Carolina stood alone, and Southern leaders who favored secession were still renegades. By 1850 politicians in South Carolina and Mississippi were seriously advocating disunion but finding few allies elsewhere. In 1860, Southern politicians perceived secession as a real possibility and few opposed disunion on the basis of political principle.
Eleven Southern states and rump segments of two others eventually left the Union and formed the Confederacy, and it is tempting to think of those states as a unity. Nineteenth-century reality was neither so simple nor so tidy. Just as the South was never static in its relationship with the rest of the United States, so also were Southerners seldom really united in terms of political policy. 37
There were many Souths. Topographically the section varied from the swamps of Louisiana to the mountains of western Virginia; culturally Southerners included such diverse peoples as Creoles, European immigrants, mountaineers, the first families of Virginia, and Texas frontiersmen. So it is no surprise that Southerners embraced a variety of political persuasions. On the crucial issue of secession, Southern voters and politicians tended to favor disunion most where the slave-plantation system and the ingredients of Southern cultural nationalism were strongest, mainly in the cotton states of the deep South. In the upper South, where slaveholding planters did not dominate the social economy quite so strongly and where the elements of Southern nationalism were not so pronounced, the stance on secession was more ambiguous. And even in the deep South there were areas populated mostly by yeoman farmers whose loyalty to the plantation-slave system was at least suspect.
Thus the secessionist leadership feared not only threats from Northerners without; it became increasingly alarmed over apostasy within. Should the border South fall away from the Southern world view and convert to Yankeeism, then the deep South would be an even smaller fraction of the American body politic. 38 In 1860 and 1861, for reasons both positive and negative, Southerners made their break. Secessionists hoped that their nation would prosper and feared that this was their last chance to save a life style that had become sacred.
The Southerner’s vision of the Yankee had become stereotypical and malignant: the North was home to a set of self-righteous moneygrubbers whose personalities were a match for its cold climate; “Yankee” was synonymous with pious frauds and pasty faces; worse, Yankees sought power and pelf at Southern expense. Union with such people had never been desirable; now it was no longer possible. 39 As David F. Jamison, president
pro tem.
of South Carolina’s secession convention phrased it:
I trust that the door now is forever closed from any further connection with our Northern Confederacy. What guarantees can they offer us more binding, more solemn, and with a higher sanction, than the present written compact between us? Has that sacred instrument protected us from the jealousy and aggressions of the Northern people, which commenced forty years ago, and which ended in the Missouri Compromise? Has it protected us from the cupidity and avarice of the Northern people, who for thirty-five years have imposed the burden of sustaining this Government chiefly upon the South? Has it saved us from abolition petitions, intended to annoy and insult us, on the very floors of Congress? Has not that instrument been trodden under their very feet by every Northern State, by placing on their books statutes nullifying the laws for the recovery of fugitive slaves? I trust, gentlemen, we will put no faith in paper guarantees. They are worthless, unless written in the hearts of the people. As there is no common bond between us, all attempts to continue as united will only prove futile. 40
Southern diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut recorded an even more direct statement of Southern chauvinism. During the crisis at Fort Sumter she
Eleven Southern states and rump segments of two others eventually left the Union and formed the Confederacy, and it is tempting to think of those states as a unity. Nineteenth-century reality was neither so simple nor so tidy. Just as the South was never static in its relationship with the rest of the United States, so also were Southerners seldom really united in terms of political policy. 37
There were many Souths. Topographically the section varied from the swamps of Louisiana to the mountains of western Virginia; culturally Southerners included such diverse peoples as Creoles, European immigrants, mountaineers, the first families of Virginia, and Texas frontiersmen. So it is no surprise that Southerners embraced a variety of political persuasions. On the crucial issue of secession, Southern voters and politicians tended to favor disunion most where the slave-plantation system and the ingredients of Southern cultural nationalism were strongest, mainly in the cotton states of the deep South. In the upper South, where slaveholding planters did not dominate the social economy quite so strongly and where the elements of Southern nationalism were not so pronounced, the stance on secession was more ambiguous. And even in the deep South there were areas populated mostly by yeoman farmers whose loyalty to the plantation-slave system was at least suspect.
Thus the secessionist leadership feared not only threats from Northerners without; it became increasingly alarmed over apostasy within. Should the border South fall away from the Southern world view and convert to Yankeeism, then the deep South would be an even smaller fraction of the American body politic. 38 In 1860 and 1861, for reasons both positive and negative, Southerners made their break. Secessionists hoped that their nation would prosper and feared that this was their last chance to save a life style that had become sacred.
The Southerner’s vision of the Yankee had become stereotypical and malignant: the North was home to a set of self-righteous moneygrubbers whose personalities were a match for its cold climate; “Yankee” was synonymous with pious frauds and pasty faces; worse, Yankees sought power and pelf at Southern expense. Union with such people had never been desirable; now it was no longer possible. 39 As David F. Jamison, president
pro tem.
of South Carolina’s secession convention phrased it:
I trust that the door now is forever closed from any further connection with our Northern Confederacy. What guarantees can they offer us more binding, more solemn, and with a higher sanction, than the present written compact between us? Has that sacred instrument protected us from the jealousy and aggressions of the Northern people, which commenced forty years ago, and which ended in the Missouri Compromise? Has it protected us from the cupidity and avarice of the Northern people, who for thirty-five years have imposed the burden of sustaining this Government chiefly upon the South? Has it saved us from abolition petitions, intended to annoy and insult us, on the very floors of Congress? Has not that instrument been trodden under their very feet by every Northern State, by placing on their books statutes nullifying the laws for the recovery of fugitive slaves? I trust, gentlemen, we will put no faith in paper guarantees. They are worthless, unless written in the hearts of the people. As there is no common bond between us, all attempts to continue as united will only prove futile. 40
Southern diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut recorded an even more direct statement of Southern chauvinism. During the crisis at Fort Sumter she
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