The Confederacy, Fifty Years After

THE time for the ideal history of the tragic episode of the Confederacy is not yet, but it is near. We are fifty years removed from the last gunshot. That luminous clarity with which sympathetic imagination invests the past has quietly dissipated prejudice, quietly dried up the mountains of exaggeration which are now crumbling into dust. Never again will the Confederacy be regarded, either as a last attempt to recover the Golden Age, or, on the other hand, as an irruption of the Powers of Darkness. A great, sincere, immensely human episode, it revealed itself long ago to dispassionate observers. But only lately, in time’s fulness, through the perspective of fifty years, has its whole significance appeared. At last we see that the revelation sealed in Confederate history is not merely something broadly human, but also something peculiarly, illuminatingly, American.

It is by virtue of the fading of our illusions with regard to Confederate history that the path to clear ideas becomes plain. Chief among these is the passing of the illusion that the Confederacy was at one with itself. The old notion of a spontaneous rush of the whole Southern people toward a single clear goal, all animated by one thought, all intelligently aware of what they wanted — this has to go. Rather, it is gone already. The fact that the Confederacy was a house divided against itself engrosses to-day the thought of its best-informed observers. We seek final intelligence, asking ourselves, Why were the Confederates divided? Why did Yancey, before the Confederacy was eighteen months old, make the reckless assertion that he saw little to choose between conquest by ‘the Yankees’ and a continuation of the existing régime? Why did Toombs, sincere though hysterical, declare that it made him ‘sick’ to fight for such people as controlled the Confederacy? Why did Davis, in bitter protest against the course of his enemies, say that, if the Confederacy failed, it would have died ‘of a theory’? Why did Georgia and North Carolina have their periods of almost open rebellion against the Richmond government? Why, in a word, did people who thought they were in harmony at the opening of 1801 know, before the end of 1862, that in many of their ideas they were widely divergent, that their harmony was tactical, not organic?

One cannot answer the question without glancing at two conceptions of the Confederate episode, both, I think, fallacious. These are the old-fashioned ‘Northern’ view — or what has been so labeled by its advocates, perhaps unfairly — and the new ‘economic’ view. One is the idea that the South rushed into secession to preserve slavery, — just that and nothing more, — while the other is the idea that it acted under compulsion of a group of vested interests, that these interests used slavery as one of the cards in their hands, but that they and their purposes are to be thought of almost, if not quite, as is ‘big business’ to-day. Both views do their small part in the way of final illumination, but both, in the main, are inadequate.

The invaluable researches of the United States Census Bureau have established the fact that only one third of the Southern whites belonged to slaveholding families. Only a small number of families held enough slaves to render the institution economically important in their lives. If they went into the war to preserve slavery, it was because of something behind it which slavery symbolized, not for the institution itself. Few Southerners, in 1861, would have suffered materially from the extinction of slavery. The motives of the others, the vast majority, form the great crux, generally ignored. And as to the theory of a group of financial barons using slavery as an economic tool, and forcing their section out of the Union merely to win freer business scope for their own astute combinations, this theory splits on the rock of political geography. If such combinations of capital really existed, — if there was a cottontrust, or a rice-trust, or a slave-trust, — the reality of the democratic temper in a very large part, at least, of the South, halts the student who would use this easy dogma to explain the movement of 1861.

The discovery that the Southerners held widely different views upon slavery — that the Confederacy lacked, as the corner-stone of its economy, a general agreement upon this vital question— is the first step toward a true conception of its history. There has not been sufficient distinguishing between the economic interest in slavery and the regard for slavery as a symbol, the belief that one had a right to hold slaves if one wanted to. And, again, there must be differentiation in the latter idea. It includes several distinct attitudes. Many a Southerner, accepting slavery as a social axiom, looked on interference with it—paradoxical as this still appears to some observers — as curtailment of the inalienable democratic right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Then, too, there can be no doubt that, in the minds of hosts of Southerners, the whole agitation against, slavery seemed merely a foreign intervention in their domestic affairs. The precise theme of the intervention — whether the right to own a slave, or the right to wear a silk hat — mattered to these people nothing at all.

At least one other attitude is also clearly discernible. An acute observer, a Confederate veteran, once said to me, ‘When I was serving in the Army of Northern Virginia, I took great interest in finding out why mountaineers and poor whites, men who had never owned a slave, men who had no interest in slavery, were as keen for the war as any of us. I concluded that it was a war of caste. Rightly or wrongly, they had the notion that, if the North won, they would be reduced to the level of the negro. They were animated by an intense racial feeling. They fought for the racial idea.’

Here, then, are five clearly distinguished attitudes toward slavery, toward the economic corner-stone of the Confederacy. And they are so unlike that in expressing them irreconcilable differences might readily appear. For example: what of common thinking was there uniting the magnate wanting slavery for trust purposes and the peasant mountaineer conceiving slavery merely as a racial symbol? How easily these two might become enemies! In fact, the five attitudes here indicated have, if you look closely, but one genuinely common factor. All desired the silencing of external interference with the ‘peculiar institution.’ But as to how, among themselves, they should regard that institution, what common view can be found?

