizens, and the attempt to involved her in the horrors of servile and civil war. That very North, to whom she had surrendered a territorial empire - who had grown great through her generous confidence - sent forth the assassins, furnished them with arms and money, and would fain rescue them from the infamy and punishment due to crimes so atrocious.

To estimate aright the character of the outrage at Harper's Ferry, we must realize the intentions of those who planned it. They expected the slaves to rise in mass as soon as the banner of abolitionism should be unfurled. Knowing nothing of the kindly feeling which exists throughout the South between the master and his slaves, they judged of that feeling by their own hatred, and expected that the tocsin which they sounded would at once arouse to rebellion every slave who hear it. Accordingly they prepared such arms as an infuriated and untrained peasantry could most readily use.

They also expected aid from another element of revolution. They did not believe in the loyalty to the government of Virginia of that part of her population which owned no slaves. They seized upon the armory, and they expected help from its operatives, and from the farming population; and to gain time for combining all these elements of mischief, as they conceived them to be, they seized upon a pass in the mountains [the town of Harper's Ferry], well adapted to their purpose. For months had they worked with fiendish and unwearied diligence, and it is hazarding little to conjecture, that the banditti who had been trained in Kansas, were in readiness to obey the summons to new scenes of rapine and murder, as soon as a lodgment were affected. [my emphasis]

Brown did expect slaves from nearby plantations to immediately come to join his band of fighters. But not as part of some general slave uprising. His intent was to steal weapons and ammunition from the federal armory at Harper's Ferry and to escape into the hills of Virginia where he would establish guerrilla bases and conduct raids to free slaves and thus further destabilize the slave system.

He wasn't counting on white Virginians to rise on his behalf, though.

But Memminger's claims present the obvious question: if the Slave Power was so confident of "the kindly feeling which exists throughout the South between the master and his slaves", and of the loyalty of non-slaveowning white Southerners to the slave system, why were they so terrified of slave revolts ("servile insurrection") and of free speech among Southern whites?

The answer is mostly likely that white Southerners were asked to pretend not to see the most obvious facts about their slave-states societies. And the Honorable Gentlemen was one of the most famous of those asking them to so pretend. Bertram Waytt-Brown writes in The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace,a nd War, 1760s-1880s (2001):

In contrast to unfeeling masterhood, Christopher Memminger, a Charleston layman, offered the ideal, which steadily became the most popular rendering of regional self-congratulation: "The Slave Institution at the South increases her tendency to dignify the family. Each planter in fact is a Patriarch - his position compels him to be a ruler in his household," guiding children, female dependents, and slaves alike with steady hand and loving voice. Like the image of the Southern lady, gracious and ethereal, the model of the Christian slaveholder was a stereotype that served a cultural function. It celebrated the alleged disappearance of old barbarisms and offered a standard of behavior to which respectable folk were to aspire. The lines between what was and what ought to be were sadly blurred, but the instructional function remained. [my emphasis]

The Republican Party had no intention of mounting a war of liberation against the slave system in the South. They were operating on the idea that if the further expansion of slavery were blocked, it would die out as an institution in the South as it had in the Eastern seaboard states of the North. But there is one sense in which the worry about Republican incursion into the South was justified, the workings of the normal process of political parties. The Honorable Gentleman told the Virginians:

The immense patronage and spoils of the government, and the large interest involved in the public expenditures, and in discriminating tariffs, bring to the aid of the dominant party every selfish interest, and enable it to rivet its fetters upon the South; while the hope held out to Southern aspirants for office is used to corrupt our leaders and confound our people.

In other words, if the Republicans won the Presidency, the power of federal patronage would allow them to establish themselves as a party in the South. And that would bring the dangerous ideas of abolition into the immediate hearing of those loyal slaves and the non-slaveowning Southern whites who were so loyally dedicated to preserving the slave system.

The Honorable Gentleman strikes other themes of Slave Power propaganda, as well. Because representatives of the free states objected to the extension of slavery after the Mexican War, this meant that they wanted that "no Southern man should stand upon the conquered territory [of Mexico] upon the same footing with the Northern." This reduced the Southern white man to a lower status than the Mormon, the "Chinaman", the infidel, "the Sandwich-Islander, or the Zambo".

All those, he whined, were expected to enjoy "equal protection and right, but the most valuable property of the the Southern man must be left behind." This imagery, that the Southern white man would be reduced to inferiority - much like a slave - if the North would not support slavery was a common theme in secessionist and Confederate propaganda. To be deprived of the right to hold other human beings, most of them fellow Christian believers, as human property would be an awful humiliation at the hands of the Northern man, in this argument. "It is not surprising that the Southern States should have been fired with indignation at this attack," said the Honorable Gentleman.

He used explicit emasculation imagery, as well: "The Delilah of the North had already cried out, 'The Philistines be upon thee, O Samson'."

But the object of the alleged desire of the Northern man to humiliate the humble slaveowner was always the same. "The generation which now has possession of the political power of the North has been regularly trained from childhood to the course which they are now pursuing. At their mother's knee they were taught that slavery was a sin." The Northern ministers contribute to this terrible desire to humiliate the Southern slavedriver: "The utterance of anathemas from the minister clothes the sentiment with the solemnity of religious truth. Slavery is denounced as a sin, and the conscience is misled to assume jurisdiction over Southern conduct."

Tags: christopher gustavus memminger, confederate heritage month 2009, slavery, us civil war

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