SECESSION OF SOUTHERN STATES.   Term Paper ID:25527 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Examines process of 11 states' secession, legal & political rationale for, states' rights, class issues, slavery.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Examines process of 11 states' secession, legal & political rationale for, states' rights, class issues, slavery. Paper Introduction: From the vantage point of the 20th century – and in the textbooks through which most people have learned their American history – Secession seems to have been a pretty simple affair. The eleven Southern States, wishing to continue their practice of slavery so as not to lose their economic base of tobacco farming – withdrew from the United States during the years 1860-61 to form the Confederate States of America. The act of secession was formally accomplished in the individual states through a convention either called by the state legislature or, as in the case of Texas, self-assembled and it prompted the Civil War, a war fought by American patriots not only to defeat the terrible institution of slavery but also to rescue the beloved Union from a terrible and permanent dissolution. In fact the process of Secession was certainly not this simpl Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. The Lost Cause (A facsimile of the 1867 edition). Secondly,Southerners were also aware of the fact that if the slave population in aregion became too dense than the slaves might well revolt against theirmasters. 12 Clifford Dowdy, Experiment in Rebellion (New York: Doubleday andCompany, 1946), 23. These fire-eaters were relyingon "a disembodied paragon of classical virtues" and their rhetoric on thisissue has lead historians into an over-emphasis of Southern culturaldistinctiveness and to downplay some important political elements ofsecession.11 In addition to the potential schisms destined to occur in a countrydedicated to the rights of individual smaller political units, there wasalso in the South a fundamental tradition of personal independence, apeculiar mixture of plantation aristocracy and a sort of (often violent)frontier individualism. They had wanted out of the Union. No Compromise! This paper examines the case put forward bythe secessionists, looking at both the official political justificationsfor Secession and the cultural forces that underpinned them before movingon to a discussion of the ways that both Southerners in general andsecessionists in particular were divided amongst themselves. As Owsley notes, any confederacy built on anti-federalist principles is bound to have trouble holding itself together. The sense of unity that hadbeen forged at Lexington - and so recently reaffirmed during the War of1812 - was a strong one. The Southerners were divided a number of different ways. 16 Ibid., 7; E.A. [ii] Ibid. [viii] Ibid., 21. 15 Ibid., 6. The right of secession was ingeneral regarded by seceding states as one of their sovereign powers, asthe United States Constitution contained no prohibition in this respect nordid it confer any power on the federal government to compel a state toremain in the Union against its wishes. The long habituation to assertingpersonal freedom and liberty meant that in the economic and politicalcrisis prompted by Lincoln's election, many southerners reverted to"forthright action in proud denial of any will imposed from without" 12 Another fundamental division that ran through the South and thatundermined the unity of Southern secessionism were distinctions amongclasses in the South - a set of tensions that was linked to theexpansionism of slave territory. And sotheir support of secession was necessarily dimmer than that of those whohad the most to gain economically from a continuation of slavery.16 BibliographyBarney, William. 13 William Barney, The Road to Secession: A New Perspective on the OldSouth (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 5. There were worries by many Southerners that some other section of theSouth would achieve supremacy in the area, as Rable notes: In decrying oppressive taxation and standing armies, border state men relied on the arguments of eighteenth-century republicanism. Before examining in greater detail the specific arguments made bydifferent factions of secessionists, it is useful to examine the majorjustification for secession put forward by most of them. And yet the upper south faced a classic dilemma. 11 Ibid., 8. There wereregional differences, which broke down somewhat along economic lines, withthe Gulf states more interested in free trade and border states likeMaryland and Virginia interested in protections for its manufacturing.[vii] There were also regional issues over where the inevitable war wouldbe fought, for clearly that section of the Confederacy would lose a greatdeal that other regions would be able to maintain. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.Whitridge, Arnold. But one of the many problems with this argument is thatit assumes something of a Southern conspiracy in seceding, and this is notan accurate description of events. In this view a Southern government might become as expensive and tyrannical as the worst Yankee administration. Pollard, The Lost Cause (A facsimile of the 1867edition) (New York: Bonanza Books, 1974), 65. Rather, states seceded individually andfor their individual reasons. The unanimity of both the North and the South hastended to be emphasized over the years until both sides have come to beseen as politically and culturally nearly monolithic, which was never thecase. As Heidler notes, "Breaking up the United States of America was nolittle task and was not taken lightly" [i]. Not only was there the fact that the entire confederacy wasbased on the principle that political parts do not have any permanentallegiance