Southern nationalists, the earliest and most ardent of whom were referred to as ‘Fire Eaters,’ struggled for more than three decades to convince Southerners of the necessity of independence from the Union. Men such as South Carolina statesman and US Senator Robert Barnwell Rhett (who spent all of his adult life leading the effort for Southern independence and remained committed to the struggle even after the Confederacy’s defeat) dedicated themselves to rallying Southerners to the cause of independence. Convincing their countrymen to secede was not an easy thing to do though. To this end the secessionists used every divisive issue which appeared, including the tariff, western expansion, slavery and foreign policy, to promote their cause. Despite their efforts, Dr William C Davis in his book ‘Rhett: The Turbulent Life and Times of a Fire-Eater,’ writes on page 582:
[N]ot a single piece of testimony survives by which a Carolinian declared that Rhett made him a secessionist. Rather, the record of the years makes it abundantly clear that Carolinians advanced toward secession in a series of fits and starts and steps backward as well as forward, not propelled by the invective of leaders but motivated by events.
The conservative nature of Southerners led them to largely reject Southern nationalists’ warnings about the inherent dangers of the Union for decades. Even after secession Southerners chose conservatives to lead the new Confederacy who had opposed secession or embraced it only after it had become inevitable. As Davis writes on page 583:
The founding fathers of the Confederacy never for a moment seriously considered a fire-eater for the presidency or vice presidency, and not one of them was considered for a cabinet post either. Those first top leaders were cooperationists to a man, and some such as Stephens reluctant even in that pose.
WHAT CONVINCED SOUTHERNERS TO SECEDE?
Though many events from the late 1820s through 1860 helped to gradually push Southerners towards independence, what was the one which finally convinced them to secede? We often hear from politically correct defenders of the South that it was a desire to maintain States’ rights that led to secession. Indeed, President Jefferson Davis’ book after the war, as well as the writings of many other former Confederates, emphasised the constitutional struggle between the South and North, the States and the Federal Government. From the other side, those who are anti-Southern and anti-secession, we hear almost to a man that the South’s desire to maintain slavery was the reason for secession. This is an issue we have repeatedly addressed on SNN. Secessionists, primarily from the Lower South, actually sided with Northern abolitionists in defeating the Crittenden Compromise which was embraced by moderates and would have preserved slavery and improved the South’s position within the Union. As well, Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address assured Southerners that slavery would not be touched where it already existed if they would rejoin the Union. If Southerners had been motivated to secede by the fear of abolition in the near future it seems clear that they would have accepted either the Crittenden Compromise or Lincoln’s offer.
Professor Charles B Dew’s book ‘Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War‘ is indispensable reading as to what actually convinced Southerners to secede in 1860-61. To be clear, Professor Dew is no friend of the South or supporter of secession. He makes it clear in the introduction and conclusion of his book that he was motivated to write the short book to prove that race and slavery, not States’ rights, were what motivated Southerners to secede. Despite this, his work is important because in it he presents in a short (the book is only 124 pages including the index, notes and appendix) and clear form the reason why the South seceded. He does so by quoting extensively from the Secession Commissioners (the representatives selected by the first seceded States to the other Southern States for the purpose of convincing them to also secede) and summarising their arguments. It becomes exceedingly clear after reading this book and the speeches it was based upon that what motivated Southerners to secede in 1860-61 was a fear that if they didn’t do so they would be physically destroyed. They believed that if they stayed in the Union they would not survive. Specifically, they saw the growing political imbalance in the Union which led to Lincoln’s election in 1860 without the support of a single Southern State and looked ahead to a time when equality (which the South forthrightly rejected in favour of civilisation) would be imposed upon them and would necessarily lead to the suffering and destruction of the Southern people.
BACKGROUND
The seigneurial civilisation (the centre of which was referred to as the ‘Golden Circle‘ by nineteenth century Southerners) to which the South belonged from the earliest colonial times until 1865 was progressively undermined beginning with the American Revolutionary War. That war split the plantation civilisation in two, greatly weakening it and ultimately spelling the doom for both halves. That split was followed quickly by the advent in the Caribbean of the radical ideology of the French Revolution. ‘Liberty, Fraternity and Equality’ nearly destroyed all of the French Caribbean and ultimately led to a genocidal race war in the fabulously wealthy colony of St Dominque (or St Domingo, as many Southerners called it) – present day Haiti. Southerners saw this happen and were horrified by the destruction and collapse of civilisation which followed. It was around this time that the Enlightenment Era-inspired ideas of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison began to slowly give way to the Romantic Era-inspired ideas of the early Southern nationalists. John C Calhoun, the South’s leading statesman in the first half of the nineteenth century, served to bridge the gap between these two political worldviews.
