Jefferson Davis, Southern Contentiousness, and the Myth of the Union

Missing the Forest for the Trees

The War for Southern Independence has many parallels to the American War for Independence, parallels which were not lost on Southerners who never failed to shine light on the similarities between the Bluebellies and the Red Coats and the two wars broadly. One of these similarities was the struggle that General Washington and President Jefferson Davis each faced in regard to the lack of troops even though there was no lack of fighting aged men living during the period of both wars. David McCullough in his book “1776” writes of Washington’s struggles in the war of recruiting men and then retaining them in the Continental Army, even though each of the Colonies had more than enough military-aged men and they were even standing up and growing large militia forces for the defense of their respective States; they simply refused to furnish troops to the war effort if the number of men sent would reduce the States capability to defend itself and its own sovereignty. This is obviously eerily similar to the same issue Jefferson Davis faced while trying to build up the regular military force for the cause of the Confederate States, the issue prevailed to such an extent that Davis was forced to issue a conscription act,¹ Abraham Lincoln then followed his fellow Kentuckian’s example a year later when he issues his conscription act.

In the North there was opposition to conscription, famously the Copperheads put up notable resistance to it, and Clement L. Vallandigham, perhaps the only good Ohioan to ever live, had his minute of fame. But for all of the efforts of the Copperheads, the general disposition in the United States of America was to make jokes about it to ease the mild frustration most, if not all of the lower class felt at having a conscription act. Jokes about the three-hundred dollars it cost to buy your way out of conscription rang in the ears of the middle and upper-classes of Yankees, while the words of the “Song of the Conscripts”² reverberated among the lower-class and those soldiers who sang, “We are the poor and have no wealth to purchase our liberty.” While some Northerners did resist the oppressive rule of the Republican Party, most were happy to have their rights and the rights of their States violated in the name of “preserving the Union.”

Such a willing and selfless attitude could not be said to be notable among the Southerners who were already primed to defend their rights at all costs when President Davis issued the first conscription act. Richard Taylor notes³ how the upper-class of Southron’s were unwilling to even sacrifice their slaves to the war effort when he needed them for various forms of labor in defense of the South. And so, conscription was just fuel on the fire of the Southern Heartland whose people were already concerned that Davis was becoming a dictator in the image of Lincoln; one such concerned soul was the Vice President himself, a Georgian named Alexander Hamilton Stephens. Their relationship was so strained that, according to Shelby Foote, Stephens was not living in Richmond nor dealing directly with the President. In the smaller political war happening during the War for Independence, Stephens took the side of his fellow Georgian Robert Toombs. Toombs was a somewhat disgraced Brigadier General and notable Georgian politician, prior to and after the war, and militiaman following the resignation of his commission due to major disagreements with Davis largely centered on the centralizing nature of much of Davis’s policies (including conscription). While this essay is not intended to be a historical piece, it is noteworthy to further mention that several confederate States (including Georgia and Florida) requested their troops be returned to their home states at various times as an act of protest, and Davis had to work hard to pacify such dissatisfaction among the various deep south Confederate States. In addition, nearly all of the heartland States retained a sizable number of military aged men in their own borders, with the notable exception of Florida who sent the highest percentage of military-aged men to the war effort relative to the total population of such citizens.

Aside from being interesting to those previously unfamiliar, all of the above is important framework to the remainder of this essay. Namely, how the South missed the forest for the trees, and as is so often the case, the venerable President of the glorious Confederate States was entirely vindicated.

Geographically the Confederacy was massive, especially in the earliest days. From the eastern most point of the Carolina’s and Virginia to the furthest plains of Western Texas, the northern tip of modern West Virginia to the swamps of Southern Florida, the sheer size of the CSA, while significantly smaller than the Union, was still more than respectable. And just as the Rebels beheld the tranquility and generally unmolested land of Pennsylvania prior to Gettysburg, the Southerners in the heartland enjoyed the same unmolested land they had always known.⁴ For a Georgian, Floridian, and Texan living during the first few years of the war, the odds are that they had never personally experienced destruction of their own homes and land; for them, the war was a far-away thing that they sent their men to but would surely be over in a few weeks and no blood would ever dye the cotton in the fields of the deep South.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of a Georgian from Newnan and a Virginian from Richmond. In which of these shoes would you be experiencing more distress in during the year of 1862? Obviously, the latter. Why? Well, a Virginian in 1862 was keenly aware that they were in an existential conflict and the result would be death, destruction, and reconstruction. If you are a Georgian, you are almost certainly aware that you are engaged in an existential conflict, but it isn’t your existence being directly attacked; and so, the distinct lack of ordinance exploding and the empty space in your mind (which Virginian’s fill with fear of being raped and pillaged by Bluebellies) gets to be filled with thinking and debating. In the case of the deep South, that thinking resulted in the question of “why are we allowing our rights as a sovereign state to be violated by the government in Richmond?” A fair question to be sure, and as a Southerner from these particularly sensitive (to oppression) regions, I too share the uniquely free spirit of my ancestors. And not only is it a fair question, but it was also a question that certainly should have been asked provided the right time and place presented itself, namely, a Confederate victory of the war and a peacetime to make corrections to the hurriedly implemented government. But instead, President Davis was presented a war on two fronts to fight. First against the Yankees, and another against the freedom loving Southrons whose very freedom was the reason for the war with the damn Yankees in the first place. Davis’s gloriously tragic presidency can be boiled down to him being contested at every point while just trying to do a job he didn’t want in the first place, and he took it all on the chin like a true Statesman made in the image of George Washington.

