The Minds of the South
By MICHAEL O'BRIEN NY TIMES
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Early 1861 found the 23-year-old Henry Adams in Washington, working as the private secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, a representative from Massachusetts. Adams was a keen observer even at that early age, and he focused much of his attention on the Southern political delegations going through the throes of secession. To Adams, the Southerners were little more than madmen. In a Jan. 8 letter to one of his brothers, he wrote, “I do not want to fight them … They are mad, mere maniacs, and I want to lock them up till they become sane; not kill them. I want to educate, humanize, and refine them, not send fire and sword among them.”
Such stereotypes, though, ran counter to the way most Southerners saw themselves. To them, they were among the best and the brightest of their time: they read and wrote political philosophy, they studied statistics, they took an interest in sociology, they travelled and kept up with the latest European trends and they were fastidious Biblical and classical scholars. Above all, they had regularly produced philosophically adept politicians, not only in the earliest generation (Thomas Jefferson, James Madison) and in the middle generation (John C. Calhoun), but in the generation that opted for secession. To them the decision to secede was not rash, but rational, the result of reasoned discussion. On Feb. 18, 1861, the South Carolinian diarist Mary Chesnut wrote, “This southern Confederacy must be supported now by calm determination — & cool brains,” and she did not doubt that the decision to leave the Union evidenced a coolness of calm judgment.
She was not wrong. Historical evidence abounds that Southerners were not stupid or close–minded, let alone mad, but rather as capable of well-informed analysis as anyone else (though also as capable of making the wrong analysis). For good or ill, theirs was a culture which believed that ideas mattered and had consequences. In this spirit, the case for secession had been reasoned out over generations, in books, periodicals, pamphlets, sermons and speeches. It was not something invented, in a moment of panic after Lincoln’s election, but a machine made by many hands, which needed only to be started up when the moment seemed right. If secession was a mistake, as events were to prove, it was an intellectual blunder, not because it was incoherent as an assertion of political principle, but because it fatally mistook Northern resolve and failed.
Library of CongressAn 1861 Currier & Ives cartoon depicting secession as a race off of a cliff. “We go it blind!” yells the figure depicting Alabama.
Antebellum Southerners had often disagreed with one another, and secession was no exception. It is probable that, at least before the summer of 1861, more Southerners opposed secession than agreed with it. Despite this habit of dissent, however, a few ideas had focused debate on what it meant to be a Southerner. Slavery was seen as fundamental to social order, though opinion was divided about why. Almost everyone agreed that the Bible and Christianity sanctioned the institution, some thought its contribution to sustaining racial hierarchy was indispensable, and no one doubted that the Southern economy would be wrecked by the elimination of forced labor.
Like other Americans, Southerners were interested in ideas of progress, thought themselves modern and understood how deeply enmeshed they were in modern capitalism. Most were earnest free traders. But, more than most Americans, Southerners had a sharp sense that progress did not come easily, that there were usually hard choices to be made about how its benefits could best be shared. It would be nice, they said, if everyone could painlessly benefit from progress. But many believed that tradeoffs were a “necessity,” a term that cropped up frequently in debates: among other “necessities,” they believed, was that in order for the majority whites of European descent to prosper, many — including Africans, Indians and Mexicans — had to lose out. A few Southerners felt guilty about this, many were smug and not a few respectfully blamed God for arranging life this way. The point is, they thought and argued about it, at length and in depth. Contrary to Henry Adams’s impression, ideas mattered in the Old South.
One idea in particular had gained purchase by the end of the antebellum era. Southerners were less interested in individualism than they had been in the 18th century, and more interested in the proposition that community was desirable and that a government which did not rest on shared social habits must fail. The “South” was one such community, but states even more so. Whereas a state in 1776 was mostly a polity, by 1860 it was thought to be a social world, with its own literature, habits, character and cultural institutions.
This emphasis on local values was not always in conflict with Unionism; Calhoun, for example, had been a dogged Unionist all his life, as well as a devoted South Carolinian. For all that, the cultural institutions of the states grew more elaborate, while those of the nation remained thinner. By 1860 there was a South Carolina Historical Society, but not yet an American Historical Association. There was a University of Virginia, but not a national university. So, when tensions within the Union grew intolerable, Southerners had alternatives — their states, their South, their version of American — ready to hand.