We have touched the heart of the matter. Whatever else it was, the Confederacy was a political movement, conceived in opposition. It was a negative movement. It was not, in the true sense, a creative expression of a people’s life; it was a desperate attempt made by widely dissimilar groups to throw back powerful influences invading their territory. Again, its coherency was tactical, not organic.

It is this fact that gives to 1861 its distinctive color. For fifteen years, ever since the beginning of the Mexican imbroglio, the Southern politicians had fought a defensive battle without clearly appreciating what they were about. One of the overlooked duties of the historian of American politics is to account for this lapse of the analytical faculty. Though the leaders of the South from 1850 to 1860 were not, to be sure, of the same calibre as its earlier leaders, they were men of conspicuous abilities. Toombs, Stephens, Yancey, Benjamin, Davis, these men had mind. Why did they fail to distinguish between the sort of bond that held them together — the bond of a common denial — and that other sort of bond, the lack of which became apparent soon after they seceded — the bond of organic union in creative assertion? The problem is part of a wider problem, of that lack of searching mentality which — if truth must out — troubles us at many a turn in the mid-century of American politics. A certain visionariness, a certain absence of realism, an easy belie! in one’s fate, joined with a universal literary tendency, vividly felt but not highly cultivated, — a rhetorical tendency, — explains much when conceived as the background of our mental being about 1850, about the time when the older, closer-knit intelligences—Calhoun, Webster, and the rest — passed away. It was in a mental atmosphere compounded in no small part of rhetoric, dogmas, and excessive optimism, that the Confederacy was born.

With the leaders united only in opposition, and with their positive beliefs held in abeyance while a negative programme, the work of an opposition, wras pushed forward, the Southerners moved on from the point where their last great constructive genius, Calhoun, left them in 1850 — moved on, lacking constructive leadership, to the crisis of 1860. Their division into five groups, or more, on the subject of slavery gave no pause, apparently, to the leaders, to men like Davis, Yancey, Toombs, in whose thoughts we seek vainly for the subtle, deadly distinction between the political significance of denial and of assertion.

And not only was there no recognition of the inherent confusion on the question of slavery: there was also the same failure of the analytical sense on the other two subjects which, with the theory of slavery, formed the political creed of the hour: the doctrine of State Rights and the economic solidarity of the South. Had the leaders been different from their time, had they applied to their problems an intellectual severity from which the time had fallen away, who can doubt that the character of their episode — its color, so to speak — would appear to us, to-day, other than it is? But they were typical American politicians of the middle of the century. Accident gave them the opportunity to reveal through their actions what was then the typically American political temper. They seized their opportunity, and thus their tragic experiment has for subsequent ages an inexhaustible interest.

It is in their handling of the doctrine of State Rights that we discern with the greatest clearness their basic error, the confusion between a movement of denial and a movement of creation. And in this connection a shower of questions might be poured upon us. All of them would lead straight to the messages and papers of Jefferson Davis, or else to the utterances of his irreconcilable enemies. And all, at heart, contain one question: What did we mean in the old days when we talked of State sovereignty? On this subject, as on the subject of slavery, the Southerners had gone into a constructive movement, without making sure that they had common ideas on which to build. Their unity in denial on the subject of slavery had been paralleled by a unity in the negative use of a political theory. To check the Northern advance, they had employed the doctrine of State Rights. But, again, the same fatal defect that runs through all American thinking of the mid-century, the rhetorical instead of the imaginative use of ideas had interposed to prevent ideas, in many cases, from coming fully home to their advocates. A strain that is almost dialectical — the political equivalent, perhaps, of the ultra-abstractedness of the Abolitionists — runs through the debates of the time, and allowed men to declare, with the accent of passion, ideas, the reality of which for their advocates was too closely connected with their rhetorical effect.

On this great question of their basic political theory many politicians were destined, in the course of the Confederate episode, to contradict, not only their fellows, but their own past. Who had asserted the State-Rights theory more emphatically than Jefferson Davis? And what among his papers is more interesting than that early message in which he vetoed a bill for accepting into the Confederate army forces raised by Texas and officered through the state authorities? From this time forward, the centralizing tendencies of the Confederate Executive, and the bitter reaction against them, are the central fact of Confederate politics. Conceptions of government, political ideals, clashed together for the control of a movement which, with every step of its advance, made plainer its lack of fundamental unity. And all this in spite of the fact that once upon a time all these men had used the same political phrases, professed the same political dogmas, met their opponents with the same train of argument. But when, at last, they had all embarked on that course where looking back was the vainest futility, they discovered how elastic, how ambiguous their theories were. For some of them, State Rights with all their implications — the uttermost stressing of the note of individualism — formed a real creed. To safeguard these ideas they were ready to die. But there were others — and Davis himself may stand as their symbol — to whom, once Secession was effected, the separate rights of any one state disappeared, and the vision of a Southern republic — if need be, a firmly consolidated republic — arose in their place. To these latter, the martyrs for State Rights appeared mere visionaries, and their crushing a matter of course. To the true StateRights men — the men in love with their own little countries, their states, who felt for them as passionately as any Greek or Belgian feels to-day — the Southern consolidationist was as odious as the Northern consolidationist, and both were monsters.

