In this Virginia History Blog on the onset of the Civil War, we examine the run-up to secession in “Year of Meteors” portending dire omens at the 1860 Presidential Election, and “Age of Strict Construction” showing the growth of federal power that Lincoln stood to inherit. “Fragile Fabric of Union” addresses the origins of the Civil War in the near certainty that the “King Cotton” world monopoly supply of cotton would bring future prosperity and military guarantees by Britain and France.
The earliest stages of the Great Rebellion are examined in “A Secession Crisis Enigma” discovering political maneuvering prior to Fort Sumter. In “Life and Times of John Brown Baldwin”, we look at a Unionist in the 1861 Richmond Secession Convention who was then a member of the Confederate Congress, and “Reluctant Rebels” describes the volunteers who would not be drafted.
Run-up to secession in the Civil War crisis
Year of Meteors
Douglas R. Egerton wrote Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought the Civil War in 2010. It is available from the Bloomsbury Press, on Kindle and online new and used.Buy “Year of Meteors” on Amazon here.
See also Michael F. Holt The Election of 1860: A Campaign Fraught with Consequences (2017), and Harold Holzer Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter, 1860-1861 (2008).
Partisan politics was central to provoking the secession crisis. It was both the prelude and the proximate cause of the Civil War. A small number of southern “fire-eater” nationalists manipulated the party nominating process in 1860 to cripple Stephen Douglas’ chances for the presidency, control state secession conventions to ruin the Union and then rule in a slaveholder’s republic. Douglas campaigned in the South to defend the Union by force if necessary. He continued advocating for Union thereafter throughout the “Secession Winter” of 1860-61.
Between the “Democratic” conventions of 1860 held in Charleston, Baltimore and Richmond, Egerton shows that Robert Barnwell Rhett and William Lowndes Yancey plotted to break up the national Democratic party. The Democratic Party’s two-thirds rule assured the downfall of Douglas, southern Whigs went for Constitutional Union John Bell, and Southern Democrat John C. Breckenridge’s (later General, CSA) professions of national loyalty were not taken seriously. The certain victory of the Democratic nominee as President Buchanan’s successor was forfeited to ensure a Republican victory for Lincoln. That created the fire-eater secessionist pretext for dissolution of the Union, which then lead to the establishment of the Confederacy.
Buy “Year of Meteors” on Amazon here. Also by this author, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (1993), and The Wars of Reconstruction (2014).
The Age of Strict Construction
Peter Zavodnyik wrote The Age of Strict Construction: A History of the Growth of Federal Power, 1789-1861 in 2007. Available from the Catholic University of America Press and online new and used.Buy “The Age of Strict Construction” on Amazon here.
See also William W. Freehling Road to Disunion: Vol. II, Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 (2007), and David M. Potter The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848-1861 (2011). Also on 19th century party patronage, Mark Wahlgren Summers Party Games: Getting, Keeping and Using Power in Gilded Age Politics (2004).
This is a narrative account of the growth in the federal government’s centralized power from the Constitution to the Civil War. There was a substantial expansion despite the officially touted theories of limited federal government held by the majoritarian parties of Jefferson and Jackson. The political practice during the “age of constitutional conservatism” was “political centralization” by employment of the spoils system through an increasing number of local government offices, government contracts and their support of industrialization, and related federal policy, including providing federal jobs for defeated Congressmen who had voted for administration legislation.
Abetted by a federal judiciary that promoted federal jurisdiction in 1819 with the Dartmouth case on contracts, the federal executive leveraged its small domain of constitutionally sanctioned policy into a substantial impact in local commercial centers among the states because the states themselves decentralized power into their localities. The Covode Committee hearings in the summer of 1860, chaired by Opposition then Republican Representative John Covode of Pennsylvania, exposed widespread corruption in the Buchanan Administration, including administration influencing state nominating conventions for Senate and House.
Buy “The Age of Strict Construction” on Amazon here.
The Fragile Fabric of Union
Brian D. Schoen wrote The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War in 2011. It is available from the Johns Hopkins University Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Buy “The Fragile Fabric of Union” on Amazon here. A companion to Howard Bodenhorn A History of Banking in Antebellum America: Financial Markets and Economic Development in an Era of Nation-Building (2000), and Charles Post The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class-Structure, Economic Development, and Political Conflict, 1620-1877 (2012).
The antebellum cotton producers in the South were not noncommercial agrarians, they were international capitalists with modern materialist values. The financial underpinning of any proposed independent Southern republic was acknowledged by all to be slave-based cultivation of cotton. Secessionists seized upon assurances by leaders of the world’s cotton production that “King Cotton” would lead to almost certain prosperity for the proposed Confederacy. Focusing on the cotton states of Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi. Byrne develops the ways that the leaders of the Southern economy pursued a near monopoly of the world’s cotton supply to European manufacturers.
To do so they had to constantly expand their commercial and industrial capabilities to supply ever-larger quantities of cotton to European mills. That required cultivation of important ties with international merchants and financiers in England and France. The “lords of the loom” in private letters and in public speeches gave their Southern partners reason to believe that their countries would resort to military force against the United States Government to guarantee a continuing supply of cotton from the American South.
