The Women of the Confederacy

by J. L. Underwood

THE NORTHERN STATES SECEDE FROM THE UNION

[By J. L. Underwood.]

The denial of the equal rights of the Southern States in the public territorial domain, and the nullification by the Northern States of the acts of Congress and the decisions of the Supreme Court on territorial questions, and the formation and triumph of a party pledged to hostility to the South, were not the only considerations that convinced the Southern States that their only honorable course lay in secession. The compact of the written Constitution was the only Union that had existed. A breach or repudiation of that compact was a breach of the Union. It was secession without its name.

In 1850, after a violent sectional agitation, which shook the country, over the admission of California as a free State, a compromise measure, proposed by Mr. Clay and advocated by Webster and Calhoun, was adopted by Congress. It was known as the “omnibus bill.” It provided, among other things, that California should be a free State; that the slave trade should be abolished in the District of Columbia, and that slaves escaping from 254 their owners, from one State into another, could be arrested anywhere and returned to their owners. Article four, section two of the Federal Constitution makes this provision in the plainest of terms. It was similar to the New England Fugitive Slave law of 1643 enacted by Massachusetts, Connecticut, Plymouth and New Haven. Mr. Webster in his great speech in Faneuil Hall in Boston, in defense of his vote for the “omnibus bill,” read the words of the Constitution and showed that the fugitive slave section of the omnibus bill was almost a literal reiteration of the constitutional provision.

The majority of the Northern States repudiated this feature of the act of Congress and declared that it should not be enforced. Here was the boldest nullification, the most direct breaking up of the old Union. Here was the arch rebellion of the century. The question was not what should be done with the fugitive slaves, but whether the Northern States would do what, in the Constitution, they had agreed to do. The South waited for the Northern States to revoke such a flagrant disregard of their rights under the Constitution and such a bold repudiation of the original terms of Union. Patriotic little Rhode Island did rescind her action in the matter, but she was alone. Most of the other States had become desperate in their hostility to the South and, when the South, seeing all hope of justice, all vestige of the old Union, all prospect of peace, hopelessly gone, resorted to quiet, peaceable withdrawal from these domineering States, the resolution was formed and carried out by the party in power, to subjugate the Southern States to the will of the majority States, and keep them in what was called the Union against their will.

The South in seceding made no threat, and contemplated no attempt to invade a Northern State in pursuit of slaves, but simply sought to sever all connection with the States and people who were so determined to ignore her rights, and who nullified their own plighted terms of union. She did not secede in the interest of slavery nor for the purpose of war. The Southern States seceded to take care of the fragments of a broken Union. 255 Slavery, it is true, was the occasion of the rupture. Peaceable secession on the one hand and coercion on the other was the issue of the war. Emancipation was adopted as a war measure two years later by the Northern administration and finally consummated in 1865 as a punitive measure to further crush the conquered South. Such was the public opinion at the time of the fall of Fort Sumter that not a regiment could have been raised at the North to invade Virginia if it had been distinctly called out for the purpose of setting the negroes free. Fanatics by the thousands made a demigod of the murderous John Brown, but it was not fanatics who were in control at Washington. It was the politicians, not working from humanitarian sentiment, true or false, but impelled by a determination to cripple the South and break up her controlling influence in national politics,—a preeminence which had existed from the first days of the government. The politicians shrewdly employed the anti-slavery excitement to gain power for themselves and especially to aggravate the South into secession, and then, smothering every whisper of war for the freedom of the negroes, they raised the rallying cry of “Save the Union” and marshalled the Northern hosts for subjugation. President Davis justly said to a self-constituted umpire visiting him in Richmond, “We are not fighting for slavery; we are fighting for independence. The war will go on unless you acknowledge our right to self-government.”

FRENZIED FINANCE AND THE WAR OF 1861

[By J. L. Underwood.]

Was the war between the States in 1861 a war in behalf of slavery on the one side and freedom on the other? Not at all. After all the noisy and fanatical agitation on the subject, only a small minority of the Northern people had expressed any desire to have the negroes of the South emancipated at that time, and no State nor people of the South had said that slavery should be perpetual. 256 All the parties which in 1860 cast any electoral votes distinctly disavowed any intention to interfere with slavery where it existed. This was the declaration even of the Republican party which was triumphant and was now in power. Mr. Lincoln, the President-elect, repeatedly declared that slavery was not to be disturbed in the States, although he said the country could not remain “half slave and half free.” Here, then, the North and the South were thoroughly agreed that slavery within the States should continue undisturbed. As to emancipation, both sections of the country and all parties except the ultra-Abolitionists were pro-slavery. The Abolitionists admitted that under the Federal Constitution there could be no power in the national government to free the slaves. They cursed and burned the Constitution as “a compact with the devil and a league with hell,” and defiantly repudiated all laws which carried out its provisions. Under the plea of what they called “higher law,” they defied law. They were really anarchists. The Free Soil party, which had assumed the name of Republican for party purposes, secretly encouraged the Abolitionists in their mad crusade and welcomed their votes, but persistently disavowed their aims. All rational men knew that the time had not come to turn loose millions of half-civilized Africans in this country; while many, North and South, deplored the existence of slavery and would not advocate it in the abstract, yet they believed that emancipation was not best for the negro and would be accompanied by tremendous peril to the white people. The truth is that the Abolitionists of the North kept up such a blatant and fanatical agitation against the South that it was out of the question, in the excitement of the times, for conservative men, North or South, to think or speak of such an alternative as the immediate freedom of the negroes.