Apostles of Disunion

INTRODUCTION Although I have taught at a New England college for the past twenty-three years, I am a son of the South. My ancestors on both sides fought for the Confederacy, and my father was named Jack, not John, because of his father's reverence for Stonewall Jackson. On my fourteenth birthday, I was given a .22 caliber rifle and Douglas Southall Freeman's Lee's Lieutenants. I devoured all three volumes of Freeman's classic history of the Army of Northern Virginia, and the rifle was my constant companion during those seemingly endless summer days in Florida when plinking at cans and dreaming of Civil War battles constituted a significant part of my boyhood activities. When I went off to high school in Virginia, I packed a Confederate battle flag in my suitcase and hung it proudly in my dorm room. My grandmother, whom I loved dearly, was a card-carrying member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. I did not think much about secession and the causes of the war back then. My focus was on the battlefield and Lee's valiant men, who had fought so hard and so long before finally yielding to overwhelming numbers. But if anyone asked me what the war was all about, I had a ready answer for them. I knew from listening to adult conversations about the war, as it was called, and from my limited reading on the subject, that the South had seceded for one reason, and one reason only—States' rights. As I recall, my principal written source for this view was a small paperback entitled A Confederate Youth's Primer, a gift from one of my father's law partners. It was crystal clear to me that the Southern States had left the Union to defend their just and sovereign rights—rights the North was determined to deny my region and my ancestors. Anyone who thought differently was either deranged or a Yankee, and neither class deserved to be taken seriously on this subject. All this is a roundabout introduction to a point I wished to make at the outset. Despite my scholarly training and years spent trying to practice the historian's craft, I found this in many ways a difficult and painful book to write. Even though I am far removed, both in time and attitude, from my boyhood dreaming about Confederate glory, I am still hit with a profound sadness when I read over the material on which this study is based. I vividly recall the first time I encountered the Secession Commissioner's words. I was not long out of graduate school, and was combing through Volume 1 of Series 4 of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies—the series dealing with the Southern Homefront—looking for material on wartime manufacturing. For some reason, Stephen F. Hale's letter to the Governor of Kentucky—the document that constitutes the core of Chapter 4 of this book—caught my eye, and I read the letter through from start to finish. I was stunned by what I found there. Hale's rhetoric took me back in an instant to my childhood growing up in the South on the white side of the color line. There, in this December 1860 document, were the same sentiments, the same views—indeed, even some of the same ugly words—that I had heard used to justify racial segregation during my own youth. Could secession and racism be so intimately connected, I asked myself? I knew, of course, that the institution of slavery was on the line in 1860-61, but did white supremacy also form a critical element in the secessionist cause—a cause my ancestors fought for, and that my relatives revered? The present volume—an examination of the message the secession commissioners carried across the South in late 1860 and early 1861—attempts to answer these questions. Like any student of secession, I know that I have not presented the whole story here. The scholarship on this topic is rich and varied and points to a multitude of causal factors. A number of seminal studies—particularly books by Michael F. Holt, J. Mills Thornton III, and Daniel W. Crofts, and an insightful article by Peyton McCrary, Clark Miller, and Dale Baum—have taken us deep into the political world of the late antebellum South and shown us how complex the relationship was between slavery, the Southern electorate, and the decision for secession in 1860-61. Other scholars—most notably Bertram Wyatt Brown and Kenneth S. Greenberg—have pointed to cultural factors—notions of honor and ideas about coercion, tyranny, and republicanism—that colored the way Southerners reacted to what they saw as Northern moves against Southern interests in the years leading up to the war. I have no quarrel with any of these historians, and I have learned a great deal from their work, but I am convinced that the speeches and letters of the Southern commissioners of 1860-61 also reveal a great deal about secession and the coming of the Civil War. I believe deeply that the story these documents tell is one that all of us—Northerners and Southerners, black and white—need to confront as we try to understand our past and move toward a future in which a fuller commitment to decency and racial justice will be part of our shared experience.