Conscription and the Myth of the Union

In typical fashion, Thomas Jefferson was completely correct in his wariness of Northern educational institutions, they did in fact, give northerners “strange peculiarities” and made them into a people of “fanatics and Tories.” It is no wonder why during reconstruction, the “Pledge of Allegiance” was first recited in American schools. The Pledge was written by a New Yorker named Francis Bellamy in 1892; he was born just a few years before Fort Sumter was fired on and grew up to see reconstruction destroy Southern heritage. But that isn’t important, what is important is the substance of the Pledge:

“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

The wickedness of the Pledge of Allegiance aside, this conception made unified action of Northern States possible; they were capable of monolithic movements with a shared spirit in preservation of the Union. And further, each and every Northerner was indoctrinated to believe that they were as integral a part of the Yankee death machine as any other, and so, an attack on the Union as an idea was a personal affront to the Northerner in the particular.

You see, the Southern Statesman of the 18th Century would not have gone along with reciting the pledge, and they would have stood in trans-generational solidarity with the Southern Statesmen and military leaders of the 19th Century. Each Colony was a Sovereign Nation, the space between the lines of writ of the Constitution was simply blank, and for many, it would have been preferable to cut their hands off than enter into contractual agreement with the Northern scum for fear of being oppressed and reconstructed. But this fear of oppression during the War for Southern Independence manifested itself both against Lincoln and Davis.

For Southerners, the South was not a monolithic unit, each State was sovereign and also retained its own distinct cultures and traditions, they each enjoyed a mode of existence foreign to all but those who were their fellow countrymen. The Yankee universalism that they watched spread across the North was coming to plant its flag in Southern ground, but perhaps Richmond had its own desires to make the world in its image, what if Richmond wanted to plant its flag in Georgia clay? And so, the heightened sensitivity to such oppression manifested itself against Lincoln and Davis, while not to the same level of extremity, perhaps enough to swing the momentum of the war Northward in the latter half.

Naivety of the South

Just as the Yankee imperial conception of the “Nation” guided their political life in every sphere, it also colored the way they saw the South. While it wasn’t true that the South was a monolithic unit in reality, when viewed from the Yankee perspective, it is easy to see why they thought that it was. Each Southern State, while unique, was unified in its opposition to the North. It was naive to believe that the War would result in death and destruction some places, but not all; for the Yankee mind, each State required reconstructing and a Texan was no different from a Virginian, both represented something deeply anti-Yankee.

This is why I say the South as a whole largely missed the forest for the trees, and when President Davis attempted to raise the South to see the broader picture, the more radicals amongst them punctured the balloon and sent the South into a death spiral to be impaled on one of the various trees that they cared so much about. And what was worse, when Davis made an effort to correct this unintentionally subversive behavior, he himself was crucified on the tree marked “no dictators.”

The trees were marked with slogans and ideas such as “no dictators,” “States rights,” “Jeffersonianism,” etc. But each tree made up a mere part of the forest, the forest was all of these and the rest of Southern heritage and philosophy put together, and the Yankees were on the fringes ready to steamroll all of it. Becoming hyper-fixated on one or two trees unintentionally divided the South against itself. Freethinkers do not always, in every particular case, make the best citizens, especially not in a time of war when President Davis and General Lee just needed devoted men to shoulder their muskets and march to, not just the defense of Richmond, but the defense of the South as a whole. While it was understood that the collapse of Richmond meant the end of the Confederacy, Southerners on the other side of the isle from Davis perhaps did not fully understand that the Confederacy was the final act of the South. On it, Southern culture would be preserved or destroyed; reconstruction was coming with or without the war, and Davis was one of the few who saw the picture broadly enough to understand it.

General Lee had his respective disagreements with Davis as well, he was famously against secession to begin with, he opposed conscription, and of course, they disagreed on various military tactics and the overall strategy of the war. But when push came to shove and his State was threated, he famously wrote, “Save in the defense of my native State, I never desire again the draw my sword.” His State was not the Confederacy, it was Virginia, and while most of his fighting was done directly in the defense of his native State, Marse Robert would have likewise drawn his sword in defense of any star on the Confederate Flag. Not because he wanted to defend Texas in and of itself, but because he too could view the forest from a birds eye view, and his perspective made him keenly aware that the whole of the Southern forest and ecosystem was at risk of being decimated, and if one part of that ecosystem was disrupted, the forest would start to die without a Yankee shell being fired.

Ideally States would not have furnished men to fight in faraway theatres that had no immediate effect on their homeland, but then again, ideally Yankees are not trying to march to the sea. Sacrifices had to be made, and unfortunately it often seemed as though President Davis stood with but a small band of heroes, the Yankees to the North and the naturally disagreeable and contentious Southerners to his rear, both trying to undermine him in his duty to his people that he didn’t want in the first place.

---

“I can't take up my musket
And fight 'em down no more
But I ain't a-goin' to love them
Now that is certain sure
And I don't want no pardon
For what I was and am
I won't be reconstructed
And I do not give a damn”

God Bless the South, and may President Davis rest in His hands.

Sincerely,

John, Son of Dick

1. “Confederate president Jefferson Davis signs the first Conscription Act in American history,” House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/28514.

2. A parody of “We Are Coming Father Abraham.”

3. “It was a curious feature of the war that the Southern people would cheerfully send their sons to battle, but kept their slaves out of danger.”

Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction, pp. 53

4. Obviously, their experience was heavily marred by the blockade and lack of resources, but the land itself had not yet known bloodshed during the first several years of the war.