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"The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to Slavery. "

 - General U.S. Grant

Sesquicentennial

Let us celebrate today the 150th anniversary of parting. On this chill, wintry cusp of November to December 2010, we mark the sesquicentennial of the secession of the Southern States from this imperfect Union we still call home.

In Kentucky, a state that remained with the Union until the war ended, some had already seen the schism coming. Although South Carolina didn't secede until December, in late October Louisville newspaper editor George Prentice sent a warning note to Abraham Lincoln. "You undoubtedly know the condition of public sentiment in the far South as well as I do. I dread lest, almost as soon as the fact of your election shall be proclaimed, a desperate blow will be struck for the dismemberment of the Union."

Lincoln's election in November electrified the monied interests in the South, who feared - no, knew - that slavery, an American institution older than the nation itself, had come under a tightening squeeze from Northern states increasingly unwilling to enforce the fugitive slave laws.

The Louisville Democrat cautioned that an ominous calm preceded "the awful storm that will inevitably fall upon the country after the election, in case Lincoln is chosen. Merchants are cautious, and bankers close in dreadful anticipation of the evil."

The same newspaper augured SIGNS OF THE COMING CONFLICT - SHADOWS OF EVIL AHEAD:

We caution slaveholders, in the event of the election of Lincoln, to be watchful of that class of property. An impression prevails in some places that that event secures their freedom, and great care should be taken. In the event of a dissolution of the Union, it may result in horrors too great to be depicted.

Surely, they meant their greatest fear, the threat of slave insurrection, not what actually happened: Millions of men in uniform, on both sides, wading through rivers of blood, ending in a staggering toll of dead and wounded.

The Deep South refused to accept the outcome of the presidential contest almost immediately as returns came in. The Charleston Mercury proclaimed: "Yesterday, November 7th, will long be a memorable day in Charleston. The tea has been thrown overboard - the revolution of 1860 has been initiated."

A resistance meeting was held. Local booksellers returned Harper's Weekly and contemplated a protest to return all "Northern" books. Many thousands of excited residents converged on the Charleston Hotel to form a procession to visit appointees who had boldly resigned their federal commissions in order to stand with their State.

In New Orleans (and perhaps even more than Charleston, New Orleans was a port of prime importance in the domestic slave trade), also in Richmond, Virginia, cadres of Minute Men quickly formed. The Lexington Kentucky Statesman of November 6, 1860, quotes a letter from Richmond: "So strong is the conviction of many leading Southern men at the South that disunion will follow the election of Lincoln that they are disposing of every dollar's worth of interest they have in enterprises North of Mason and Dixon's line."

While nervous banks prepared for the worst, leaders remained sanguine. The Governor of Mississippi took the stand that "individual action, looking to non-Intercourse commercially with the Abolition States, is the fever which, if properly handled, can turn new England upside down in six months. Half her population would be paupers in less than twelve months from the day Southern States cease to trade with her."

Of course that proved untrue. The South, according to historians, started with a deep deficit in manufacturing capacity, a shortage of capital and credit, and a crippling dependence on a monoculture crop, cotton, and its corollary - slave labor.

The former vice president turned unsuccessful Democratic candidate for president John C. Breckinridge tried to broker a Constitutional fix through a Committee of Thirteen in the Senate. His fellow Kentuckian, Sen. J. J. Crittenden, was a prominent member of that committee. Crittenden's famous "Compromise" Amendment, introduced around Christmas, proposed, among other things:

  • Drawing a permanent territorial line of 36 degrees 30 minutes of latitude to describe the eternal borderline of involuntary servitude.
  • Barring Congressional power to ban or abolish slavery in places under its jurisdiction - the District of Columbia, for example, where slaveholding members of Congress traveled to and fro with their bonded chattel.
  • Finally, the kicker was the amendment's last section, Article 6, which stipulated that no future amendment of the Constitution could abolish slavery.

In a supreme irony, Crittenden's Compromise would have been the Thirteenth Amendment, had it gone on to ratification. Instead, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery.

Odder still, there are those alive today who don't believe the Civil War was fought over slavery. I think the reason may be dry, documentary evidence like the campaign poster imaged above, which touts a platform of constitutional sovereignty of the states and equal protection to all citizens, native and naturalized. The cues to the initiated are the words "institutions" and "property."

These doubters should listen to the Confederates, in my opinion. Take John Headley, an undercover operative who rode with Forrest and Morgan and after the war became Kentucky's Secretary of State. He begins his memoir, Confederate Operations in Canada and New York, by saying:

The sectional animosities engendered by the agitation in the Northern States for the abolition of African slavery reached a climax upon the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency of the United States in November 1860. The Southern people construed this event to mean the freedom of the negroes.

Copyright © 2009 Debba · Image: Democratic candidate for president John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky and vice-presidential candidate Joseph Lane of Oregon on a campaign poster in the American Memory collection of the Library of Congress.