CHAPTER 29
The secession crisis of 1850–52, like the earlier Nullification Controversy and the later disunion finale, involved classic confrontation politics. On each occasion, far-out Carolinians prayed that if bullets replaced ballots, the southern mainstream would shoot Yankees rather than Southrons.
Those precipitous tactics risked the ire of two majorities. A majority of Southerners could resent being forced to the battlefield. A majority of Americans could resent southern ultras’ defiance of majoritarian law. An extremist minority of a minority could thus paint itself into a suicidal corner.
Secessionists grated on southern majoritarian sensibilities more in 1850 than in 1860. In the year of Lincoln’s election, a northern majority imposed a President on the South. In the year of congressional armistice, the majority of Southerners voted to compromise with the North. How could a victorious southern majority legitimately help sore losers gut the majoritarian process?
Extremists who drove slavery’s assumptions past “mere negro” bondage saw no legitimacy problem. These elitists believed that betters should rule majorities on all sides of all color lines. So affirming, South Carolina extremists favored a patriarchal revolution against egalitarians’ so-called Compromise of 1850. Simultaneously, eastern Virginia oligarchs favored resisting King Numbers’s latest assault on the Old Dominion.
Both states’ elitist republicans lost these confrontations. Defeat came partly because each oligarchy lacked the autocratic nerve to defy the majority. The twin failures, intensifying each other, left the Old Order in demoralized disarray.
1
The Virginia crisis of 1850–1 was a replay of the Virginia Convention of 1829. The overriding issue was identical: Was black slavery compatible with white egalitarianism? Eastern Virginia’s predominant answer was the same: The ideology of slavery must transcend color lines and lead those richer to control those poorer. Western Virginia’s predominant response never varied: Unless whites could gain an egalitarian republic, slaveholders could not retain blacks.
The issue was once more fought out in the Hall of the House of Delegates in Richmond. The occasion was again a state convention called especially to determine how seats should be apportioned in future Houses of Delegates. Lower house apportionment remained vital because the House of Delegates initiated tax bills. The recurrent problem was that in a one-white-man, one-vote legislature, a western nonslaveholder majority could emancipate slaves through soak-the-rich taxation.
The 1829 Virginia Convention, emulating Jefferson’s trick windows at Monticello, had decreed an illusion of reconciliation. The convention majority had coupled the egalitarian West’s concept of what should be counted to determine proper apportionment, white men alone, with the elitist East’s concept of when the proper count transpired, in 1820, when the West had less whites. Lower house apportionment frozen on 1820 numbers was already anti-egalitarian by 1829, for western Virginia’s white population grew faster than eastern Virginia’s. The slide away from one-white-man, one-vote grew steeper. By 1850, western Virginia, with 55% of the state’s white population, controlled only 42% of lower house and 41% of upper house seats. This skewed legislature elected governors and judges, à la South Carolina. Furthermore, Virginia, for once more anti-egalitarian than South Carolina, denied poorer white males a vote for legislative representatives.
As a growing western white population made Virginia’s government ever less egalitarian, pressure increased for a new constitutional convention. As in the late 1820s, the eastern-dominated legislature eventually compromised on a convention stacked against western reformers. The conclave was apportioned on the basis of both white population and taxes paid. Under this “mixed basis” of wealth and numbers, eastern Virginia, with well under half the numbers of white Virginians but well over half the state’s taxable wealth, possessed 56% of convention seats.
For several days in 1850 and many months in 1851, this malapportioned convention debated malapportionment of the tax-initiating lower house.1 Eastern agreement to white egalitarianism, so Westerners repeated the argument of 1829, would create nonslaveholder loyalty to black slavery. Give us representation based on one-white-man, one-vote, claimed Trans-Allegheny leader Waitman T. Willey, “and you secure our fidelity forever.” But continued tyranny of rich white over poor white would “destroy western fidelity.” The notion that “we cannot have a republican government in Virginia because of slavery,” added George Summers, strikes “the deadliest blow” at bondage.2
Nonslaveholder control, answered eastern Virginia squires, augured deadlier blows. Waitman Willey’s assurances of “loyalty if” demonstrated loyalty uncomfortably thin. Westerners’ assault on slavery in 1832 had mocked their protestations of loyalty in 1829. Would it happen again? Westerners, declared William O. Goode, “have assailed the slaveholders as a class.” They have called us “proud, and arrogant, and presumptuous.” Their insults highlighted “the point of weakness in slave communities.”3
The point of weakness, Easterners emphasized, transcended class antagonism. Between slave owners and the nonslaveholding white majority, explained James Barbour, “mountains interpose, and no peculiar tie of business or social intercourse binds them in inseparable identity.” A majority living far from a minority, added M. R. H. Garnett, possessed none “of those kindly feelings which personal acquaintance awakens.” These Virginia squires quailed not so much before proletariat revolution as before geographic imprisonment and a distant lower class as jailers.4
To contain majority despotism, reactionaries would insure that numerically fewer and richer Easterners always had more House of Delegate seats than the more numerous and poorer Westerners. As in 1829, they had the convention seats to impose whatever apportionment they liked. But once again, they lacked the class unity to consolidate rich men’s rule.
Their prime opponent in the Virginia Convention of 1850–1 epitomized their problem.5For fifteen years, eastern Virginia Congressman Henry Wise had championed Slavepower stonewalling against federal mobocracy. Back in gag rule times, this Southern Whig foe of John Quincy Adams had demanded that Southern Democrats gag free democratic discussion more totally than Carolina’s “traitor,” Henry L. Pinckney, proposed. Yet this same Henry Wise told the Virginia Convention in 1851 that nothing “on God’s Almighty earth” stinks more than “monied aristrocracy; and negro aristocracy stinks worst of all.”6
To aristocrats accused of befouling an American republic, Wise’s rhetoric seemed proof of the irresponsible demagogue. Reactionaries were right that this rabble-rouser could talk and did love to court the commoners. But the Old Order missed Henry Wise’s conviction that only the New Order’s egalitarian tactics could save slavery. Wise saw that the eighteenth-century titan—cool, balanced, elegant, enlightened, handing down rationality from on high—could not command nineteenth-century yeomen. This up-to-speed romantic valued intuition more than abstraction, instinct more than consistency, Everyman more than philosopher-kings. With his hero, Andrew Jackson, Wise saw himself as no better than any white and much better than all blacks. He would show starch-stiff squires how to win their (white) fellows’ allegiance.
The people’s man wore homespun cloth, rough and rumpled. His sallow neck seemed shrunken inside his disheveled collar. His eyes were sunken, his cheeks hollow, unless swollen with tobacco. Then brown streams of spit punctuated his invective. In his element, stump speaking to screaming crowds, his emaciated frame became a blur, his slurring words a torrent. He looked and sounded like a hungry climber who could not bear folks fattened and privileged.
Henry Wise’s slashes at privilege were rooted in his coastal homeland, Accomac County, haven for fishermen. Amidst the camaraderie of men who went to sea, Wise learned that a slaveholder must at least play the democrat. Still, Wise’s courting of the masses was not inevitable in Accomac County. That least-enslaved Virginia Tidewater district had also produced Wise’s States’ Rights Whig colleague, Abel P. Upshur. The former Secretary of State had looked like all head where Wise seemed much mouth, all frosty logician where Wise was romantically impulsive, above all convinced that Wise’s loathed “negro aristocracy” must command whites no less than Negroes. Accomac, rare Virginia Tidewater area where slaveholders were massively outnumbered, spawned two antithetical Slavepower strategies: stonewalling against or pretending to join King Numbers.
Henry Wise remained too mercurial to be Upshur’s constant antithesis. On national questions, both Accomac County political titans would gag northern majorities and seize Texas, lest democratic procedures overwhelm slaveholder minorities. Yet where Judge Upshur drove elitist purity wherever it led, Wise tended to be foggy about all-out defiance of northern majorities. Henry Wise was always passionately for slavery but a little for Conditional Termination, earlier an Andrew Jackson admirer but a partisan Whig, later a zealous Democrat but a distruster of party as panacea.
