Rhett wore a black suit as he waited to surrender the revolution. The date: February 18, 1861, inauguration day for President-elect Jefferson Davis. The place: Montgomery, Alabama, provisional capital of the provisional Southern Confederacy. Rhett’s uncomfortable task: to greet the President-elect when the inaugural parade reached the white capitol and to present him to the lily-white Confederate Congress. White is beautiful, so the infant republic proclaimed, in its manifestos, its buildings, its taste in skin. But Robert Barnwell Rhett, like Southerners everywhere, usually donned black when the occasion called for dress.
Rhett, South Carolina’s most notorious Disunionist, had less trifling confusions in mind as he glared down Montgomery’s main street. The parade crept up the hill, matching hesitations Rhett discerned throughout the South. After thirty years of frustration, he stood so near, yet so far from his ambition. Three months earlier, Abraham Lincoln’s election had handed Disunionists an opportunity. In December of 1860, Rhett’s South Carolina had seceded from the Union. Five Lower South states had quickly followed. Texas would allegedly soon join in.
Now, here in Montgomery, Rhett had helped mold a new republic, dedicated to the proposition that Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson had been a fool. Natural rights were unnatural. Men were created unequal. Black bondage was blessed. On and on went the litany that turned Jefferson on his head. How sweet to exclaim eternal truths and to be free of hypocritical Yankee sneers.
Free at last, if the revolution did not slide backwards. That spector soured Rhett’s celebrations. So often, South Carolina had tremulously pushed revolution. So often, nervous precipitators had then retreated. In 1832–3, Rhett had helped bring off the first confrontation crisis, the Nullification Controversy. Even though the South’s favorite politician, President Andrew Jackson, had trouble rallying other Southerners to coerce Carolina hotheads, Nullifiers had lost their nerve. In 1850–2, Rhett had helped secretly plot another confrontation crisis. That time, Southerners had so ignored Carolina that few even knew about the abortive plotting. In 1860, extremists beyond Carolina had at last conspired to encourage Carolinians to begin.
But how long would revolutionary nerves hold out? Most slave states remained in the Union two months after South Carolina had seceded. The last nonseceding state in the deepest South, Texas, would supposedly soon join the new slaveholding republic. Only fifteen years earlier, however, the then-independent and then-not-so-enslaved republic of Texas had made ambiguous gestures towards antislavery England. Worried Southerners had demanded that Texas be instantly annexed. The most important gesturer, then-Texas president Sam Houston, was now governor of the state. Houston had recently called slavery evil and disunion an abomination. With that foot-dragger as leader, had the Deep South’s western hinterland been sufficiently consolidated?
Robert Barnwell Rhett worried more about northern hinterlands. The eight Upper South states had lately voted against immediate secession, when they bothered to vote. One anti-secessionist state, Delaware, possessed fewer than 2000 slaves. Another, Maryland, had almost as many free blacks as slaves. Others, especially Virginia and Kentucky, had sporadically debated schemes to remove slaves. If war came, would such Southerners desert to the North?
Rhett also spied potential desertions in Montgomery. Some worried slaveholders from black-belt southern Alabama hinted that compromise might be preferable to war. Some irritated nonslaveholders from white-belt northern Alabama hinted that if rich men refused to compromise, poor men might refuse to fight.
And the slaves? They heard everything. They affected to know nothing. They cheered proslavery speeches. They burned Lincoln in effigy. Slave behavior was always hard to read. Did this behavior hint at pretense? Might something other than straw Lincolns someday light neighborhoods? Masters—mistresses too—denied thinking such thoughts.1
No wonder Robert Barnwell Rhett stood in the shadows, awaiting someone else’s parade. The times hardly called for notorious revolutionaries. Rhett’s cause demanded a legitimacy only conservative opponents could supply. The cause needed the frigid respectability of Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis.2
Two days earlier, William Lowndes Yancey had summed up the need in a phrase. Yancey, Montgomery’s favorite Disunionist and fire-eaters’ shrewdest tactician, had stood on the balcony of the Exchange Hotel, Davis by his side and hundreds below. He had gazed into the dark night, past the crowd and up the hill to the shadowy capitol, America’s newest City on the Hill. Long since he had learned, amongst Alabama’s coarse politicos, the lesson Rhett would never learn amidst South Carolina’s haughty patricians. An elitist who would command commoners must stay but a half-inch ahead. So, as the crowd hushed, Yancey had introduced the President-elect with a prayer dressed up as praise: “The man and the hour have met.”3
How Rhett must have winced as citizens screamed approval. For Jefferson Davis had long cooperated with Disunionists’ foe, the Southern National Democratic Party. Whether manipulating presidential cabinets or maneuvering the United States Senate, Davis had usually advocated the National Democrats’ main line—that disunion was folly because the South could rule the Union through the party. In 1858, when Davis came close to breathing northern territorial heresies, Mississippi’s legislature had demanded explanations. In November 1860, he had warned Rhett against disunion. Would he now lead a retreat back into the Union?