There is no understanding the Confederacy until we feel permeating it a double loyalty, an intense desire to preserve the general character of Southern life, and likewise an enthusiasm for preserving as a genuine political unit each little country, each sovereign state. The latter was the same feeling as that which now animates Bohemia, Montenegro, Belgium. But a time came when the two loyalties separated. And then the deepest tragedy of the Confederacy was revealed. The true State-Rights men found themselves in a false position. They could not go along with the Richmond government and save ‘the country,’ without lending themselves to a movement toward centralization, toward the rearing on the ruins of the Union of a consolidated Southern republic, omnipotent over its states. They could not draw away from that government, stand fast by the sovereignty of their states, without wrecking the general cause, paving the way for a Northern victory, for a revolution in the character of Southern life.

No history of the Confederacy can pretend to be illuminative that does not make intelligible the course of these despairing adversaries of Richmond. Among them few will serve better the historian’s purpose than a great figure, strangely neglected, Robert Barnwell Rhett. Few Americans have been more consistent. From early life, through a series of stirring episodes, he was guided ever by one inspiration — by a passionate attachment to his native state, South Carolina, and an intense longing to see her virtually independent. Today, he would have made a grand leader of the Belgians. For Rhett, the doctrine of State Rights cloaked no ambiguities. His failures were not intellectual, but temperamental. To his bold and haughty nature, defeat was inconceivable. Advocating secession ten years before the war, he said, ‘Smaller States have before us struggled successfully for their freedom against greater odds.’

At the inauguration of the Southern President, it was on Rhett’s arm that Davis leaned as he entered the hall. But it was Rhett, his powerful following in South Carolina, his party organ, the Charleston Mercury, that, in a year’s time, were bitterly opposed to the Richmond government. And as Rhett felt, in South Carolina, so felt all those in North Carolina who, at last, came to the very verge of open rebellion under Vance; so felt the powerful Georgia group, with Toombs and Stephens for their spokesmen; so felt Yancey in Alabama; and behind these a host of followers. Desperately, gallantly, these men fought on to uphold the sinking Confederacy, refused to make separate terms with the Union; but all the while, with as little faith in the Richmond government as in the Washington government, and fearful that the victory of Richmond meant the death of State Rights almost as completely as would the victory of Washington. It was in the crumbling of their ideal of separate State sovereignty, the perception that it was doomed any way they took it, — perhaps by conquest from without, perhaps by the consolidation of a military despotism at Richmond, a despotism which soldiers would pronounce justifiable, — that their hearts were wrung and despair became their portion.

It is through the overthrow of the ideas of these men that the historian of the future will bring out the inner tragedy of the South. All the great measures of the Administration, — its conscription policy, its suspensions of the writ of habeas corpus, its bold and sometimes ruthless seizures of property, its schemes to arm and emancipate the slaves, — these, and numberless others, always encountered some group whose sincere conviction compelled resolute opposition. Always, everywhere, a tactical, not an organic combination of forces! Few things are more sternly typical of the episode than is Davis’s desperate attempt, aided by the great influence of Lee, to arm the slaves. Emancipation was to follow military service. So boldly had these Confederate ‘progressives’ departed from the programme of 1861!

But over against them arose all the questions that were doomed to arise. The groups that were really fighting for slavery fought this measure with the energy of self-preservation. The real State-Rights men saw in it one more blow at local independence, one more usurpation by the central government. All who wanted, for any reason, to maintain the utter subordination of the blacks saw the end of their purpose in the creation of a great number of free negroes, honorably discharged soldiers, decorated with the thanks of the Republic.

Thus, in a hundred ways, it becomes apparent that the brave men who marched so resolutely against the front of destiny, were all the victims of illusion, not merely the obvious illusion of underestimating the force against them, — serious as that was, — but chiefly of this subtler illusion, the failure to understand themselves. They had attempted creation when the creative force, the force of cohesion, was lacking. It is through considerations of this sort that the Confederacy will interest the future. The grand expression of a blind enthusiasm, driving on without correlating itself with the conditions of the problem it had to solve, and coming to a standstill in its own mind even before it was crushed from without— such is the episode as it is destined to stand in the gallery of the soul’s heroic failures.

And yet, it has still a deeper significance. As this becomes more and more plain, the Confederate episode will overstep a paradox and will cease in the eyes of students to be narrowly Southern. Here, at last, is its final value to the student. It is a display, on a great scale, of the American character in statecraft. As history regains its insight, — lost temporarily in mere statistics, — as psychology, especially communal psychology, gives it a new color, the mere events of Confederate history, thrilling and dramatic as they are, will have less hold on men than the revelation of national character contained in the way its actors related themselves to their age.