Locally as nationally, this eccentric was on both sides of Slavepower strategies. At the 1851 convention, Wise deserted his own class only when elitists insisted on malapportionment in the House of Delegates. Dictatorship of the rich in the lower house, he urged, would “bring on an agrarian war of the poor against the wealth.” It would make slave property “odious.” It would usher in abolition.
A better way was to trust white commoners in the House of Delegates. “The people are not plunderers.” The aristocratic few, “those who attempt, through property, to seize on to political power, are the plunderers to be feared.” It is high time, soared Wise, to “bring the question home—shall money rule men or men rule money?”7 It is about time, responded Westerners, that an Easterner made some sense.
Easterners almost defeated Henry Wise’s mobocratic sense. On one roll call, anti-egalitarians fell only one vote short of giving wealth as much power as numbers in the tax-initiating lower house. But as in 1829, too many slaveholders from Jefferson’s western Piedmont and from the southern Valley, as well as too many Easterners from heavily nonslaveholding Tidewater cities and from Wise’s fisherman-dominated Accomac County defected. Splits in the slaveholding class and region gave western nonslaveholders a slight balance of power. So the convention opted for important elements of a (white man’s) egalitarian regime: universal white male suffrage, popular election of governors, and a one-white-man, one-vote lower house apportionment.
Yet if Henry Wise had prodded Old Virginia into the nineteenth century, his new populism clung to the expiring order. His minority East, with his blessing, retained 60% of the upper house, which would have to approve any tax bill initiated in the lower house. Moreover Wise’s tax-initiating House of Delegates, while a white man’s mobocracy in 1851, could not remain mobocratic. The House of Delegates’ apportionment was based on 1850 figures and frozen at that level for at least fifteen years.
The new constitution, again with Wise’s blessings, also froze taxes on slave property. Slaves over twelve could not be assessed for more than $300. Younger slaves could not be a basis for taxation. These provisions lowered slaveholders’ taxes in 1851. The constitutional $300 limit also prevented adjustment for slave prices, destined soon to skyrocket way over $1000 per “wench” or “boy.” No indirect abolition through soak-the-rich taxation could result.8
Under Wise’s leadership, to sum up convention results, Westerners won command of the tax-initiating House of Delegates. Then elitist republicans restrained egalitarians from confiscating rich folks’ fortunes. By 1860, Westerners were again calling the Virginia constitution a bulwark of reaction. Their angry fulminations—and their revolutionary actions—would demonstrate that in 1851, as in 1829 and 1832, Virginia rulers had only stalled off class and regional showdown.
No one could have convinced imperious Easterners that the compromising Henry Wise could stall off anything. To M. R. H. Garnett, upper-class hegemony demanded rulers determined to lord it over commoners. Garnett lamented that aristocratic domination had not been institutionally consolidated and brought to full upper-class consciousness. “This tendency to Radicalism,” he wrote William Henry Trescot of South Carolina, “is not natural in a slave-holding community.”9To which Henry Wise would have replied that a tendency towards reaction is not natural in an egalitarian republic.
Virginia, as usual, came down somewhere in the middle on those questions of elitist versus egalitarian strategy. Trescot, while rejoicing that one Virginian understand slavery’s implications, had to pick a quarrel even with Garnett. “You call yourself a democrat,” wrote back the South Carolinian. But “that word democrat … has betrayed the South. Southern slaveholders in their strange zeal to be good democrats have been untrue to themselves and their position.”10
Henry Wise had been frozen to no position. Ever after the Convention of 1851, Virginia’s newest hero would jump from extreme to extreme. Trying to sort out his forays, realizing ideological confusions and class-geographic conflicts which beset his class and commonwealth, no one could doubt that Monticello’s strained balances were relics. The ancien régime was ancient history. But where was the South’s “mother state” now heading?
2
The South Carolina aristocracy plunged into a simultaneous mid-century crisis grieving the loss of its guiding hand. Compassion tempered grief. When he died in March of 1850, John C. Calhoun was spared the agony of heart and lungs ravaged by bronchitis. He was also saved the futility of an old man who had outlived his time.
After the Civil War, careless commentators would claim that Calhoun’s ghost led the South to war. Contemporaries knew better. Few claimed Calhoun’s tradition during southern debates of the late 1850s. His last Senate speech and posthumously published masterpieces explain why. They reveal a man trapped in the 1830s.
Calhoun’s final senatorial scene almost seemed staged to dramatize man beaten by the clock. On March 4, 1850, he was half-dragged into the Senate chamber by none other than James Hamilton, Jr. Sugar Jimmy, Carolina’s brightest young star back in nullification times, had long since degenerated into a middle-aged salesman of Texas bonds11 After the frumpy Hamilton released the dying Calhoun into a chair, the old man sank, then gripped the wood. His clenching hands seemed drained of blood. His sweaty hair streamed erratically. His emaciated frame was wrapped in funereal flannels. Since he was too frail for speeches, he had passed his manuscript on to South Carolina colleague Andrew P. Butler. Since Butler’s eyesight was too weak, he had passed the speech on to James Mason of Virginia. South Carolina’s radicals, so often stymied by Middle South moderation, now needed a Virginia voice to be heard.
Those who closed their eyes and willed away incongruities could have believed they were hearing little Jimmy Hamilton in the golden days of ‘32. The issue, Calhoun had written, was not California or fugitive slaves. The problem was southern fear of the North’s permanent majority. The permanent minority must be given countervailing power. Otherwise, secession would ensue.12
A day later, Mississippi’s Henry S. Foote charged that Calhoun had issued a disunion ultimatum. The charge provoked a last explanation from the extremist who had ever sought to save South and Union too. Ultimatums about disunion, Calhoun told the Senate, were “not to be deduced from any language I used.” He had merely predicted that constitutional protection would alone stop secession.13
Before the month was out, Calhoun was no more. James Hammond, commissioned to deliver Charleston’s eulogy, caught his subject’s last and lifelong point perfectly. In recommending some sort of nullification instead of secession, declared the eulogist, “Mr. Calhoun was mainly influenced by that deep, long cherished, and I might almost say superstitious attachment to the Union, which marked every act of his career.”14
Since no other congressman of 1850 cared about a remedy lost in 1832–3, no one publicly inquired what constitutional amendments the dying leader desired. Nor did anyone ask Mr. Nullifier to explain away the old difficulty with his outmoded panacea. If the South could veto, how could national government avoid paralysis? The curious remained in suspense until 1854, when Calhoun’s mature political theory was posthumously published.
In his Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, a long exegesis on American national government, Calhoun urged two Presidents, one northern, one southern, each armed with an absolute veto. In his shorter, more theoretical, more famous Disquisition on Government, the Carolinian claimed that nullification would work because the best men would rule.15
Numerical mobocracies failed, explained Calhoun, because patronage invited the worst men to delude the rabble. Depraved politicians used “slander, fraud, and gross appeals to the appetites of the lowest.” With scum ruling the herd, democracy became a disaster. Minorities, being weakest, were victimized most. But campaigns for spoils “thoroughly debased and corrupted” the whole nation.
Under minority veto, dreamed Calhoun, excess taxes would be nullified. Patronage would dry up. Spoilsmen would seek a more lucrative occupation. Majority and minority, both interested in avoiding anarchy, would call disinterested patricians to fill the vacuum. The enlightened would prevail. Compromise would ensue. Union would endure.
