8. THE GATHERING CLOUDS OF WAR

THE NATION FINALLY DIVIDES

The election of Lincoln was the signal for the Southern states to begin to announce their secession from the Union.  On December 24th (1860) South Carolina was the first Southern state to announce its withdrawal. Six others (Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) soon joined South Carolina and on February 4, 1861 they announced at a meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, the creation of the Confederate States of America.  There a provisional government was established, with Jefferson Davis as the provisional Confederate president. Initially the moral claim of the new Confederacy was that it was simply confirming the basic rights of the states, rights that reached back to Madison and Jefferson, rights that they claimed former Federalists and contemporary Unionists had been stealing from them.  And indeed, the Confederacy was built loosely so that the states did indeed seem to be nearly fully sovereign and the Confederacy simply a coalition of rather independent states. Yet there were strong forces holding the Confederacy together. Actually, the very looseness of the Confederacy required as a matter of extreme necessity a strong, commanding hand to hold it together.  And that hand appeared in the form of Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy president. In many ways, the struggle of the South to secure its independence militarily required him and his administration to take on almost unlimited powers. But holding the Confederacy together was the even more powerful ingredient: fear White Southerners had of their Black population – both free and slave.  The Black population was growing at such a rate that Whites were terrified by the thought of being outnumbered in their Southern homeland by Blacks.  The preventing of the spread of slavery into the new Western territories – as Lincoln and most of the North had committed themselves to doing – would imprison the South in a confined world over which they feared they could soon lose control. Paranoia and thoughts of anti-White conspiracy coming from multiple directions gripped at the Southern imagination, forging Southerners into a tight bond. But that bond would soon deprive them of the real sense of freedom that they claimed they were achieving in breaking from the Union.  The South became an oppressive land, whose laws and cultural vigilance tightened down on society.  Free Blacks living in the South soon found themselves under the threat of being forced into slavery. And war fever in the South demanded that any Northern Blacks captured in battle (those not just killed outright), or simply captured as farm workers in the process of the Southern armies advancing across the land, would be carried off into Southern slavery. As both Jeff Davis and his vice president, Alexander Stephens, put it, Blacks by their very inferior nature were intended by God to thrive only within the context of eternal servitude to the superior race of Whites.  Enslavement of any and all Blacks was actually a necessary part of the advance of civilization. This credo was thus the real glue holding the Confederacy together.

Jefferson Davis   – Confederate President

Alexander Stephens – Vice President  



South Carolina votes for secession – December 24, 1860



The Confederacy is formally established in Montgomery, Alabama – February 4, 1861
Alabama Department of Archives and History

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Go on to the next section:  1861 – The War Begins

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  Miles H. Hodges