[CHAPTER XII]
The Attitude of the Border States
With the secession of Virginia on the seventeenth of April, 1861, there came a final end to all hope of finding a way out. The active border states did not immediately declare their secession indeed, but that was a foregone conclusion so far as Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee were concerned, and military proceedings did not wait for the formal act. That came on the sixth of May, in Arkansas, on the twentieth of May in North Carolina, and on the eighth of June in Tennessee. Kentucky and Missouri were so divided in sentiment that no united action for or against the Union could be secured.
Kentucky officially assumed an attitude of neutrality to which neither side paid the smallest attention then or later. That indeed was the most impossible of all conceivable attitudes. It assumed to the state all the independent right of action that secession itself implied, without asserting a claim to the right of secession. It proclaimed Kentucky to be so far out of the Union as to demand respect for its neutrality and so far in the Union as to exercise its full voice in Congress. It warned the armies of both sides to avoid trespass upon Kentucky's territory, a warning which, if Kentucky had undertaken to enforce, it would have involved that state in immediate war with both the combatants at one and the same time. The thing was ridiculous from the beginning, absurd in conception and a ludicrous failure in execution. There was later a pretense of secession by a so-called convention in that state, but it was not taken seriously on either side, and in the end the state furnished volunteers to both the contending armies in substantially equal numbers.
Tennessee did much the same thing but in a different fashion. That state's adoption of an ordinance of secession was quite regular in form. It had all the validity that the like ordinance adopted by any other state had or could have. But it did not and could not command the obedience of Tennessee's people in anything like the degree in which secession ordinances in other states had commanded the obedience of the people of those states. The advocates of secession had secured a majority vote in Tennessee, but it was not a very pronounced majority. Still more important, the division of sentiment there was mainly geographical. In the mountainous eastern part of the state and in the adjacent mountains of North Carolina where slavery scarcely at all existed and where little mountain farms and hunters' log cabins stood in the place of plantations and stately mansions, the sentiment was overwhelmingly in favor of the Union. This was perhaps scarcely more largely due to a feeling of loyalty to the Union, though that was strong, than to a still more active sentiment of hostility and antagonism to the wealth and social pretensions of the cotton and tobacco planters whose more fruitful fields lay farther to the west.
The often illiterate but shrewdly intelligent mountaineers, to whom education had offered few and very meager advantages and with whom fortune had dealt rather harshly, were very naturally jealous of their better educated, better fed, and altogether more prosperous neighbors. It is hard for the man who trudges afoot or rides astride an underfed mule for which his forage supply is scant, to entertain kindly feelings toward the man who goes about in his carriage drawn by sleek and negro-groomed horses. It is not easy for the man who houses his family in a mud-daubed log hut and feeds his half-clad wife and children upon corn pone and an often uncertain ration of bacon or salt pork, to avoid sentiments of discontent when he realizes how much easier and more luxurious is the lot of those who "wear purple and fine linen and fare sumptuously every day."
So, in the mountain regions of Tennessee, among the stalwart six-footers who were inured to hardship, and who knew all there was to know about using a rifle with effect, there was a very general impulse to join the Union armies and fight against the slave-holding class, whom they regarded as hereditary enemies.
In the region a little farther west this class antagonism was intensified by a closer contact and one often more exasperating. Between these two classes there was instinctive and implacable war already; and when the time came for the poorer Tennesseans to choose on which side they would fight, they very generally elected to fight against and not for an institution which they believed to be the source and origin and ultimate cause of that social inferiority which so galled and irritated and angered them.
Let us not misunderstand. These people had no theories on the subject of slavery. The few of them who could in any wise come into the ownership of a negro held to that property possession as resolutely as they would have held to the ownership of a mule or an ox. They were not troubled by any scruples of conscience concerning the ownership of human beings or beset in their minds by any abstractions as to human rights. They no more regarded the negro as the equal of the white man than did their plantation owning neighbors. A negro was in their eyes a "nigger," to be worked to his utmost capacity and mercilessly lashed when guilty of any insolence. They were even less ready than their wealthier neighbors to tolerate any assumption of equality on the part of a negro. They were quicker even than the planters to see and resent such assumptions because their own social status as the superiors of black men was less marked and less secure than that of the planters. A very small concession on that point would have obliterated the only social distinction that these poor cabin dwellers enjoyed.[3]