There spoke the Carolina gentleman, disgusted with American parties and politicians, nostalgic for the English House of Lords, proud that his was the only American legislature which consolidated eighteenth-century elitist republicanism. But could South Carolina’s anti-spoilsmen “utopia” be transferred to nineteenth-century Washington? Those who read the Disquisition closely knew that Calhoun’s logic placed national government beyond redemption. Calhoun conceded that demagogues could always control mobocracies. He admitted that spoilsmen would never be wise or disinterested enough to compromise and thus avoid anarchy. Calhoun’s utopia depended on emptying the pork barrel so thoroughly that pols would retire and patriarchs would rule. Minority veto, he believed, would slice spoils. But would enough payoffs remain to attract politicos?
Modern national states, Calhoun despairingly answered, needed “large establishments, both civil and military.” Such irreducible patronage led irresistibly to “hostile parties and violent party conflict.” Such contests for “party triumph and ascendency” always overpowered “all regard for truth, justice, sincerity, and moral obligation.”
America’s most famous logician here locked himself into a logical trap. Whatever social interests would desire under government by nullification, demagogues after irreducible spoils would retain an interest in deluding the gullible. The worst would again rout the best. Compromise would become impossible. Anarchy, that “greatest of all evils,” would ensue. Even in the abstract world he loved to haunt, this most union-loving of Carolina autocrats could not save aristocratic republicanism within the national Union.
While Calhoun’s posthumous publication placed national republicanism beyond redemption, his farewell advice mocked his recent redemptive strategies. Back in the nullification era, Calhoun had believed that a do-nothing federal government would leave slaveholders safe. But in the age of Texas Annexation, Pearl Andrews and Lord Aberdeen taught the former advocate of federal hands-off that a southern-dominated federal government must lay protective hands all over vulnerable slaveholding outposts. Subsequently, Calhoun no less than the southern mainstream sought national power to salvage Slavepower. The ex-Nullifier demanded federal power in the North to stop slaves from fleeing border states and federal protection in the territories to entice slaveholders to distant provinces.
The leader’s final logic would have nullified his post-nullification triumphs. With their own President possessing a veto, Northerners could have axed Texas Annexation, stymied juryless fugitive extraditions, stopped territorial slave codes. The South would have been trapped with multiplying blacks, with no safety valve, and with an ever-greater chance of losing internal social control.
Calhoun the theorist never quite understood that as practical politician he had wielded his loathed majoritarian system to sustain his treasured minority’s control. The disjunction between the theorist without hope and the politico securing success is striking, especially because this abstracted leader was more pragmatically astute than most allies. Many Calhoun admirers were Disunionists. They could not understand why he believed slavery could be consolidated in the Union. More Calhounites were States’ Rights Whigs. They could not understand why he thought the Democratic Party might better protect slavery. Almost alone within his faction, Calhoun called the Jackson Party which Calhounites had left perhaps the best hope of securing protective slavery legislation.
Or to be more accurate, Calhoun sometimes saw that the Democratic Party might give the lie to his notion that a permanent national majority enslaved the minority South. An eighteenth-century patrician scornful of nineteenth-century parties could not relentlessly realize that a minority could command the nation’s majority party. So Calhoun spent a career storming in and out of the Jackson Party. Inside at the beginning, he moved outside to nullify, inside again to support Van Buren in 1840 and Texas annexation in 1844, outside again to oppose Polk’s war, still further outside to seek the Nashville Convention. Through it all, he called for a reorganization of national parties, then a recapture of the Democratic Party, a Southern Convention, then southern opposition within Democratic Party conventions, a saving new majority, then a veto of all majorities.
In the end, despite compromise tariffs and gag rules and Texas Annexation, this aging ideologue could not accept minority salvation within a spoilsmen’s party—within any partisan coalition. He would gut parties, handcuff federal power, nullify the century. His nullification would have canceled fifteen years when Slavepower wielded majorities.
John C. Calhoun was the early southern watchman, warning of abolitionists in ambush. By lending his prestige to nullification as a middle way, he gave South Carolina ultra views a saving respectability. By continuing agitation in the Gag Rule and Texas Annexation controversies, he helped edge the Lower South towards South Carolina. The momentum he initiated would someday result in revolution.
Still, those who initiate are not necessarily adept at producing conclusions. Nor do those who commence momentum necessarily like the direction in which that momentum veers. Calhoun exemplified the radical who seeks to save rather than to destroy and who never can adjust when less favored later solutions work better than cherished first remedies. The former Nullifier could only heap logic atop logic in futile efforts to make his most unworkable and most repudiated tactic come out right. To escape from their titan’s irrelevant nostalgia and seek a revolution he predicted and dreaded, South Carolina had to bury him with honors—and rush on past his grave.
3
Revolutions thrive on haste. Second thoughts are often sober thoughts. The revolutionary must strike before confidence falters. Immediately after Congress enacted the Armistice of 1850, South Carolinians were tempted to rush. The sellout, gentlemen told each other, threw down the gauntlet. The Union could no longer be suffered.
Langdon Cheves, another ancient Carolina warrior, displayed a revolutionary’s reasoning at the hapless second Nashville Convention in November, 1850.16 Cheves, delivering the only memorable oration at the irrelevant conclave, termed the national settlement a disaster. Cutting down the slave trade in Washington set a precedent for cutting off slave trading between states. Slicing off a third of enslaved Texas meant abolition within a state. Admitting free California meant David Wilmot had triumphed. Against this freesoil victory, what had the South gained? An unenforceable fugitive slave law and a payoff to surrendering Texans!
Why had southern congressmen helped fashion this disaster? Southern politicians, answered Langdon Cheves, were pols first and Southerners second. They valued party supremacy more than sectional safety. They would do anything for patronage, even sell out their homeland.
Armed with a permanent majority and facing a bribable minority, northern politicians, declared Cheves, could attack slavery wherever they desired. Freesoilers claimed to desire only non-extension of slavery. “If their views really went no farther than to pen it up within restricted limits, do they not thereby render it less profitable, less valuable, and more difficult of management?”
But fanaticism “has no stopping place.” Southern communities must “reap the storm.” Eventual racial holocausts would resemble “the sufferings, the massacre and the banishment, in poverty and misery, of the white proprietors of Hayti.” An abolitionized, scorched South would surrender to “some Emperor, bearing and exulting in the title of, perhaps, Cuffy the First.”
Secession alone could stave off Cuffee’s victory. Disunion risked war. But Americans welcomed war, Langdon Cheves recalled, in 1776 and 1812. Then as now, “it is a question of life and death, morally, politically, and physically.” We can “form one of the most splendid empires on which the sun has ever shown…. But submit! Submit! The very sound curdles the blood in my veins.”
So spoke the hot-blooded warrior, apparently incapable of submission. But Cheves also showed why Carolinians so often submitted. Single state secession, he fretted, would not work. During nullification times, Cheves had warned against going it alone. He had no wish to become a prophet twice vindicated. Secession by four or more states, he exulted, would succeed. Disunion by less, he lamented, involved too great a risk.
While Langdon Cheves in Nashville was showing that memories of nullification might cool Carolina blood, Governor Whitemarsh Seabrook, a wealthy rice planter and among the earliest Nullifiers, was secretly corresponding with other Deep South governors. His disunionist letters vindicated northern images of a Great Slavepower Conspiracy.
Let us again be clear about the Slavepower Conspiracy phenomenon. Ever since the last documentable disunion conspiracy, the James Hammond-Thomas Cooper-Beverley Tucker gag rule correspondence of 1835–6, Northerners had befogged the nature and significance of Southerners’ sporadic plotting. Yankees especially erred by calling the sporadic a constant. Unable to understand how the minority regularly secured majority legislation, Northerners imagined a sustained conspiracy to rule or ruin the majoritarian process.
This image of a South, united in abnormal conspiratorial control of democracy, missed everything important about the divided South, about normal democratic process, and about how and why southern conspiracies very occasionally operated. Southerners in the National Democratic Party, as the most powerful pressure group in the most powerful political party, usually obtained a typical democratic outcome: triumph of a minority better organized and more committed than silent majorities. The southern minority’s most resented victories, aimed at shoring up vulnerabilities at the South’s fringes, revealed a region not united in conspiracy but fearful of its own disunity.