The fall of the French Caribbean due to the imposition of democracy and equality in that region was followed shortly thereafter by the fall of the British Caribbean. Southerners watched this with intense interest as well. Prior to the American Revolution the British plantation colonies of the Caribbean had been close partners with the Southern plantation colonies and they had shared political, cultural, economic and family ties. London’s imposition of democracy and equality in the region led to the swift economic decline of the British Caribbean. By then the Golden Circle civilisation survived largely in the South, Cuba (a wealthy Spanish colony which was periodically threatened with the prospect of democracy and equality by Madrid) and Brazil (a former Portuguese sugar plantation colony). What had been the wealthiest civilisation in the world was clearly on the defensive and being picked apart by outside powers.
With the above brief historical sketch one can understand why Southerners in the mid-nineteenth century were on the defensive. Their economy was extremely strong and their power in the US Federal Government was impressive, yet their position was being gradually undermined by the North’s fast-growing (due to immigration) population and western expansion. Southerners saw a time approaching when they would be unable to stop anti-Southern legislation in the US Congress. The prospect of this was frightening given the increasingly radical political noises that came out of the Northeast and Upper Midwest. The Era of Good Feelings was over; the North and South were locked in a struggle for political supremacy, control of the Union and, ultimately, cultural and economic survival.
SURVIVAL
Beyond even concerns for their political and economic position in a Union which they understood would soon be dominated by a more populous, hostile region, Southerners were greatly concerned for their physical survival. For decades the Fire-Eaters had warned that remaining in the Union threatened the South politically and economically; however, these arguments did not persuade the people of a single State to secede. It was only with the actual fighting on the western frontier (Missouri and Kansas) between Southern and Northern partisans (see here, here, here, here and here), the watershed events of massacres by radical abolitionists (such as John Brown’s Pottawatomie Massacre of 1856) and rise in North of the Republican Party (a purely sectional, anti-Southern party which had as one of its important factions the radical abolitionists) that Southerners en masse accepted the necessity of independence. They saw three possible and destructive scenarios playing out if they remained in the Union. These were 1) the imposition of equality (as had been inflicted upon the British Caribbean and resulted in the dramatic decline of the region), 2) genocidal racial warfare (as had happened in Haiti and had resulted in White genocide and the collapse of civilisation), or 3) racial amalgamation (which would mean the end of White Southerners as a distinct ethnic group). Southerners were unwilling to accept any of these scenarios. Professor Charles Dew notes that the Secession Commissioners’ speeches to the legislative assemblies and political leaders of the South illuminated ‘so clearly the racial content’ of secession. What was at stake was survival, nothing less. After decades of abuse at the hands of the Federal Government and a hostile region it was only the prospect of physical destruction which finally moved Southerners to leave the Union in the winter of 1860-61. Professor Dew writes in the concluding chapter of his book:
When they used words like “submission” and “degradation,” when they referred to “final subjugation” and “annihilation,” they were not talking about constitutional differences or political arguments. They were talking about the dawning of an abominable new world in the South….
The secession commissioners knew what this new and hateful world would look like. Over and over again they called up three stark images that, taken together, constituted the white South’s worst nightmare.
The first threat was the looming specter of racial equality.
…The second element in the commissioners’ prophecy was the prospect of a race war. …Alabamians Garrott and Smith told their Raleigh audience that Republican policies would force the South either to abandon slavery “or be doomed to a servile war.” William Cooper, Alabama’s commissioner to Missouri, delivered a similar message in Jefferson City. “Under the policy of the Republican Party, the time would arrive when the scenes of San Domingo and Hayti [sic], with all their attendant horrors, would be enacted in the slaveholding States,” he told the Missourians.
The third prospect in the commissioners’ doomsday vision was, in may ways, the most dire: racial amalgamation. …In Virginia, Henry Benning insisted that under Republican-led abolition “our women” would suffer “horrors… we cannot contemplate in imagination.” There was not an adult present who could not imagine exactly what Benning was talking about. Leroy Pope Walker, Alabama’s commissioner to Tennessee and subsequently the first Confederate secretary of war, predicted that in the absence of secession all would be lost – first, “our property,” and “then our liberties,” and finally the South’s greatest treasure, “the sacred purity of our daughters.”
