Rhett, Southern independence & the Golden Circle

by The League of the South

The Old South is understood by historians to have been part of a much larger civilisation of plantation societies in the New World that stretched from Brazil north to through the Caribbean through the mainland South up to Delaware. The centre of this agrarian, classically-influenced civilisation was the Caribbean and there the plantation model of society was most intense. Prior to the American Revolution the South had been part of the same empire as the British plantation colonies of the Caribbean. The severing of that union in 1776 ultimately led to the downfall of the British Caribbean and saw the agrarian South join with New England in an ill-advised union of greatly different cultures and economies. Nineteenth century Southerner leaders understood all of this and many Southern nationalists such as South Carolina statesman Robert Barnwell Rhett dreamed of uniting the entire plantation region of the New World in a single confederation which would be powerful enough to stand up to the growing industrial powers of Western Europe and the US North (and thereby prevent disastrous economic (high tariffs), political (democracy) and social (equality) policies from being implemented in the region). ‘The Golden Circle’ was a term that many Southerners (and sympathisers in the North) used to describe the future they envisioned in which the mainland South, the Caribbean and coastal lands around the Caribbean would be joined together, forming a large ‘circle’ of sorts on maps. Professor Eric H Walther describes Rhett’s vision of Southern independence on page 150 of his book The Fire-Eaters. Clearly, this was not simply a reaction to Northern intervention in Southern society; this was a program which many Southerners must have found inspiring as they thought about how to strengthen, expand and further enrich their society. Walther writes:Rhett offered an alternative. An independent South, he claimed, would be invincible. Eight million whites, holding 4 million slaves, “are too mighty in their strength to trust any other people to shape their destiny,” Rhett argued. “They must be independent and free in the high station for which they are designed amongst the great nations of the earth.” Furthermore, southerners had a “high mission” imposed upon them: they had a duty to show the world a slaveholding republic could not only exist but thrive. A thriving future, he said, was inevitable. Freed from the restraints of Yankee domination, he pledged, “Expansion shall be the law of the South.” In his incredible picture of the future, a Southern nation [sic] would consume all potential plantation regions in the Western Hemisphere, reaching thirty degrees north and south of the equator (roughly from Virginia to the southern tip of Brazil). Southern institutions would thus remain safe for centuries, southern economic power would dominate the world, and liberty for white southerners would never again be in jeopardy. If northerners joined southerners to elect a Democrat president in 1860, the South might choose to remain in the Union a while longer. But if a Republican were elected southerners must choose between a dangerous Union and a “glorious Southern Confederacy.”