The few southern disunionist conspirators stood especially disunited from mainstream southern notions that minority pressure could control majority legislation. To defy that consensus, Disunionists depended on South Carolina to precipitate a confrontation situation. But uneasy revolutionaries controlled that state. These gentlemen would likely require secret assurances from other states before they would again stand alone.
No secret assurances had preceded Carolina’s first solo adventure. Carolinians, having plunged into the Nullification Controversy without pledges of support, had lacked the confidence to push confrontation relentlessly far, despite signs that at least some states’ rights Southerners might revolt against coercion of secessionists. Memories of that nervous winter informed every subsequent Carolina strategy. Carolinians would never again strike without privately sounding out zealots in other states.
That psychological necessity led Beverley Tucker, in his mid-1830s novel, The Partisan Leader, to imagine conspiratorial planning between secessionists in various states about how and when each state would secede. Tucker helped make fantasy fact by joining the sole documentable pre-1850 southern conspiracy: the attempt to use Congressman James Hammond to secure a disunionist finale to the Gag Rule Controversy. The conspiracy went nowhere. Instead of making resignation from Congress an announced prelude to withdrawing from Union, Hammond merely left, with no public announcement.
In 1850, Governor Whitemarsh Seabrook’s attempt to pre-arrange a more successful revolutionary outcome started with secret efforts to encourage another state to play initiator. The governor claimed he feared South Carolina’s reputation as a hothead would stigmatize any Carolina-initiated revolution. He did not admit to Carolinians’ fear that they might never again dare jump first.
Seabrook began his secret plotting with the Lone Star State. Texans, he privately counseled Governor Peter H. Bell on September 11, 1850, should reject the national offer to assume the state debt, keep their territories, and defy the United States. If war resulted, South Carolina would pledge every aid—including “our full quota of men and money.” Seabrook envied Bell’s opportunity to “arrest the mad career of usurping rulers. Not only our liberty but our lives are in peril.”17
Texas, however, preferred to opt for peaceful millions from the United States rather than to start South Carolina’s civil war. So Seabrook explored alternative plots. Submission to the late sellout, he secretly wrote several Deep South governors on September 20, 1850, would make Southerners “forever mere dependencies of a great Central Head.” Despite the emergency, South Carolina had to move cautiously. But as soon as two or more governors gave evidence of determined resistance, in disregard of consequences, Seabrook would convene his legislature to “arrest the career of an interested and despotic majority.”18
Governor George W. Towns of Georgia, also eager for action, answered that South Carolina must hold back. Towns had called a Georgia convention to consider resistance. Election for delegates would transpire in early November 1850. Seabrook must not convene Carolina’s legislature before that time, warned Towns, for the reaction would “contribute largely” to our overthrow.19
South Carolinians were “clamorous” for instant action, Seabrook answered. But Carolina’s governor was “fully aware” that old Nullifiers’ “precipitate movement” might “ruin, perhaps the cause of the South.” He would postpone his legislature’s session until late November, after Georgia’s election.20
Revolutionary plotting with Georgia’s governor thus led South Carolina’s governor to lose two months before convening his legislature. Simultaneous plotting with Mississippi caused further delay when Carolina’s lawmakers finally met. On September 29, 1850, Mississippi Governor John Quitman answered Whitemarsh Seabrook’s secret inquiries with secret assurances. Quitman had called his legislature to convene on November 18. He would propose a state convention. “Having no hope of an effectual remedy for existing and prospective evils but in separation from the Northern States, my views of state action will look to secession.”21
On October 23, 1850, a month before South Carolina’s legislature would meet, Seabrook wrote to promise Quitman that should “your gallant commonwealth adopt the decisive course” you urge, we “will be found at her side.” South Carolinians were “ready and anxious for an immediate secession.” They held back only to avoid sabotaging the great movement. Seabrook prayed “that Mississippi will begin the patriotic work, and allow the Palmetto banner the privilege of a place in the ranks.” Seabrook’s legislative recommendations would depend “very much … on your suggestions”—and still more “on the action of your legislature.”22
Quitman answered South Carolina’s governor with a telegram on November 29, 1850. The Mississippi legislature, Quitman wired Seabrook, had called a state convention a year hence. Quitman’s follow-up letter three days later led Seabrook to exult that Carolina secessionists could “confidently rely” on the Mississsippi convention to initiate secession. “Your letter, discreetly used,” Seabrook wrote back, “had the salutory effect of checking the course of the impetuous.” The news that Mississippi would act “has enabled me to suspend the scheme of many prominent men of publicly avowing that in one year, if unaided by some other state at the time, South Carolina would withdraw from the confederacy.”23
Following guidelines of the Seabrook-Quitman secret understanding, Carolina’s legislature confined itself to mechanisms for seconding Mississippi. The legislature called a southern congress to meet in January 1852, several weeks after Mississippi’s convention. If only Mississippi came, so be it. A South Carolina convention was authorized, although its date for convening was to be set later. The legislature gave Seabrook a third of a million dollars to arm the state in the interim. His secret correspondence, Seabrook congratulated himself, had at last pointed Carolina towards responsible revolutionary strategy.24
Within three months, Quitman informed Carolinians that the plot had backfired. Quitman had overestimated Mississippi’s revolutionary zeal. His state, “alarmed by the imaginary evils of an unknown future, may recoil and pause.” South Carolina must “take the lead and confidently act for herself.” In a showdown between Carolina and the United States, Mississippi would join her Deep South sister. “Soon all the adjoining states would follow.” Then Border South states, who would “never abandon the present Union unless forced,” would be coerced into choosing between North and South.25
Quitman here displayed the way a different plot might have yielded a different scenario. Revolutionaries in less flammable areas, Quitman realized too late, must encourage more fiery regions to provoke confrontation, for the less fiery might never dare. In the fall of 1850, advice to shun initiatives had helped give fiery but reluctant Carolinians a patriotic rationale to break stride. Now the Carolina legislature would not meet until November 1851. That delay would give Carolina hotspurs time to remember nullification and watch sluggish neighbors repudiate secession. Momentum, that revolutionary treasure, had evaporated. The conspiracy of 1850–1 had helped make revolution less likely.
Still, these Carolina conspirators would not necessarily have dared depart the Union even if Quitman had earlier encouraged them. Conspiracy is a weapon rather than a panacea. The weapon’s use speaks volumes about conspirators’ mentality, and the conspiracy of 1850–1 highlighted Jacobins’ prayer that someone else would leap first. South Carolina gentlemen were nothing if not edgy revolutionaries; and no one scolded Whitemarsh Seabrook for jamming on brakes to see if someone else would accelerate, any more than many Carolina radicals had damned Calhoun in 1833 for negotiating on the non-negotiable. In the fall of 1850, South Carolinians had acted like South Carolinians in displaying revolutionary mania. Governor Seabrook had been equally Carolinian in plotting to place Carolina revolutionaries in a temporary straitjacket—and in conspiring to slip keys over to saner states.
4
In 1850–1, Georgia’s electorate outraced Mississippi’s to the pleasure of pronouncing Whitemarsh Seabrook a madman.26 Georgia’s Unionists came to the fall 1850 campaign for choosing delegates to a state convention armed with the national settlement as a soothing solution. They also possessed a trio of leaders who almost cornered the spectrum of southern heroes.