Rhett nursed one consolation. Things could be worse. At least Davis had opposed the Compromise of 1850. The presidency might have gone to Howell Cobb of Georgia, now Presiding Officer of the Confederate Congress. Cobb, an even more notorious National Democrat than Davis, had lauded the Compromise of 1850 and had helped poison the subsequent Davis-led resistance movement. A decade later, in December 1860, Fatty Cobb had wished to remain comfortably clubby in Washington.
The presidency might also have been bestowed on Alexander Stephens, now Vice President-elect of the Confederacy. Stephens, a bitter man with an emaciated body, had spoken in Georgia two months earlier, arguing that secession was insanity. In 1850 he had helped Cobb stop resistance in Georgia. In 1845 Stephens had urged that slavery was too evil to spread. With this previously softhearted advocate but a heartbeat from power, Rhett might be reduced to praying for Davis’s health!
At last the joy of the inaugural parade broke through, pushing morbid prayers out of mind. Bands blared. Dust swirled. Boys raced for the best positions. Marching out front, with sky blue pants and bright red coats, were Captain Semnes’s Columbus Guards. They proudly displayed Georgia’s coat of arms while performing Zoave tactics. Along came Herman Arnold’s band, playing a catchy tune. Before long, a nation would be humming “I wish I were in Dixie Land.” Then more troops. Then the imminent commander-in-chief. Prancing white horses drew Davis’s silk-lined carriage. The entourage stopped at Rhett’s feet. When Davis clambered down, white belles in white dresses surrounded the President-elect. They hung a wreath around his arm as whites shouted and blacks danced along the avenue. With Rhett on one side and Stephens on the other, Davis stepped into the white capitol.
The trio approached the spiral staircase, each step so perfectly balanced that the whole curved up without support. Brown tobacco stains marred snow-white stone. Too much spittle had missed too many spittoons. As they ascended, these rather polished aristocrats caught the scent of not-so-polished frontiersmen. Here elegant gentlemen and seedy boors mixed uneasily. At the second landing, the congressional chamber loomed ahead. Here southeastern elitists and southwestern egalitarians would have to get together.
Rhett introduced Davis to the Congress with cold formality—“Allow me to present to you the Honorable Jefferson Davis, who in obedience to your choice has come to assume the important trust you have confided to his care.” Davis, seeking to melt the ice, briefly begged support. Then all proceeded out to the warm sunlight and supporters warmer still.4
When the clock struck one, Jefferson Davis laid his hand on the Bible and took the oath of office from Howell Cobb. Then Davis stood alone on the decaying portico, between towering white pillars. As he swung around for his inaugural address, he stretched straight and lean, aggressively maximizing middling height. His square, tough chin anchored an aesthetic, rectangular face. His long forehead hinted at intelligence. His neatly brushed gray hair seemed that of a prophet.
But it was his eyes, his blue-gray eyes, which gave him away. They were sunk into high cheekbones. One eye, nearly blind and covered with film, was the site of excruciating pain. The other eye saw through men with painful clarity. Jefferson Davis, waiting for applause to end so that he could define a culture’s destiny, looked like a man who had seen and suffered.
Today he suffered over a southern destiny he saw was obscure. War, he suspected, was imminent. The South, he knew, was ill-prepared. As United States Secretary of War a few years earlier, he had worried about the South’s poor military state. As President-elect in the past few days, he had jolted along the section’s primitive railroads. Could so industrially underdeveloped a society defeat northern industrial might?
