Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi

Many books about the antebellum period and the period leading to secession go over the same timeline and events: the Mexican War connects to the Wilmot Proviso, which connects to the Compromise of 1850, which connects to the Kansas-Nebraska Act . . . you get the picture.

It's really nice to run into books that dig deeper, usually focusing on a particular state or region within a state. Christopher J. Olsen's fine book, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830-1860 (Oxford University Press 2000) is such a work. What I really like about it is that it puts you on the ground and helps explain, on a very practical level, how local institutions worked.

Rather than provide a generalized review, I thought I'd imitate Olsen's methodology by summarizing just a few pages, focusing on voting. At pages 125-31, Olsen provides a graphic description of the mechanics of voting in antebellum Mississippi that is a joy to read.

In rural areas, the polling station was often at a plantation. The board of police, a countywide elective body, appointed inspectors and other election officials, who were usually leading local men. For example, in the fourth precinct in Bolivar County in 1855, the poll was held at the house of the neighborhood's leading citizen, "Squire" William Vick. Squire Vick and two other planters served as election inspectors. Each voter walked through the gate of Squire Vick's "Nitta Yuma" plantation and approached the front veranda, where the inspectors greeted them and probably chatted with them. Squire Vick, as host, almost certainly treated voters to food and drink.

The voters then cast their votes under the watchful eyes of the inspectors and handed their ballots to the return officer, the nephew of another planter, for placement in the ballot box, and then gave their names to clerks. Because ballots of different candidates were usually different sizes and often different colors, voting was not secret. Functionally illiterate voters -- from 10 to 25 percent or more -- might ask for help filling out names of candidates for local offices, whose names were not on the ballots.

What wonderful images! You really get a feel for the process. The voters are free men who approach to exercise the quintessential right of free men. They are treated as free and equals by the leading citizens of the area, who may want their votes in the future. And yet the entire ritual subtlely but clearly emphasizes the wealth, importance and authority of the leading men. Professor Olson comments:

"All of these considerations betray the importance of the voting process as a public ritual, and underscore its many-layered meanings and implications. Especially in small rural neighborhoods, planter-inspectors potentially held vast power. Not everyone voted alike, but most did -- some out of genuine class bonding or a shared masculine perspective, but others because they felt pressured by Squire Vick and his friends. . . . Certainly the record implies numerous limitations on freedom of choice and demonstrates that deference and intimidation survived the movement to printed ballots and mass democracy. At the very least, scenes like those on Vick's veranda discredit notions of frontier democracy or the rampant egalitarianism that supposedly made elite hegemony or inherited hierarchy untenable in the Old Southwest."

Mr. Caldwell Goes to Richmond

Did you know that there was a Republican in the Virginia State Senate -- in 1860? There was:

"Alfred Caldwell, former mayor of Wheeling, was elected to the Virginia Senate in 1859 under the Opposition banner, but, by 1860, he was an active Republican. Serving as a member of the Republican National Committee in 1860, Caldwell would eventually become what one contemporary called one of 'the most sagacious and resolute Republicans in the Northwest.' In Richmond, Caldwell was ostacized, left to smoke his cigars alone and pay his own bills at the bar. But Panhandlers elected Caldwell to represent their 'peculiar sentiments' about slavery, not 'to be the toast of urbanity.' Despite his ostracism, it was difficult for what he termed the 'peddler-lynching, school-mam expelling, parson-whipping editors and asses of Old Virginia' to undermine his popularity among his constituents."

William A. Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press 2003), at 202-03.

Incredibly, there's no Wikipedia entry for Senator Caldwell, and Professor Link's footnote (omitted) suggests by negative implication that there is little modern discussion of him. He might make an interesting topic for a thesis or paper.

Secession

H. Mills Thornton makes a compelling argument that the non sequitur in the disunionist case concerning exclusion from the territories, and the fact that unionists rarely pointed out the obvious error, demonstrates that something else was going on:

"The careful reader will have observed a fundamental non sequitur in the southern rights case. If the great threat of free-soil was that it would trap southerners in the South amidst the rising tide of Negroes, how would secession remedy the predicament? Would not independence shut southerners out of the territories even more effectively than would the adoption of a free-soil policy by the federal government? . . . If getting access to that territory was the primary southern goal, southerners had certainly not selected a means which gave obvious promise of being efficacious.

"It is essential to note, however, that . . . Unionists almost never mentioned the difficulty. The solution to this paradox is the identification of which element in the southern rights case was the primary source of its force. Despite all the discussion about the effects of free-soil upon southern slavery, the threat of Negro inundation was not the chief terror with which the case conjured; and the Unionists knew it. . . . The essence of the case was not what would happen to southerners when they were excluded from the territories but was the fact that they were to be excluded. That the exclusion would wreak ill in the economic and social environment of the South was mere lagniappe to the argument; the true ills would be wrought in the hearts of those debarred. Free-soil was an issue basically because it would represent an overtly discriminatory action by the common government."

* * *

"Secession, then, was not really intended as a remedy for the consequences of free-soil . . .. It was to be revenge for the condemnation implied by the policy and the inequality inherent in it. Southerners were Americans and they wanted to be treated like Americans; we must never forget that they saw themselves as struggling to preserve the substance of the American dream."

H. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1978), pp. 225-27 (emphasis added).

The Road to Disunion II: Secessionists Triumphant

This is as much a note to myself as anything else, but I'll dress it up with some background information to make it bloggishly useful.

If you are at all interested the causes of the Civil War -- or more accurately the causes of secession -- the first book you should read is David Potter's The Impending Crisis 1848-1861. The second book you should read is William Freehling's The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay 1776-1854. Although Professor Freehling's writing style is poor, the book is nonethless wonderful.

I have been waiting for the sequel for years. Last summer, word came that Volume II would be published this coming March. The Oxford University Press site indicates that March 2007 remains on track as the publication date for The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant 1854-1861. This will be one of the few books that I will buy in hardcover, new and at full price. The advance reviews at the OUP site give a taste of the themes in Secessionists Triumphant. You can also take a look here at an address that Professor Freehling gave back in 2000, entitled "South Carolina's Pivotal Decision for Disunion: Popular Mandate or Manipulated Verdict?", which presumably figures prominently in his narrative.

Volume II should be particularly interesting because Professor Freehling's apparent thesis -- that secession was largely manipulated by southern radicals -- is controversial. In this, it seems to bear some similarities to the arguments of Michael F. Holt. Some other historians, such as Stephanie McCurrie in her superb Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Housholds, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country, have noted that there were organized elements in the push for secession in lower southern states. Others, such as H. Mills Thornton III, in his Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama 1800-1860 and Lacy K. Ford, in his Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry 1800-1860, have emphasized that secession was popular among white farming yeomen in the deep south precisely because it was rooted in fundamental values of white male freedom and equality. I do not regard these views as mutually exclusive and look forward to seeing whether and how Professor Freehling attempts to reconcile them.

The "note to myself" part of this entry is that I see that the Civil War Roundtable of New York will be hosting a talk by Professor Freehling on March 14, 2007. Frankly, I didn't even know that such a Roundtable existed. I've never looked for a local Civil War roundtable because I have the impression, or perhaps misimpression, that roundtables do nothing but sit around and rehash Pickett's Charge for the ten-thousandth time.

I guess I'll find out whether I am mistaken or not. I've already got March 14 reserved on my calendar. If you're in the New York City area, you should consider doing the same.

Somewhat Related Earlier Post on McCurrie, Thornton and Ford:

The Causes of Secession in the Lower South