Indeed, the options seemed all the more attractive because they seemed so conformable to the political traditions of 1776. As Jefferson Davis put it in his inaugural address as provisional president of the Confederacy, “Our present position … illustrates the American idea that government rests upon the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish a government whenever it becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established.”
This contrasted with prevailing Unionist ideas, articulated by Abraham Lincoln, which held that first there had been an American people and a Union, and then this Union had sanctioned the political subdivisions that were the states. But Davis believed this was backward: first there had been the individual colonies, which had broken with Britain and had established themselves as sovereign states, and then these states had agreed to create the United States as a workmanlike compact. The states that had made the compact were entitled to unmake it, if they followed the appropriate democratic procedures of consulting the popular will.
This was not just a difference of convenience, but a philosophical division about the nature of the state and time. Unionists were inclined to the view that, with the creation of the American republic, history had stopped and that the Union was literally perpetual, at least as long as the whole American people found it satisfactory. Davis thought that history could move on, that the political geography of God’s purposes for Americans could be rearranged without serious damage to providence.
As William Henry Trescot, one of the earliest proponents of secession, had put it in 1850, “We believe that the interests of the southern country demand a separate and independent government … The Union has redeemed a continent to the Christian world … It has developed a population with whom liberty is identical with law, and in training thirty-three States to manhood, has fitted them for the responsibility of independent national life … It has achieved its destiny. Let us achieve ours.”
Today Americans necessarily embrace the Unionist point of view of 1861, so that talk like Trescot and Davis’s gets branded as extremist and incoherent. Yet it was not always so: many American political thinkers before 1860 dissented from Lincoln’s version of history and thought Davis’s compact theory to be, at a minimum, a cogent proposition.
This much is clear: far from being a case of the crazy South splitting from the wise North, in 1861 the balance of rationality and irrationality was poised. Both sides had a delicate mix of wisdom and folly, clarity and confusion, altruism and self–interest. Neither had a marked advantage when it came to rationality or madness. And neither had the least idea what war would mean, as is often the way with the best and the brightest.
Michael O’Brien is a professor of American history at Cambridge University
By MICHAEL O'BRIEN NY TIMES
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Early 1861 found the 23-year-old Henry Adams in Washington, working as the private secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, a representative from Massachusetts. Adams was a keen observer even at that early age, and he focused much of his attention on the Southern political delegations going through the throes of secession. To Adams, the Southerners were little more than madmen. In a Jan. 8 letter to one of his brothers, he wrote, “I do not want to fight them … They are mad, mere maniacs, and I want to lock them up till they become sane; not kill them. I want to educate, humanize, and refine them, not send fire and sword among them.”
Such stereotypes, though, ran counter to the way most Southerners saw themselves. To them, they were among the best and the brightest of their time: they read and wrote political philosophy, they studied statistics, they took an interest in sociology, they travelled and kept up with the latest European trends and they were fastidious Biblical and classical scholars. Above all, they had regularly produced philosophically adept politicians, not only in the earliest generation (Thomas Jefferson, James Madison) and in the middle generation (John C. Calhoun), but in the generation that opted for secession. To them the decision to secede was not rash, but rational, the result of reasoned discussion. On Feb. 18, 1861, the South Carolinian diarist Mary Chesnut wrote, “This southern Confederacy must be supported now by calm determination — & cool brains,” and she did not doubt that the decision to leave the Union evidenced a coolness of calm judgment.
She was not wrong. Historical evidence abounds that Southerners were not stupid or close–minded, let alone mad, but rather as capable of well-informed analysis as anyone else (though also as capable of making the wrong analysis). For good or ill, theirs was a culture which believed that ideas mattered and had consequences. In this spirit, the case for secession had been reasoned out over generations, in books, periodicals, pamphlets, sermons and speeches. It was not something invented, in a moment of panic after Lincoln’s election, but a machine made by many hands, which needed only to be started up when the moment seemed right. If secession was a mistake, as events were to prove, it was an intellectual blunder, not because it was incoherent as an assertion of political principle, but because it fatally mistook Northern resolve and failed.
Library of CongressAn 1861 Currier & Ives cartoon depicting secession as a race off of a cliff. “We go it blind!” yells the figure depicting Alabama.
