Civil War

Civil War Notes

By Madison Nef

Picking up where my last section of notes left off- most Southerners began to view the Republican’s election victory as a huge triumph for those in the North who wanted to abolish slavery, slave trading etc. This held especially true for seven of the “Deep” southern states: South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Texas and Florida. Pro-secessionist colonies quickly formed in these states, and by December of 1860, the lower states began to pass ordinances of secession.

-          ~Delegates sent to a convention in Montgomery

-          ~Constitution written and government established for a new nation

-          ``~“Confederate States of America”

These “Confederate States” began to model themselves and build up on what the states had already built, calling themselves the rightful successors and promoting themselves as better than the original states. The Confederate leaders of these states chose well-balanced leaders, and then began conversing with the only 8 slave-holder states left in the country: Arkansas, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia; asking them to join them.

This initial phase of succession represented a large but risky step for the Lower South in protecting slavery rights- it was largely frowned upon and many of the polls guaranteed defeat, calling it an attempt to “undermine the economic and social bases of their society”.

The Montgomery Convention

The convention was held in early February of 1861. It was at this convention that the Confederate States were born. As mentioned above, the Confederate States ripped off most of what they were from the original states- in fact, the only key difference was the laws and opinions about slavery!

The Confederates elected Jefferson Davies of Mississippi as their President, but decided to not make any large decisions that could affect the chances they had at bringing over the remaining 8 slave-holding states to their side. However, they did make it clear that they would not allow African slave trading. Their constitution, while it did not support trading, DID explicitly protect slavery as a business.

I wanted to take a moment and go through some of the key... groups, I guess, that took a large part in the events of the secession.

Immediate secessionists were often times Breckenridge supporters. These people wanted each state to act immediately and believed that the best course of action was to cut all ties from the Union and the other states. They thought that by doing so, it would promote a new type of independence, safety, and southern unity. Immediate secessionists had good allies in the lower south, and drew a lot of support.

Cooperationists were mostly supporters of Bell, with a small percentage supporting Douglas. This means they were comprised of mainly former democrats. That aside, they differed from immediate secessionists because they recognized that the South was in great danger and knew that they would be forced to provide strong guarantees to protect their rights and slavery if Georgia stayed with the Union and did not join them.

Cooperationists figured the best way to handle things would be to hold conventions in the 8 upper South states, and use farming prospects to convince them to leave the Union. However, with the secession of more than half of the nearby states without any conventions; the cooperationists seemed rather defeated and were no where near as active with campaigning as the immediate secessionists were.

Unionists typically lived in the Upper South and the border states. They were anti-secession and refused to give help to the Confederacy. During the war, unionists offered full support to the Union. Now; don’t get the title garbled. There were two types of unionists- the type of unionist who supported the Union simply for its ideals, and the type of unionist who simply stood by the Union as a defiance to slavery. Most unionists were as much against the war as they were against slavery.

Unionists (including Lincoln) also wrongly believed that Cooperationists were anti-secession and expected a backlash that never came in the south against the sentiments of the secession.

All southerners had different opinions about what Montgomery represented. Some thought it was a revolutionary response to Lincoln’s election; while others thought it was purely legal. Initially, it was compared to the American Revolution of the past century and most thought that it was an attempt to throw off the central force of power.

While the hope had been for a nice, peaceful separation of the states; the Confederacy took to force and military action multiple times. They overtook Federal forts and raided the arsenal, activated the militia, and authorized a large army of over 100,000 men. At the time this was seen as a large problem, but later arguments insisted that the Lower South had acted legally and that what they did was fine because it complied with the Constitution’s law about state sovereignty.

Secession is impossible to separate from the institution of slavery. The Low South accepted and loved the secession, seeing it as a way to drive away northerners and their attempts to get rid of slavery. The biggest fear of the Southerners was losing all they had worked for to northerners... but we’ll focus on that NEXT TIME.

I hope you enjoyed this paper and learned something useful. I know I did.

~Maddie