Howell Cobb had never expected to fight for anything side by side with Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs. Little Alec and Dashing Bobby, leaders of young Georgia Whigs, had spent many an evening ridiculing Fatty Cobb, leader of the Georgia Democratic Party. But after Northern Whig intransigence over the Fugitive Slave Law, the Lower South world of Democrats versus Whigs was cracking apart. Georgia’s young Whigs, in danger of becoming politicians without a party, hoped a new Unionist Party might replace old Democratic or Whig institutions. Cobb’s strategy differed. He hoped that a temporary unionist coalition would be Whigs’ bridge to the permanent Democratic Party.
Cobb, Stephens, and Toombs epitomized more than the old Whig-Democratic battlefield. The Georgia triumvirate also provided classic versions of southern leadership types. Fatty Cobb, richly married to a Lamar, comfortably an insider in Washington, was the quintessence of the man under attack who seeks clubby union with his tormentors. Like John Slidell of Louisiana and Benjamin Fitzpatrick of Alabama, he disliked breaking up anything to do with power, ease, prominence. He helped make the South count in Washington’s inner circle.27
Stephens, small and unhealthy, personified the provincial, defensively apart. Like James Hammond of South Carolina and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, he usually remained too far above the crowd to seize, direct, conquer. He customarily posed as an icy statue of angry integrity.28
Toombs was the Southerner as medieval knight. Hale and handsome, fond of wine and fleshpots, he was a hothead somersaulting between extremes. He transformed defensiveness into aggressiveness with blinding parries and thrusts. Like Henry Wise of Virginia and Pierre Soulé of Louisiana, he rarely stood still long enough for followers to line up behind him. He secured admiration for his impulsive and dashing forays.29
The outsider as insider, the crippled provincial as isolated ideologue, the flamboyant cavalier as charging defender—a society under attack naturally produced and adored this triumvirate. Only one character was missing to make an all-inclusive quartet. The Georgia triumvirate lacked the revolutionary who remorselessly bores from within.
That commodity was in short supply everywhere in the South—and nowhere to be found in Georgia. The Empire State, as Georgia appropriately called itself, was too busy building its empire. In 1850, the southern cotton economy at last turned the corner, moving from hard times since the Panic of 1837 to a decade of prosperity. Southwestern secessionists had to bring off that difficult revolution, the one amidst a prospering people.
An improving economy, a seductive compromise, a splendid triumvirate—Georgia’s radicals took a look and fled. The debate over secession had barely begun before so-called Disunionists were complaining about being misnamed. They favored not smashing the country but resisting the congressional sellout. They could resist through economic non-intercourse, or another southern convention, or further congressional redress. Self-named Unionists, Resisters insisted, should be named Submissionists. Only southern traitors would submit to such anti-southern legislation.30
Little Alec and friends were not disposed to become another casualty of southern loyalty politics. Nor were Unionists inclined to let Disunionists change names. Day in and day out, campaigning across much of Georgia, Toombs, Stephens, and Cobb warned against secession. Unionists kept attacking apparently vanished secessionists in part because they knew that Disunionist was a more damning label than Resister.
Unionists also persisted out of sincere belief that Resisters remained at heart Disunionists. Their largely false suspicions indicated again how deeply the role-playing, Cuffee-like image infested southern thought. Every Southerner who spoke from any angle on mid-century slavery issues indirectly testified that slaves had helped mold masters to see duplicity as the essence of human relationships.
Granted, Stephens wrote a fellow spirit, our “more sagacious and cunning” foes pretend to be “for some sort of resistance under the Constitution.” They deceptively urge that “an act of Nonintercourse” would be “peaceful and effectual.” They knew better. Their real object “is to get the state to take a step that will lead to disunion.”31
By making the Disunionist label stick no matter where ultras hid, Stephens and company brought off an electoral landslide. Unionists won a virtual monopoly of December 1850 Georgia convention seats. The convention’s famous Georgia Platform declared future disunion desirable if southern rights were violated. But delegates also hailed the congressional settlement of 1850 as no such violation. Only 19 of 256 representatives voted against that sentiment.32
Nine months later Howell Cobb ran for governor on the platform that secession was illegal as well as inexpedient. Rebellion, declared Cobb, could never be lawful and could only be justifiable when natural rights were horribly violated. Georgia voters affirmed that notion too by awarding Cobb another sweeping triumph. Toombs, who thought Cobb was taking a good thing a bit far, still participated in victory. Dashing Bobby snatched old man John Berrien’s senatorial seat. The South’s Empire State, for the umpteenth time in its adolescent history, had snubbed its nose at creaking Carolina.33
Mississippi showed more respect for southeastern elders. Mississippi’s Resistance Party also had to contend with the so-called compromise and an improving economy. But along the deltas and bayous of the South’s most fabled river, ultras possessed an advantage compared with Georgia Resisters. No triumvirate of statesmen here called the Armistice of 1850 honorable. Rather, the great culture heroes, from Governor John Quitman and Senator Jefferson Davis down to lesser lights, almost unanimously called the settlement a sellout.34
John Quitman began the Mississippi drive for resistance with a classic fire-eater’s oration.35 The governor told Mississippi’s lawmakers on November 18, 1850, that he had called them into special session to combat a “deep political intrigue.” Yankee fanatics moved against slavery under camouflage. The so-called Compromise of 1850, a “stupendous plot,” secured the Wilmot Proviso “in another form.” Such “false, hollow, and deceptive” attacks, unless decoded and resisted, would “seal our doom.”
Quitman called Yankee sneak attack ominous because Southerners lacked commitment to see through the disguise. Slavery was “a delicate interest.” Vague hostility killed it. After “interferences, agitations, disturbances, and injurious” laws, “a sense of political degradation sets in,” followed by “decay of spirit” and “deterioration of public morals, not a little promoted by the demoralizing … temptations to treachery, held out by the splendid patronage of the Federal Government.” Demoralized slaveholders, bribed to submit to camouflaged attack, faced “a shaky, lingering, distempered, and precarious existence.”
The Mississippi governor called territorial expansion of slavery spiritually no less than practically vital. California, lamented Quitman, could have enabled Southerners to shuck doubt. Slaves could have made California mines hum, California ports boom, California soil yield cotton. Slaveholders could have emerged “confident in the future.”
Instead, Congress had bribed Texans to rejoice in their state’s mutilation. Slave auctions had been declared too revolting for the nation’s capital. California had been pronounced free. In other Mexican Cession territories, Popular Sovereignty, that ambiguous nonsolution, would create doubt about slavery’s future and therefore keep slaveholders away. The so-called compromise thus announced that however “slavery districts may be crowded with population,” the region “is to be hedged in by a wall of fire.”
Governor Quitman urged a state convention and an ultimatum. The state must demand that Southerners receive half the territories and massive constitutional guarantees. Failure was “probable.” Secession should follow.
Most Mississippi ultras could have strangled the governor for declaring disunion probable. Mississippi’s Resistance Party sought less a policy than an attitude; and a policy of disunion frightened away an attitude of resistance. If the South grew confident in itself, aware of northern deceptions and united in resistance, Northerners would cease and desist. If southern submission continued to breed deceit, divisions, disloyalty, Yankees would creep ahead.
Quitman’s opponents denied that submission to compromise connoted disloyalty. What was conspiratorial about Texans accepting millions for a disputed boundary? And why couldn’t Washingtonians join residents of John Quitman’s home town in securing happy relief from dismal slave auctions? “More than twenty years ago,” noted one of Quitman’s prominent neighbors, Natchez by law drove its slave mart out of the city. “Why not drive it from Washington city as well? All admit it is not a pleasant sight to see.” Quitman, concluded that Natchez citizen, had better realize that “the true patriot knows ‘no South, no North, but my country and my whole country.’” In that spirit, Mississippi’s Unionists enlisted for another round of loyalty politics. They would pin the term “traitor” on the appropriate tail.36
Much to the Resistance Party’s embarrassment, no cloth was broad enough to cover Governor Quitman’s derriere. The campaign for convention delegates ran concurrently with Quitman’s campaign for re-election, although the gubernatorial election would transpire two months later. The governor’s opponent, United States Senator Henry S. Foote, let no one forget what the chief Resister had proclaimed “probable.” Quitman, warned Foote, etched a self-portrait when describing how abolitionists played roles. The governor, Cuffee-like, moved indirectly and undercover towards a revolution he no longer openly discussed.37
Foote knew his man. At the very time most Mississippi Resisters were sincerely seeking more aggressive southern campaigns in the Union, Governor Quitman was secretly plotting disunion with South Carolinians.38 Almost all other leaders of the Mississippi Resistance Party, aware that Quitman was indeed the conspirator Foote painted, wished their leader would vanish. At their June 1851 nominating convention, they sought to secure Quitman’s resignation from the gubernatorial race. When Quitman persisted, the party conclave threw a disguising platform around the candidate. The nominating convention declared secession rightful and the so-called compromise a disaster. But Mississippi should not exercise “the right of secession … under existing circumstances.”