Not, Davis knew, unless the South pulled together. The President was an expert on southern divisions. He had cooperated, at arm’s length, with Disunionists in opposing the Compromise of 1850. He had then learned how devoutly men such as Rhett believed that those an arm’s length apart were disguised traitors. During the ensuing decade, Davis had watched fellow Southern National Democrats feud endlessly. Some hoped to reopen the African slave trade. Others denounced that as kidnaping. Some dreamed of seizing South America. Their opponents decried that as piracy. Here in Montgomery, advocates of reunion battled proponents of war. Louisiana delegates, exuding the aggressive commercialism of New Orleans, sought a republic encompassing the entire Ohio-Missouri-Mississippi river system. South Carolina delegates, reflecting Charleston’s hidebound conservatism, wished to exclude nonslaveholding members.
More distressing still, half the South missed today’s festivities. The lawn below Davis contained no representatives of more northern, more populated, more industrialized, more militarily strategic Upper South slave states. Here again, Davis’s personal experience prevented illusions. He had resided more often in the Upper South than on his Deep South plantation. He had been educated in Kentucky, had served military apprenticeships in Missouri and Arkansas, and had often vacationed in Virginia while helping to govern from Washington. He thus understood why the Lower South came to Montgomery while the Upper South anchored in Washington. He knew that the more northern the location of a slave state, the less cotton was grown, the fewer plantations existed, and the more land was dotted with primarily nonslaveholders harvesting primarily grains. Despite less of a stake in slavery, the Upper South would likely become prime Civil War battleground. Another South’s revolution, these Southerners shuddered, might annihilate their South first.
Davis’s inaugural address sought to ease these problems. The address, men discovered with relief, was sprinkled with reassurances. War, Davis reassured moderates, would come only if the North began it. Reunion, he reassured extremists, was not likely. True, northern states might join the Southern Confederacy. But unless he mistook “the judgment and will of the people, a reunion with the States from which we have separated is neither practicable nor desirable.”
So much for reassuring secessionists. Davis’s more critical task was to attract nonseceding Southerners. To do this, he reached into his heritage, past recent struggles between National Democrats and Disunionists, past his Mississippi plantation, past his Missouri soldiering and Kentucky education to bedrock, to the Southerner whose name was part of his own. Southerners everywhere, Jefferson Davis declared, cherished Thomas Jefferson’s right of revolution. The southern republic “merely asserted the right which the Declaration of Independence” declared “inalienable.” Davis applauded the American idea that “governments rest on the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish them.”5
The crowd enjoyed Davis’s effort. Congressmen especially voiced approval. If Virginians would not fight for black slavery, they might fight for Thomas Jefferson. With fresh hope, lawmakers returned to troubling tasks.6
One legislator, however, viewed Davis’s departing figure with troubled distaste. Robert Barnwell Rhett, ears attuned to every syllable, heard old ambiguities in the new address. Davis had merely claimed that the people rejected reunion. He had not promised to reject a popular change of heart. Nor had he barred nonslaveholding states from entering the Southern Confederacy. If Davis could not lead Southerners back to Washington, he might attract Northerners down to Montgomery!
And why did Davis have to mouth St. Thomas’s idiocies? Inalienable rights! Rights of revolution! The principles of 1776! The South had revolted to escape those ideas. What a foundation for a great slaveholding republic!7
The ensuing Civil War would mock Rhett’s doubts about Davis. South Carolinians would soon be wishing their President was less inflexible. Still, the spirit Rhett thought Davis personified was abroad in the land on this Inauguration Day. It was the very divisive spirit Davis had tried his best to master. But would Davis’s best—could anyone’s best—pull this land together? Could any man or idea make one people out of jealous yeomen and arrogant planters, Union-loving Marylanders and Union-smashing Alabamians, pretending slaves and wary masters, post-seventeenth-century South Carolinians and pre-twentieth-century Louisianians? As they brooded over the past and stewed about the future, the suspicious South Carolinian and the tortured Mississippian knew that one question of the half-century had become the question of the hour: Would there ever, ever, ever, be a South?