…The choice was absolutely clear. The slave states could secede and establish their independence, or they could submit to “Black Republican” rule with its inevitable consequences: Armageddon or amalgamation.
VINDICATION
US history after 1865 demonstrates the prescience of the Secession Commissioners. The physical destruction of the South’s towns and farms and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people was followed by crippling poverty which subjected a previously wealthy nation of people to Third World conditions. This is what the Union did for the South. Economic exploitation became a fact of life that harmed Southerners for generations to come. Racial warfare did in fact break out in areas of the South after the US conquest as Southern paramilitary groups fought Union-supported Black militias. Even greater horrors – namely, a Haitian-like collapse of civilisation in the Lower South – was prevented only by the Revolution of 1876 and the restoration of limited Southern home rule.
Recent history, in particular since the late 1950s, has much more closely followed the first and third warnings listed above that were invoked by the Secession Commissioners. Equality and democracy were forced upon Southerners at gun point. The result of this is the horror of the so-called ‘New South.’ In this reality once-safe and prosperous Southern cities are now Third World areas subjected to rampant crime, violence, political corruption, institutionalised anti-White bias and continued decline. Local, agrarian Southern elites have been replaced by democratic creatures with no loyalty to the people, culture and land. Most recently the continued survival of the Southern people has been gravely endangered by the purposeful US policy demographic replacement (as recently bragged about by US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano). Racial amalgamation is promoted relentlessly in the US media and educational system which have been forced upon Southerners. Resistance to this is labeled ‘hate’ in a perverse injustice to morality and the English language by US society.
US history since 1865 has vindicated the warning of the Secession Commissioners. The reality that we face today in the US-ruled South – one which hundreds of thousands of Southerners gave their lives to prevent – is a true horror to behold. The survival and well-being of the Southern people depend on the replacement of the ‘New South’ with a South which will be a homeland for Southerners. This is the struggle of contemporary Southern nationalists.
Friday 19 April 2013
The Secession Commissioners: Independence or destruction?
Southern nationalists, the earliest and most ardent of whom were referred to as ‘Fire Eaters,’ struggled for more than three decades to convince Southerners of the necessity of independence from the Union. Men such as South Carolina statesman and US Senator Robert Barnwell Rhett (who spent all of his adult life leading the effort for Southern independence and remained committed to the struggle even after the Confederacy’s defeat) dedicated themselves to rallying Southerners to the cause of independence. Convincing their countrymen to secede was not an easy thing to do though. To this end the secessionists used every divisive issue which appeared, including the tariff, western expansion, slavery and foreign policy, to promote their cause. Despite their efforts, Dr William C Davis in his book ‘Rhett: The Turbulent Life and Times of a Fire-Eater,’ writes on page 582:
[N]ot a single piece of testimony survives by which a Carolinian declared that Rhett made him a secessionist. Rather, the record of the years makes it abundantly clear that Carolinians advanced toward secession in a series of fits and starts and steps backward as well as forward, not propelled by the invective of leaders but motivated by events.
The conservative nature of Southerners led them to largely reject Southern nationalists’ warnings about the inherent dangers of the Union for decades. Even after secession Southerners chose conservatives to lead the new Confederacy who had opposed secession or embraced it only after it had become inevitable. As Davis writes on page 583:
The founding fathers of the Confederacy never for a moment seriously considered a fire-eater for the presidency or vice presidency, and not one of them was considered for a cabinet post either. Those first top leaders were cooperationists to a man, and some such as Stephens reluctant even in that pose.
WHAT CONVINCED SOUTHERNERS TO SECEDE?
Though many events from the late 1820s through 1860 helped to gradually push Southerners towards independence, what was the one which finally convinced them to secede? We often hear from politically correct defenders of the South that it was a desire to maintain States’ rights that led to secession. Indeed, President Jefferson Davis’ book after the war, as well as the writings of many other former Confederates, emphasised the constitutional struggle between the South and North, the States and the Federal Government. From the other side, those who are anti-Southern and anti-secession, we hear almost to a man that the South’s desire to maintain slavery was the reason for secession. This is an issue we have repeatedly addressed on SNN. Secessionists, primarily from the Lower South, actually sided with Northern abolitionists in defeating the Crittenden Compromise which was embraced by moderates and would have preserved slavery and improved the South’s position within the Union. As well, Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address assured Southerners that slavery would not be touched where it already existed if they would rejoin the Union. If Southerners had been motivated to secede by the fear of abolition in the near future it seems clear that they would have accepted either the Crittenden Compromise or Lincoln’s offer.