Thereafter, Resistance Party newspapers and orators endlessly denied they sought disunion. They demanded “disapproval of the Compromise” and affirmation of “the right of secession.” They had furthered the right resistance tactic when they called the Nashville Convention. They believed that more southern conventions might save South and Union.39
It was to no avail. Mississippi voters, sensing that John Quitman’s candidacy involved more dangerous salvations, gave Henry Foote’s Unionist Party a 57% popular vote majority in the September election for convention delegates. Quitman faced a similar debacle in the November governor’s election. The governor, now aware he was killing resistance, retreated to Natchez and temporary retirement. He resigned with characteristic flourish, first picking a fistfight with Foote.40 The staggering Resistance Party asked an ailing, reluctant Jefferson Davis to step in.
The substitute was better cast than the original. Davis had been author of the Resistance Party’s June Platform, calling secession inexpedient. But Davis would not allow a Union shared with Yankee enemies and border neutrals to deter the Lower South from resistance. Jefferson Davis’s campaign against Henry Foote continued his senatorial onslaught against Henry Clay. “In an evil hour,” Davis had written his personal physician two years earlier, “some of the most distinguished of southern statesmen admitted that slavery was an evil. This … takes from us all ground of defense.” Northerners, aware of shaky southern opinions, do not believe that southern citizens “with any approach to unanimity will… maintain the doctrines which their representatives have contended for in Congress.” Past “error” must be corrected “in time” to impress the North, “save the constitutional rights of the South, and preserve our Union.”41
In September of 1851, Davis believed time yet remained. But the Lower South needed to see through the sellout and seize the offensive. The Mississippi Resistance Party, Davis hoped, might whip up healthier attitudes for the next fight in the Union. Submission, on the other hand, would signal the North that Henry Clay might after all speak for the South.
While Davis was continuing his senatorial campaign against Clay, Mississippi’s other senator seemed to swerve from senatorial forays. Henry S. Foote, Davis’s opponent for governor, had lately sought to divide California at the 35°30′ line. Foote had then derided northern determination to possess every golden hill. So why not join Jefferson Davis in resistance, albeit resistance short of John Quitman’s conspiratorial disunionism?
Henry Foote had no trouble making his zig square with his zag: while a southern chance for a piece of California would have made the Compromise of 1850 more desirable, he said, the Fugitive Slave Law made the settlement acceptable. That rationale could not cover Foote’s gyrations. The Mississippian had moved in a matter of weeks from leading a provocative assault on southern California to leading a soothing campaign against resisting or resenting the loss.
The impulsive Foote spent a career denying that such statecraft was the soul of inconsistency. He was not alone among southern firebrands in protesting overly much on this point. While consistency was hardly the rule in northern politics, the southern milieu nourished more than its share of dashing, darting, Foote-like characters. Bobby Toombs in Georgia, Henry Wise in Virginia, James Hammond in South Carolina—they were all like Foote in being provocative southern knights one moment, soothing anti-provocationists the next. The prominence of such erratic leaders illuminated a culture unsure of its way.
Foote’s latest mercurial effort indicated again that loss of the Golden State did not quite touch southern uneasiness at its source. While southern California could theoretically have been a southern boon economically, politically, and psychologically, the region was too remote to inspire section-wide intransigence. The essential southern safety valves were all up close against slaveholder soil: Missouri, Texas, Kansas, and just across the Gulf, Cuba. Foote’s decision to go after some distant golden hills, but then not keep going after them and after them, reflected the dominant southwestern mood: that so-called Compromise of 1850 was not quite a life and death matter.
Jefferson Davis shrewdly sustained that mood by urging Southerners to resist but not go to war over the alleged compromise. Still, the future Confederate president could not quite overturn Foote’s September 57% landslide over Quitman. Foote hung on to 51% of the vote in November. A bitter Davis, ironically convinced his career was over, accurately explained his narrow defeat. John Quitman had gone “too fast and too far, the public became alarmed, and the reaction corresponded with the action.”42 Several days after Davis was defeated, the Mississippi state convention completed the reaction by voting 73–17 to concur with Georgia that secession was “utterly unsanctioned by the Federal Constitution.” Disunion, being “revolution,” demanded more extreme provocation than the settlement of 1850.43
Those words finalized South Carolina’s isolation. The non-Carolina Lower South had repudiated lawful secession in theory and practice. Victorious Fatty Cobbs were in command. Vanquished Jefferson Davises could not rally resistance even inside the Union. After months of watching Mississippi and Georgia demonstrate that Southwesterners wished to make money rather than a revolution, would South Carolina ultras now care to clamber out on a revolutionary limb?
6
Apparently! In May of 1851, an extra-legal conclave of South Carolina’s most important leaders, 450 strong, met in Charleston and announced for secession. “If it be our fate to be left alone in the struggle,” publicly resolved these precipitators, “alone we must vindicate our liberty by secession.” One of the meeting’s more prominent participants, D. F. Jamison, future president of the 1860 South Carolina Secession Convention, privately explained that he preferred to risk “chaos than submit with folded arms” to an “appalling” racial “destiny” akin “to the fate of St. Domingue.”44
This extra-legal meeting felt to participants like a break out of jail. In the late spring of 1851, Carolina revolutionaries felt released from their hesitant history and their hesitant selves. Their confrontation crisis would make all the South like Carolina—or else seal off Carolina from the corrupting universe.
These squires’ mid-century view of the world featured corruption everywhere sneaking towards their mecca. Up in the Border South, slavery was spread too thin. Over in the Southwest, slavery’s lesson was heeded to superficially. An egalitarian republic antithetical to an inegalitarian institution fostered mobocracy, thus demagogues, thus spoils, thus party politicians dedicated to deluding the southern masses. Yankees, understanding that stealth could conquer the deluded, now sought only far-off territorial outposts. When Southerners momentarily awakened, freesoilers would momentarily pause. When slaveholders paid no heed, the enemy would draw “closer around us.”
Southern leaders failed to sound the alarm about distant encirclement, continued this secessionist diagnosis, because “the price of federal honors is treason to the South.” With “federal gold and office” turning southern politicians’ eyes “on the national crib,” “a host of enemies will spring up in the very midst of us, that will more endanger our institutions than all our enemies from abroad.” Already, Delaware is “to all intents and purposes” a free labor state, and Maryland and Kentucky are “fast losing their hold upon our institutions.”