to the wheel (as noted above), and in additional to regionaldifferences and economic counter-interests, there was the fact that thepeople who had lead and ultimately succeeded in bringing about secessionhad not done so with any uniform vision of what they wanted the South tobecome. Pulling the Temple Down: The Fire-Eaters and the Destruction of the Union. We are in the habit of ascribing as the causes of the failure of the Confederacy the blockade, lack of industrial development and resources, breakdown of transportation, inadequate financial system, and so on, all of which are fundamental; yet, in spite of all of these, if the political system of the South had not broken down under the weight of an impracticable doctrine put into practice in the midst of a revolution, the South might have established its independence. "The existing class and racialarrangements of the South's biracial society were secure only as long asadditional salve territory could be acquired" Barney writes 13, noting thatthis was an accepted political reality in both the North and the South. The arguments made by Southerners wishing to secede have an eerilyfamiliar ring to them, calling up in many ways the ghosts of Revolutionarytimes, and this is hardly surprising. The Story of the Fanatics WhoPaved the Way to the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 196 ),25. They would break up the Union in defense of what wasinarguably a higher cause - the deeply Americans provisions for libertycontained within the Constitution.[v] This insistence upon the importance of states' rights - while servingfor many as the compelling justification for the establishment of theConfederacy - would ironically prove to be one of the major forces thatdoomed the South to defeat. The Road to Secession: A New Perspective on the Old South. Once they hadmade their initial break, and in the chaos and misery afforded by the war,Southerners had little if any chance to develop a sufficiently coherentsense of national identity to survive. With expansion effectively capped by Lincoln'selection, the racial and class tensions began to boil up in the South.Those who favored secession saw their existence outside of the union as apotential way to continue to acquire new land to be worked by slaves. The Civil War wasin many ways a war about culture, about different ways of living and aboutdifferent futures that could be dreamed and imagined. It isthus a little puzzling that late 2 th century explanations of the Civil Warshould focus so narrowly on slavery, for it is hard to believe that slaveryalone would have been a sufficient reason to "pull down the temple" of theUnited States, to borrow Andrew Calhoun's 186 description of Secession. Experiment in Rebellion. government, but alsoby the border states in the South and those people whose caution and fearof revolution gave them the title of cooperationists - those Southernerswho wished to avoid war and rupture and believed that some endless seriesof compromises could be strung together to ensure if not peaceful co-existence at least the avoidance of actual war. It took enormously strong forces to pull apart acountry that had risked so much in its founding and had believed so much inthe democratic unity of the principles that it had always espoused. Like the teenager whojust wants to get away from home, the Confederate states found that freedomfrom something is no substitute for freedom for something. If they refused to leave the Union, a Gulf states confederacy might reopen the African slave trade and stop importing slaves from the border states. New York: Bonanza Books, 1974.Rable, George. The justifications put forward by the Southern secessionists weremostly based in the very differing culture of the Southern part of thecountry, although they were rarely cloaked in such terms. Moreover, when secessionary talk began in the Southin the 184 s, there were still people living whose knowledge of theRevolution came from actual experience. Plantations tended to be highly self-sufficient,and so all those people connected with plantation life in some form hadgrown accustomed in essential ways to obeying or even considering noauthority higher than the local one. [iii] Arnold Whitridge, No Compromise! [vi] Lawrence Owlsey, State Rights in the Confederacy (Gloucester, MA:Peter Smith, 1961), 1. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 196 .----------------------- Endnotes [i] David Heidler, Pulling the Temple Down: The Fire-Eaters and theDestruction of the Union (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1994), 1. The idea that the Southern (or any) states could secede whenever theychose to was sometimes referred to as the concept of "nullification", whichwas based on the idea that "the Constitution was a compact betweensovereign States"[iii] It followed from this doctrine that the States assovereigns had "the right to judge when their agent, the federalgovernment, had exceeded its powers" and, having determined this, to call aconvention of its own people, pronounce an objectionable law null and voidand prevent the execution of the law within its own boundaries.