Professor Charles B Dew’s book ‘Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War‘ is indispensable reading as to what actually convinced Southerners to secede in 1860-61. To be clear, Professor Dew is no friend of the South or supporter of secession. He makes it clear in the introduction and conclusion of his book that he was motivated to write the short book to prove that race and slavery, not States’ rights, were what motivated Southerners to secede. Despite this, his work is important because in it he presents in a short (the book is only 124 pages including the index, notes and appendix) and clear form the reason why the South seceded. He does so by quoting extensively from the Secession Commissioners (the representatives selected by the first seceded States to the other Southern States for the purpose of convincing them to also secede) and summarising their arguments. It becomes exceedingly clear after reading this book and the speeches it was based upon that what motivated Southerners to secede in 1860-61 was a fear that if they didn’t do so they would be physically destroyed. They believed that if they stayed in the Union they would not survive. Specifically, they saw the growing political imbalance in the Union which led to Lincoln’s election in 1860 without the support of a single Southern State and looked ahead to a time when equality (which the South forthrightly rejected in favour of civilisation) would be imposed upon them and would necessarily lead to the suffering and destruction of the Southern people.
BACKGROUND
The seigneurial civilisation (the centre of which was referred to as the ‘Golden Circle‘ by nineteenth century Southerners) to which the South belonged from the earliest colonial times until 1865 was progressively undermined beginning with the American Revolutionary War. That war split the plantation civilisation in two, greatly weakening it and ultimately spelling the doom for both halves. That split was followed quickly by the advent in the Caribbean of the radical ideology of the French Revolution. ‘Liberty, Fraternity and Equality’ nearly destroyed all of the French Caribbean and ultimately led to a genocidal race war in the fabulously wealthy colony of St Dominque (or St Domingo, as many Southerners called it) – present day Haiti. Southerners saw this happen and were horrified by the destruction and collapse of civilisation which followed. It was around this time that the Enlightenment Era-inspired ideas of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison began to slowly give way to the Romantic Era-inspired ideas of the early Southern nationalists. John C Calhoun, the South’s leading statesman in the first half of the nineteenth century, served to bridge the gap between these two political worldviews.
The fall of the French Caribbean due to the imposition of democracy and equality in that region was followed shortly thereafter by the fall of the British Caribbean. Southerners watched this with intense interest as well. Prior to the American Revolution the British plantation colonies of the Caribbean had been close partners with the Southern plantation colonies and they had shared political, cultural, economic and family ties. London’s imposition of democracy and equality in the region led to the swift economic decline of the British Caribbean. By then the Golden Circle civilisation survived largely in the South, Cuba (a wealthy Spanish colony which was periodically threatened with the prospect of democracy and equality by Madrid) and Brazil (a former Portuguese sugar plantation colony). What had been the wealthiest civilisation in the world was clearly on the defensive and being picked apart by outside powers.
With the above brief historical sketch one can understand why Southerners in the mid-nineteenth century were on the defensive. Their economy was extremely strong and their power in the US Federal Government was impressive, yet their position was being gradually undermined by the North’s fast-growing (due to immigration) population and western expansion. Southerners saw a time approaching when they would be unable to stop anti-Southern legislation in the US Congress. The prospect of this was frightening given the increasingly radical political noises that came out of the Northeast and Upper Midwest. The Era of Good Feelings was over; the North and South were locked in a struggle for political supremacy, control of the Union and, ultimately, cultural and economic survival.