And what were South Carolinians doing about this incremental weakening? Hemorrhaging masters and slaves towards the corrupted South! Losing confidence in their ability to resist insidious encirclement! We must strike now, demanded Carolina secessionists, lest we sink into the morass forever.45
Carolina revolutionaries envisioned two purifying scenarios after they struck alone. Perhaps the United States would wish them good riddance and bar Carolina blacks and whites from crossing the border. Wonderful! South Carolina would then hemorrhage no more cash to Washington and no more slaves to Mississippi. Her citizens would stay home, perfect patriarchal republicanism, and make Carolina another Venice.46
Or perhaps the United States would declare war after South Carolina declared itself a nation. Wonderful! As one secessionist privately explained that delicious prospect to another, Yankee coercion would drive Southerners “to rally around So. Carolina.” We “will form a nucleus for a glorious Confederacy. Don’t you think so?”47
The question hung like humidity in the thick tropical air. In the long hot summer of 1851, with Mississippi turning against John Quitman, memories of going it alone in nullification times seemed more daunting than ever. The Carolina elite hardly had time to celebrate the May 1851 jailbreak from doubt before some revolutionaries broadcast renewed qualms. Dissenters resolved to turn an October 1851 Carolina election into a referendum on secession. They plunged oligarchic Carolina into a state-wide mobocratic campaign over an issue for the first time since nullification.48
These opponents of Separate State Secession portrayed Robert Barnwell Rhett and fellow precipitators as hosts preparing a party after guests had rejected the invitation. Carolina’s intended charge after Georgia and Mississippi had retreated would look like dictation. Self-respecting slaveholders would not slavishly obey Carolina after deciding against secession for themselves.
Opponents of Separate State Secession envisioned another, not-so-wonderful finale to a confrontation crisis. In 1832, Jackson had collected nullified tariffs in offshore federal forts. In 1851, federal naval vessels drifting miles from the city could blockade Charleston. If Carolina desperadoes could somehow outfit a ship and chug out to fight, they would be routed, drowned, disgraced. We would be, warned James Hammond, “like Man in the Cage—the laughing stock of heaven and earth.”49 South Carolina’s exports, blockaded from being sold abroad, would pile up, unused, useless. Slaves, barred from being sold across the Carolina border to the foreign nation of the United States, would multiply and become as worthless as unsold exports. Whites, preferring New World bonanza to a worse than Old World Calcutta, would flee southwest faster than ever. Whites remaining in trapped Carolina would face racial holocaust. And secession was supported to stop strangulation by a freesoil noose!50
The plea that Separate State Secession was madness passed for moderation in South Carolina. Yet Carolina’s moderation would have been mania anywhere else in the mid-century South. Opponents of Separate State Secession, calling themselves Cooperative State Secessionists, would leave the Union as soon as other state(s) would cooperate. The Cooperative State Secession name measured the cavern between Carolina and the Southwest. Ultras in Mississippi and Georgia, fleeing the fatal label Secessionists, called themselves Resisters. Carolina opponents of ultraism were glad to be labeled Secessionists, so long as Cooperation be added to the name.
In 1851, the most famous Cooperationist pamphleteer, John Townsend, argued for disunion with a skill equal to any Separate State Secessionist’s.51Townsend, a lowcountry planter, distinguished between two northern enemies. A few open abolitionists mounted frontal assault. The rest, secret abolitionists, deployed disguised siege. “The soft spoken free soiler,” warned Townsend, “is on a par with the most brawling and fanatic abolitionist: only that the former is more to be dreaded; since with his … plausible ‘compromises,’ which he knows are deceitful, he lulls us into security, and then stupifies us into non-resistance!”
Role-playing Northern freesoilers bribed Southerners to play roles. “As the North becomes stronger … traitors to the South will become more numerous among her public men; and the breed of the Badgers, and the Bentons, the Bells, the Houstons, and the Footes will fearfully multiply…. We shall be betrayed and weakened, by desertion from our ranks.”
The settlement of 1850, continued John Townsend, was the latest instance of fakers North and South hemming in slavery with imperceptible precision. Every such “compromise” had to be treated as disguised abolition. Otherwise, slaveholders would wake up one morning and find themselves penned up in a demoralizingly small area. Better to see through distant deceits now than “when our strength shall have diminished, our allies deserted us, and the spirit of our people crushed and discouraged.‘”
Still, John Townsend opposed Carolina seceding alone. He wanted to lay eyes on “The Mighty Nation of the Southern United States,” not on “The Little Nation of South Carolina.” Others wished to make Carolina another Venice. They forget “that Venice is, at this very moment, under the iron heel of Austrian soldiery.”
While the lowcountry’s Townsend was rivaling Robert Barnwell Rhett’s Separate State Secessionists in explaining why the settlement of 1850 demanded disunion, the upcountry’s James L. Orr, another prominent Cooperationist, was outdoing Rhett as tactician of revolution.52 Orr called cooperation “the panacea for all our ills.” He had “no hope” of cooperating with Upper South “grain or tobacco growing regions.” If Carolina waited for Virginia, “all is lost.” The Deep South must instead provoke a confrontation and present to Virginia and apologizing border slavocrats “the alternative of rallying under the banner of the Free or Slave States.” One seceding state, however, would be blockaded, strangled, ruined. Successful confrontation politics required “two of the Slave States, acting harmoniously and in conjunction.”
Separate State Secessionists answered that no other state dared. Cooperationists retorted that revolutions take time. “We ask our people to study the history of the American Revolution,” urged C. G. Memminger. Some colonies wished to revolt in 1765. They wisely restrained their ardor for a decade, until the rest caught up. Better triumphant disunion in 1860 than abortive secession ten years too soon.53
To appease fire-eaters who could not wait, Cooperationists had at their disposal James Hammond’s, or rather Thomas Cooper’s, blueprint for nonrevolutionary revolution. Fifteen years after the conspiracy of 1835–6, Hammond at last publicized the revolutionary strategy Professor Cooper had secretly counseled. South Carolina, the Hammond of 1851 recommended, should be “in but not of the Union.” Carolinians should refuse to go to Congress. They should refuse to participate in presidential elections. They should refuse to accept federal appropriations. Semi-secession by nonviolent nonparticipation should come hand in glove with “avowals that we are ready to go further if any will go with us.” In preparation for going further, a Carolina navy should be constructed. The state could thus provide a disinterested moral example, prepare for others to enlist, and avoid the deadly blockade facing those who secede without frigates.54
Hammond feared that federal frigates offshore might induce “a complete Revolution here.” Mountaineers at Carolina’s upper fringes could use abortive disunion and social chaos to “change the Government and I fear the whole character of the State.”55 For evidence of that specter, Hammond had only to point to his Cooperative State Secession alliance. Lowcountry and upcountry slaveholding reactionaries led the opposition to Separate State Secession. But upcountry nonslaveholding reformers also fought Disunionists.
The reformers’ kingdom was Carolina’s northernmost, quasi-mountainous belt of counties. The leading spirit was Benjamin F. Perry, editor of The Southern Patriot. The Patriot’s incessant line was that patriotism to the South included loyalty to the Union. Union-busters, said Perry, were a Carolina minority. To block Union-breakers, Perry demanded majority rule at home.
Perry’s statistical proof of minority rule in Carolina made egalitarians wince. Twenty percent of Carolina’s white population, residing near the coast, controlled 40% of the House and 50% of the Senate. Fifty percent of the white population, residing nearer the northerly mountains, elected but 33% of the House and 25% of the Senate. Gerrymandering, claimed Perry, would enable one-third of the white population to break up a Union which two-thirds of white Carolinians supported. That absurdity could “not be tolerated by freemen.” Slaveholders who demand “equality from the Federal Government,” Perry warned, must first “give it to citizens of their own state.” Virginia’s issue had come to South Carolina.56
Benjamin F. Perry’s egalitarianism, so much like Henry Wise’s, was water and gruel compared with the King Numbers tirade of “Brutus,” author of the most anti-elitist pamphlet circulating in the state in 1851. Oligarchy in South Carolina, said “Brutus,” exists “to guard and secure the interests of the large rice and cotton planters. The interests of men who have to work with their hands are entirely unprotected.” Disunion, blockade, chaos, all disastrous to lower-class interests, must at last arouse class consciousness and class revolution. Poor men must teach “masters of overgrown plantations that we cannot always endure.”57
Those limits of endurance showed that the lightly enslaved, yeoman-dominated corner of the upper upcountry could not be treated too outrageously. An upper-class split over whether to secede alone dared not ignore calls for lower-class resistance. In South Carolina in 1851, after the whole South had accepted the Compromise, Carolinians for defiance were hopelessly squeezed between angry nonslaveholders and worried reactionaries.