[iv] Theadvantage of this justification for secession for many Southerners was thefact that it seemed to them to be working within the Constitution ratherthan in violation to it: The seceding states in this regard were no lessloyal than the patriots who had fought against the enforcement of excessivelaws by the British. From the vantage point of the 2 th century - and in the textbooksthrough which most people have learned their American history - Secessionseems to have been a pretty simple affair. Butothers (those without large land holdings) in the South saw both secessionand further expansion as simply a continuation of the status quo - a statusquo that was not necessarily ever going to be to their benefit. They had wanted away from theNorth. It was only by having more territory into which to expand and soto deport slaves that the slaves could be kept few enough in any one areato make the white population feel safe.15 It was in fact the Republican Party's - and Lincoln's - anti-expansionist stand more than its anti-slavery stand per se that promptedsecession. Even the group of secessionists known as the fire-eaters - who weresimply the most rabid pro-secessionists and who therefore might be expectedto be the group of men most likely to have a idealized vision of a what anew independent South might look like - varied tremendously amongthemselves over the kind of country the confederacy should be. The Story of the Fanatics Who Paved the Way to the Civil War. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1946.Heidler, David. But this is no blueprint for a new nation. [v] Ibid. Edmund Rhett, brother of leading radical Robert Barnwell Rhett, basically shared Wigfall's worldview but also believed that agrarianism and slavery afforded Southerners the leisure to "cultivate the arts, the graces, the accomplishment of life, to develop science, to apply ourselves to the duties of government, and to understand the affairs of the country."1 Not only are these positions obviously contradictory, as Rable notes,but they are also both misrepresentations of Southern life as it actuallyexisted in the middle of the last century. Secession was a complex issue and historical actuality - complicatedlegally, morally, and politically. The act ofsecession was formally accomplished in the individual states through aconvention either called by the state legislature or, as in the case ofTexas, self-assembled and it prompted the Civil War, a war fought byAmerican patriots not only to defeat the terrible institution of slaverybut also to rescue the beloved Union from a terrible and permanentdissolution. The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics. In some ways, this seeming desire to explain the Civil War entirely interms of slavery versus abolition resides in Abraham Lincoln himself, withhis insistence that the "peculiar and powerful interest" of slavery in theSouth "was somehow the cause of the war".[ii] These words of Lincoln's havethe advantage of presenting the issue in a simple and straightforward way -sort of an early version of a sound bite by a man who surely would haveexcelled at them. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1994.Owlsey, Lawrence. 1 Ibid. Wigfall boasted that Southerners were a peculiar people, an agrarian people, who had no use for cities, manufacturing, or even literature and who would stake their economic future of King Cotton. Nor was it so pure a one morally from the point of the Union norso patriotic a one. The South did not secede in a uniformaction over the issue of slavery. State Rights in the Confederacy. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1961.Pollard, E. [iv] Ibid., 26. 9 Ibid., 7. But the rhetoric ofSecession often used political and legal language to justify something thatwas in fact far more primal. This is a doctrine(which has been informally expanded to include a number of barely relatedconcepts) referred to as states' rights. In fact the process of Secession was certainly not this simple aprocess. For slave-holding, wealthy Southerners, expansion was quitesimply a matter of survival. These fire-eaters "fell into hopeless disagreement when trying to define Southernnationalism with any precision", often resorting "to a fuzzy romanticismthat obscured far more than it revealed".9 The Texas firebrand Louis T. This possibility raised explosive issues of class and race that threatened to abort any experiment in Southern nationalism.[viii] That Southerners should be so fiercely divided should not in fact comeas a surprise. 14 Ibid., 11. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972.Dowdy, Clifford. The eleven Southern States,wishing to continue their practice of slavery so as not to lose theireconomic base of tobacco farming - withdrew from the United States duringthe years 186 -61 to form the Confederate States of America. Lincoln's administration alwayscontested the right of the states to succeed, although one could easilyargue that the federal (Union) government was making this argument onpolitical rather than purely legal grounds. [vi] Ironically - and a point that speaks to the deep divisions thatexisted amongst the Southern states, the rhetoric of high taxation andinsufficient representation and overly zealous federal governments was notsimply raised by the Southern States against the U.S. [vii] George Rable, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution AgainstPolitics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 21-22. It was certainly not supported by allthose living in the South, and one can only assume that some of thosepeople living in the North did see it as the right of states to withdraw ifthey chose (in fact, long before even the whispers of Civil War, murmurs ofsecession had swept through New England over opposition to the LouisianaPurchase). A. In fact, some of the same issues werein fact being debated. Thus theeconomic health of the South (based as it was on farming and in particularon tobacco) required expansion into previously uncivilized land. Expansion of slave territory south and west had "alleviated the mostserious paradoxes and stresses of the slave south" 14. The two mostsignificant of these stresses was the fact that tobacco farming (at leastwith the technology available to the 19th century farmer) needs a steadyinfusion of new, unplanted land to remain viable (and of course allfarmland tends to degrade after years of intensive planting). If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.