II

The example of Virginia—and of Robert E. Lee—exerted a powerful influence on the rest of the upper South. Arkansas was the next state to go. Its convention had adjourned in March without taking action, subject to recall in case of emergency. Lincoln's call for troops supplied the emergency; the convention reassembled on May 6. Even before the delegates arrived in Little Rock, however, pro-secession Governor Henry Rector aligned his state with the Confederacy by seizing federal arsenals at Fort Smith and Little Rock and by allowing Confederate forces to place artillery to command the Mississippi at Helena. The convention met in an atmosphere of high emotion, the galleries packed with spectators waving Confederate flags. Within minutes an ordinance of secession came to the floor. A motion to submit this ordinance to a referendum—a test vote of unionist strength at the convention—was defeated 55 to 15. Most of the fifteen minority delegates came from the Ozark Plateau of northwest Arkansas, where few slaves lived. After defeat of this motion, the convention passed the ordinance of secession by a vote of 65 to 5.⁹

North Carolina and Tennessee also went out during May. Even before calling the legislature into special session, the governor of North Carolina ordered the militia to seize three federal forts on the coast and

9. Four unionist delegates later changed their votes, making the final tally 69 to 1.

the arsenal in Fayetteville. The legislature met on May 1 and authorized an election on May 13 for a convention to meet on May 20. During these weeks everyone in the state, even in the previously unionist mountain counties, seemed to favor secession. "This furor, this moral epidemic, swept over the country like a tempest, before which the entire population seemed to succumb," wrote a participant.¹⁰ After a test vote on a procedural matter showed that the moderates were a minority, the delegates on May 20 unanimously enacted an ordinance of-secession. Meanwhile the Tennessee legislature short-circuited the convention process by adopting a "Declaration of Independence" and submitting it to a referendum scheduled for June 8. Tennessee imitated the action of Virginia by concluding a military alliance with the Confederacy and allowing Confederate troops to enter the state several weeks before the referendum. That election recorded 104,913 for secession and 47,238 against. Significantly, however, the voters of mountainous east Tennessee cast 70 percent of their ballots against secession.

Although speeches and editorials in the upper South bristled with references to rights, liberty, state sovereignty, honor, resistance to coercion, and identity with southern brothers, such rhetoric could not conceal the fundamental issue of slavery. The following table shows the correlation between slaveholding and support for secession in the Virginia and Tennessee conventions.¹¹

The popular vote in secession referendums illustrated the point even more graphically. The voters in 35 Virginia counties with a slave population of only 2.5 percent opposed secession by a margin of three to one, while voters in the remainder of the state, where slaves constituted

10. Sitterson, Secession Movement in North Carolina, 241.

11. The data in this table were compiled from Ralph A. Wooster, The Secession Conventions of the South (Princeton, 1962), 151, 153, 183, 185.

36 percent of the population, supported secession by more than ten to one. The thirty counties of east Tennessee that rejected secession by more than two to one contained a slave population of only 8 percent, while the rest of the state, with a slave population of 30 percent, voted for secession by a margin of seven to one. Similar though less dramatic correlations existed in Arkansas and North Carolina, where moderate delegates had a median slaveholding about half that of the all-out secessionists.¹²

The Nashville Patriot of April 24, 1861, was conscious of no irony when it cited the "community of interest existing in all the slaveholding States" as the reason why these states must unite to defend "justice and liberty."¹³ The upper South, like the lower, went to war to defend the freedom of white men to own slaves and to take them into the territories as they saw fit, lest these white men be enslaved by Black Republicans who threatened to deprive them of these liberties.