Given such towering obstacles to revolution within and without, secessionist rice and sea island cotton planters demonstrated anew that theirs was the South’s wackiest corner by sweeping all but one lowcountry rural parish on election day in October 1851. In Charleston and almost all noncoastal rural areas, however, voters overwhelmed immediate secessionists. Anti-secessionist majorities at the state’s upper fringes were especially whopping. In the whole state, Cooperationists captured six of seven congressional districts and almost two-thirds of the vote.58 William H. Trescot, who had lately bemoaned M. R. H. Garnett’s Virginia defeats, now mourned a similar disaster closer to home. The popular verdict, he despaired to Garnett, indicates that in South Carolina no less than in the Old Dominion, “democracy will kill slavery as it has destroyed every other conservative institution.”59
Carolina’s defeated secessionists had one ploy left. The Trescots knew that between James Hammond and Benjamin F. Perry loomed as large a disagreement as divided any two men in America. James Hammond, the Cooperative State Secessionist, and Robert Barnwell Rhett, the Separate State Secessionist, were both elitists and ex-Nullifiers. They had more in common with each other than either had with Perry, egalitarian and Unionist supreme. Accordingly, after the election, the Separate State Secessionists’ Maxcy Gregg offered to throw his party’s support behind Hammond’s plan: South Carolinians should secede not from federal Union but from federal offices. Hammond joyously saluted Gregg’s acceptance of Cooper’s old way to “calculate the value of the Union.”60
It was too late for joy. A revolution careening backward, no less than a revolution surging forward, develops a momentum of its own. In 1852, when the South Carolina convention finally met, public opinion had retreated past Hammond’s plan and craved no secession at all. Robert Barnwell Rhett, forced to resign from the United States Senate, was reduced to flailing editorials in the Charleston Mercury. James Hammond, turned down for Rhett’s seat, was left to fume in his swamp.
By 1852, Hammond’s generation of Carolina ultras, having trained for revolutionary races ever since Professor Cooper pointed out the finish line, looked suspiciously like the nag who had been too often to the post. “The whole world,” whimpered William J. Colcock, “is against us, and I fear it will not be very long before we will find numerous abolitionists in our midst, who have kept silent hitherto from fear, but who will now be emboldened openly to advocate their sentiments.”61 The elegant William Henry Trescot, as always, dissolved whine in wit. Our “late election,” he wrote, “determines that South Carolina, for better or worse, goes with the South. Previous elections have determined that the South, for better or worse, goes with the Union. And if you know whither that is going, in pity to a somewhat alarmed passenger, do tell me.”62
7
For clues, Trescot had only to look upstate from Charleston. Into the leadership void created by Calhoun’s death and the oligarchy’s debility stepped a new-style American politico. James L. Orr, congressman from Benjamin F. Perry’s upland area, was a pragmatic opportunist with a message for every season. In late unpleasant times when revolution had been all the rage, the Cooperationist had offered Rhett lessons in revolutionary tactics. With Rhett’s remedy now defeated, Orr advised Carolinians to re-enter the National Democratic Party.63
Orr had had enough of revolutionaries too frightened to revolt. He could not abide any more of “the folly and absurdity of this transcendental isolation.” A nation had to be governed. An institution had to be saved. His state wished to influence. The National Democratic Party was triumphant. It was time to join the American chase.64
Orr wanted Carolina politicians drinking with old southern boys at Democratic Party conventions. He wanted Carolina congressmen puffing cigars in congressional caucuses. He wanted South Carolina citizens voting in presidential elections. Carolina plebeians should enjoy campaign hoopla. Carolina politicians should feast on federal spoils. And James L. Orr should become Speaker of the House—until he could claim residence at the White House.
No one could escape the drift of this new menace. Orr was a South Carolina Fatty Cobb. He would import the whole federalizing, compromising, Union-loving, party-worshipping game into a state affecting to loath the stuff. Orr was also a South Carolina Henry Wise. He would save oligarchy by at least pretending to practice egalitarian republicanism. With Orr at the helm, South Carolina might become compromising Virginia—or worse, some uncompromising mobocracy.
Virginia’s Convention of 1851 was too recent a trauma and James L. Orr was too ominously like Wise for the battered Carolina regime, especially in the lowcountry, to acquiesce without a struggle. In 1855, Orr’s presidential election notions were defeated in the Carolina senate after passing the house. But Orr’s optimistic dynamism mocked Trescot’s paralyzing preciousness. The Orr faction commanded a third of the state. The Orr ideology seemed in tune with the time. With lowcountry revolutionaries having shot themselves in the foot and a patronage-hungry upcountry federalizer the healthiest warrior around, how could Cooper’s students keep Cooper’s cause from dying with a whimper?
8
No one in demoralized Carolina offered an answer. But a devoted deserter belatedly pointed to a viable strategy. William Lowndes Yancey, scion of an illustrious lowcountry family and named after William Lowndes, that luminous lowcountry saint, had long since moved to Alabama. In 1848, Yancey had acted like a Carolinian. He had marched out of the National Democratic Party Convention. One Southerner had followed.65
After the Armistice of 1850, Yancey’s Alabama faction suffered the typical fate of extremists who would be Carolinians in the Southwest. Yanceyites retreated from secession to resistance. Unionists warned resistance was a ploy. The electorate bought the warning. Yancey’s ultra views were defeated at the polls.66
Yancey continued to sound like a Carolinian. Both Democratic and Whig parties, he proclaimed in a public letter on May 10, 1851, have “heretofore preyed upon the vitals” of secession movements. But “Union issues of party policy cannot long attract popular attention.” Abolitionism would increase. Southern outrage would escalate. National parties would falter. Southern resistance would become more viable.
Resisters accordingly should shun national parties and perfect a local faction. “Every fresh aggression on the part of the general government, tending to irritate and excite the South, will find an organized party whose ranks will inevitably be swelled.” Yancey’s nucleus, “fully disciplined and fully prepared,” would someday save the South. Thomas Cooper’s old plan was alive in Alabama.67
Within the year, Yancey had seen Carolina’s folly. Yancey’s Alabama nucleus sought to nominate a states’ rights presidential ticket in 1852. Yancey balked. The Democratic Party’s Franklin Pierce, he urged, would protect slavery better than the Whig Party’s Winfield Scott. More important, southern warriors were massing in the Democratic Party. A commander must not secede from the troops. Better to rejoin and guide than to stand insultingly aloof from potential followers.68
The Yancey who came back bore little relation to rival Democratic Party chieftains. His was not the spirit of Fatty Cobb, eager to be clubby in congressional caucuses. He was no Jefferson Davis, certain a properly aggressive South could control the Union. He scorned the way of James L. Orr, playing whichever cards were dealt.
Yancey would cooperate with Southern Democrats now. Then they might cooperate with him later. He would push, push, push, testing whether the National Democracy could obtain southern demands. If Southern Democrats prevailed, he would remain a Democrat. If Southern Democrats failed, they might follow an extremist who had fought their good fight.
Yancey understood why Charleston squires sniffed at his plunge into an egalitarian institution. Elitists left behind in South Carolina were out of touch with the nouveau South. Only a Carolinian become a Southwesterner could seek a more radicalized South inside the Democracy, the Southwest’s favorite alternative to disunion. Playing National Democrat was admittedly playing with fire—or, more accurately, aiding and abetting politicians determined to control fire-eaters. But within this ever-more dominant power structure, dreamed this ex-Carolinian, a southern extremist might still rule or ruin the establishment.