With the passage of secession in South Carolina, at once the remaining “Cotton States” were torn by the conflict of making a great decision. There were those to whom the indignity of submitting their conception of government to what they called a usurpation of authority was inconceivable treachery to an ancient and honorable past: and there were those to whom unquestioning obedience to the Government at Washington was the only way of fulfilling the heritage of their ancestors. In the end, the extremists won. The North would offer no compromise: indeed, it would have been contrary to the Southern code of honor to have accepted halfway measures. To them there appeared no other course to pursue, no solution but to follow Carolina’s lordly lead. Mississippi seceded on January ninth, Florida on the tenth, Alabama on the eleventh, Georgia on the nineteenth, Louisiana on the twenty-sixth.
For the South as a whole, as well as for her poets, January had been a month of tempest. Following the secession of Carolina, the situation that had developed over Fort Sumter was dangerous to the extreme. As it afterwards proved, Sumter was the tinder which kindled the flame of war; and as early as January, when Major Anderson refused to surrender the fort the menace within the South began to show itself. The authorities of Charleston, endangered by Federal possession of Sumter, demanded its surrender. No decision could have been reached until after March fourth, when Lincoln was inaugurated. Meanwhile, on the fourth of February, the six states which had already left the Union, and Texas, which seceded three days earlier, formally met at convention in Charleston, and united in a Confederacy, in opposition to the Government at Washington. It was a move which their poets, as well as their more practically visioned men, had been frantically urging. Two of the most interesting of the poems of this period appeared, the one in the Southern Literary Messenger for January, by William Gilmore Simms, the other in the Charleston Courier, about the middle of the month, addressed in French, by R. Thomassy, under date of Nouvelle Orleans, 2 Janvier 1861, to “Les Enfants du Sud.” It is fiery and eloquent of passion.
Enfants du Sud, l’outrage et la menace
Aux nobles coeurs ne laissent plus de choix.
Le paix nous trompe: un serpent nous enlace
Tranchons ses noeuds, et defendons nos droits!
Qu’attendrons—nous pour reprendre l’epee,
Qui triompha d’un vieux monde oppresseur?
Le nord aussi, violant la foi juree,
Seme a son tour discorde et deshonneur.