SURVIVAL
Beyond even concerns for their political and economic position in a Union which they understood would soon be dominated by a more populous, hostile region, Southerners were greatly concerned for their physical survival. For decades the Fire-Eaters had warned that remaining in the Union threatened the South politically and economically; however, these arguments did not persuade the people of a single State to secede. It was only with the actual fighting on the western frontier (Missouri and Kansas) between Southern and Northern partisans (see here, here, here, here and here), the watershed events of massacres by radical abolitionists (such as John Brown’s Pottawatomie Massacre of 1856) and rise in North of the Republican Party (a purely sectional, anti-Southern party which had as one of its important factions the radical abolitionists) that Southerners en masse accepted the necessity of independence. They saw three possible and destructive scenarios playing out if they remained in the Union. These were 1) the imposition of equality (as had been inflicted upon the British Caribbean and resulted in the dramatic decline of the region), 2) genocidal racial warfare (as had happened in Haiti and had resulted in White genocide and the collapse of civilisation), or 3) racial amalgamation (which would mean the end of White Southerners as a distinct ethnic group). Southerners were unwilling to accept any of these scenarios. Professor Charles Dew notes that the Secession Commissioners’ speeches to the legislative assemblies and political leaders of the South illuminated ‘so clearly the racial content’ of secession. What was at stake was survival, nothing less. After decades of abuse at the hands of the Federal Government and a hostile region it was only the prospect of physical destruction which finally moved Southerners to leave the Union in the winter of 1860-61. Professor Dew writes in the concluding chapter of his book:
When they used words like “submission” and “degradation,” when they referred to “final subjugation” and “annihilation,” they were not talking about constitutional differences or political arguments. They were talking about the dawning of an abominable new world in the South….
The secession commissioners knew what this new and hateful world would look like. Over and over again they called up three stark images that, taken together, constituted the white South’s worst nightmare.
The first threat was the looming specter of racial equality.
…The second element in the commissioners’ prophecy was the prospect of a race war. …Alabamians Garrott and Smith told their Raleigh audience that Republican policies would force the South either to abandon slavery “or be doomed to a servile war.” William Cooper, Alabama’s commissioner to Missouri, delivered a similar message in Jefferson City. “Under the policy of the Republican Party, the time would arrive when the scenes of San Domingo and Hayti [sic], with all their attendant horrors, would be enacted in the slaveholding States,” he told the Missourians.
The third prospect in the commissioners’ doomsday vision was, in may ways, the most dire: racial amalgamation. …In Virginia, Henry Benning insisted that under Republican-led abolition “our women” would suffer “horrors… we cannot contemplate in imagination.” There was not an adult present who could not imagine exactly what Benning was talking about. Leroy Pope Walker, Alabama’s commissioner to Tennessee and subsequently the first Confederate secretary of war, predicted that in the absence of secession all would be lost – first, “our property,” and “then our liberties,” and finally the South’s greatest treasure, “the sacred purity of our daughters.”
…The choice was absolutely clear. The slave states could secede and establish their independence, or they could submit to “Black Republican” rule with its inevitable consequences: Armageddon or amalgamation.
VINDICATION
US history after 1865 demonstrates the prescience of the Secession Commissioners. The physical destruction of the South’s towns and farms and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people was followed by crippling poverty which subjected a previously wealthy nation of people to Third World conditions. This is what the Union did for the South. Economic exploitation became a fact of life that harmed Southerners for generations to come. Racial warfare did in fact break out in areas of the South after the US conquest as Southern paramilitary groups fought Union-supported Black militias. Even greater horrors – namely, a Haitian-like collapse of civilisation in the Lower South – was prevented only by the Revolution of 1876 and the restoration of limited Southern home rule.
Recent history, in particular since the late 1950s, has much more closely followed the first and third warnings listed above that were invoked by the Secession Commissioners. Equality and democracy were forced upon Southerners at gun point. The result of this is the horror of the so-called ‘New South.’ In this reality once-safe and prosperous Southern cities are now Third World areas subjected to rampant crime, violence, political corruption, institutionalised anti-White bias and continued decline. Local, agrarian Southern elites have been replaced by democratic creatures with no loyalty to the people, culture and land. Most recently the continued survival of the Southern people has been gravely endangered by the purposeful US policy demographic replacement (as recently bragged about by US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano). Racial amalgamation is promoted relentlessly in the US media and educational system which have been forced upon Southerners. Resistance to this is labeled ‘hate’ in a perverse injustice to morality and the English language by US society.
US history since 1865 has vindicated the warning of the Secession Commissioners. The reality that we face today in the US-ruled South – one which hundreds of thousands of Southerners gave their lives to prevent – is a true horror to behold. The survival and well-being of the Southern people depend on the replacement of the ‘New South’ with a South which will be a homeland for Southerners. This is the struggle of contemporary Southern nationalists.
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