Antebellum Southerners had often disagreed with one another, and secession was no exception. It is probable that, at least before the summer of 1861, more Southerners opposed secession than agreed with it. Despite this habit of dissent, however, a few ideas had focused debate on what it meant to be a Southerner. Slavery was seen as fundamental to social order, though opinion was divided about why. Almost everyone agreed that the Bible and Christianity sanctioned the institution, some thought its contribution to sustaining racial hierarchy was indispensable, and no one doubted that the Southern economy would be wrecked by the elimination of forced labor.
Like other Americans, Southerners were interested in ideas of progress, thought themselves modern and understood how deeply enmeshed they were in modern capitalism. Most were earnest free traders. But, more than most Americans, Southerners had a sharp sense that progress did not come easily, that there were usually hard choices to be made about how its benefits could best be shared. It would be nice, they said, if everyone could painlessly benefit from progress. But many believed that tradeoffs were a “necessity,” a term that cropped up frequently in debates: among other “necessities,” they believed, was that in order for the majority whites of European descent to prosper, many — including Africans, Indians and Mexicans — had to lose out. A few Southerners felt guilty about this, many were smug and not a few respectfully blamed God for arranging life this way. The point is, they thought and argued about it, at length and in depth. Contrary to Henry Adams’s impression, ideas mattered in the Old South.
One idea in particular had gained purchase by the end of the antebellum era. Southerners were less interested in individualism than they had been in the 18th century, and more interested in the proposition that community was desirable and that a government which did not rest on shared social habits must fail. The “South” was one such community, but states even more so. Whereas a state in 1776 was mostly a polity, by 1860 it was thought to be a social world, with its own literature, habits, character and cultural institutions.
This emphasis on local values was not always in conflict with Unionism; Calhoun, for example, had been a dogged Unionist all his life, as well as a devoted South Carolinian. For all that, the cultural institutions of the states grew more elaborate, while those of the nation remained thinner. By 1860 there was a South Carolina Historical Society, but not yet an American Historical Association. There was a University of Virginia, but not a national university. So, when tensions within the Union grew intolerable, Southerners had alternatives — their states, their South, their version of American — ready to hand.
Indeed, the options seemed all the more attractive because they seemed so conformable to the political traditions of 1776. As Jefferson Davis put it in his inaugural address as provisional president of the Confederacy, “Our present position … illustrates the American idea that government rests upon the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish a government whenever it becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established.”
This contrasted with prevailing Unionist ideas, articulated by Abraham Lincoln, which held that first there had been an American people and a Union, and then this Union had sanctioned the political subdivisions that were the states. But Davis believed this was backward: first there had been the individual colonies, which had broken with Britain and had established themselves as sovereign states, and then these states had agreed to create the United States as a workmanlike compact. The states that had made the compact were entitled to unmake it, if they followed the appropriate democratic procedures of consulting the popular will.
This was not just a difference of convenience, but a philosophical division about the nature of the state and time. Unionists were inclined to the view that, with the creation of the American republic, history had stopped and that the Union was literally perpetual, at least as long as the whole American people found it satisfactory. Davis thought that history could move on, that the political geography of God’s purposes for Americans could be rearranged without serious damage to providence.
As William Henry Trescot, one of the earliest proponents of secession, had put it in 1850, “We believe that the interests of the southern country demand a separate and independent government … The Union has redeemed a continent to the Christian world … It has developed a population with whom liberty is identical with law, and in training thirty-three States to manhood, has fitted them for the responsibility of independent national life … It has achieved its destiny. Let us achieve ours.”
Today Americans necessarily embrace the Unionist point of view of 1861, so that talk like Trescot and Davis’s gets branded as extremist and incoherent. Yet it was not always so: many American political thinkers before 1860 dissented from Lincoln’s version of history and thought Davis’s compact theory to be, at a minimum, a cogent proposition.
This much is clear: far from being a case of the crazy South splitting from the wise North, in 1861 the balance of rationality and irrationality was poised. Both sides had a delicate mix of wisdom and folly, clarity and confusion, altruism and self–interest. Neither had a marked advantage when it came to rationality or madness. And neither had the least idea what war would mean, as is often the way with the best and the brightest.
Michael O’Brien is a professor of American history at Cambridge University
Copyright 2011 The New York Times
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