Buy “The Fragile Fabric of Union” on Amazon here.
Earliest Stages of the Civil War Crisis
A Secession Crisis Enigma
Daniel W. Crofts wrote A Secession Crisis Enigma: William Henry Hurlbert and “The Diary of a Public Man” in 2010. It is available from the Louisiana State University Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Buy “A Secession Crisis Enigma” on Amazon here. See also Michael S. Green Politics and America in Crisis: The Coming of the Civil War (2010).
The “Diary”for the crucial Winter Secession Crisis from December 1960 to March 1861 was published anonymously in 1879 in the New York North American Review. It purported to be written by a Washington insider with access to Abraham Lincoln, William H. Seward and Stephen A. Douglas. Sensible leading politicians in Washington sought to avoid civil war, including Northern Democrats, conservative Republicans, and Southern Unionists who saw the catastrophe ahead that the extremists were driving towards. Lincoln met extensively with southern Senators and Representatives while he stayed at the Willard Hotel and took a serious interest in the Peace Conference with representatives from fourteen free states and seven slave holding states who met there the month before his inauguration.
The anonymous work was republished in 1946, and it was once held comparable to Mary Chestnut’s diary. But it fell into disuse in historical circles, because it was after all, a fabricated memoir by a ghostly author. It now turns out to be a compilation of at least two contemporary journalists with access to the personalities reported on, William Henry Hurlbert and his friend and sometime rival Sam Ward (Not Sam Ward alone as was believed earlier.) Herbert himself had backed Douglas over Lincoln and so lost his job with the New York Times. He later intrepidly went to Richmond following the secession convention story there in early 1861, only to be arrested and jailed by Confederates for a few months, then held under house arrest until the summer of 1862.
Buy “A Secession Crisis Enigma” on Amazon here. Also by this author, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (1993), Old Southampton: Politics and Society in a Virginia County, 1834-1869 (1992), a TVH top 300 pick for Virginia history, and Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other Thirteenth Amendment and the Struggle to Save the Union (2016).
The Life and Times of John Brown Baldwin
John R. Hildebrand wrote The Life and Times of John Brown Baldwin, 1820-1873 in 2008. Available from Lot’s Wife Publishing, and online new and used.Buy “John Brown Baldwin” on Amazon here. See also Charles B. Dew Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (2017).
John B. Baldwin was an Augusta County state legislator from the Valley who was a conditional unionist, commissioned as a delegate in Virginia’s Secession Convention in Richmond to meet with Lincoln just before the Confederates firing on Fort Sumter. He served initially as a Confederate Colonel to raise troops, then in the Confederate Congress rebuking Jefferson Davis for violations of civil rights and supporting army recruiting efforts.
At the close of the war, Baldwin resisted Lee’s efforts to enlist slaves and opposed continued futile resistance. After the war, he was one of the Committee of Nine negotiating with President Grant to pass a Virginia Constitution allowing universal suffrage white and black men, including ex-Confederates. He returned to the General Assembly and also served on the University of Virginia Board of Visitors.
Buy “The Life and Times of John Brown Baldwin” on Amazon here. Also by this author, Iron Horses in the Valley: The Valley and Shenandoah Valley Railroads, 1866-1882 (2000).
Reluctant Rebels
Kenneth W. Noe wrote Reluctant Rebels: The Confederates Who Joined the Army after 1861 in 2010. Available from the University of North Carolina Press, on Kindle and online new and used.Buy “Reluctant Rebels” on Amazon here.
See also Aaron Sheehan –Dean Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia (2007), and Albert Burton Moore Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (1924, 2017). A companion to James McPherson For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997).
This book explores the differences between the volunteers enlisting in the Confederate armies in a “rush to the colors” in 1861 and their subsequent failure to re-enlist, versus the men enlisting under the threat of North America’s first civilian conscription for war. The early rallying citizenry were more ideologically secessionist, concerned with issues of honor and duty.
Later enlistees who volunteered to avoid being labeled “draftees” were more committed to protect their families and property from the advancing Yankee hordes. They hated the invading army. They were older, and less caught up in the army’s religious revival, but not shirkers. The national goal of independence was secondary to the compelling interest in local defense. Failure of the Confederacy to defend homes and to expel the invader compromised their loyalties to the rebellion.
Buy “Reluctant Rebels” on Amazon here.
TVH Era Webpage for the Civil War Crisis
The TVH webpage for Antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction Eras, 1824-1883, features our top title picks taken from the bibliographies of three surveys of Virginia History’s 400 years.
The Table of Contents divides Political and Economic Virginia, 1824-1883 into (a) Antebellum Virginia Policy 1820-1850, (b) Antebellum Virginia Economics 1820-1850, (c) Sectionalism and Civil War 1850-1865, and Reconstruction Virginia Policy 1865-1883. Topical history is treated under headings of Social History, Gender in Virginia, and Religious Virginia.
African American Virginia, 1820-1883 is divided into (a) Plantation Slavery 1820-1865, (b) Free Blacks, Artisans and Slave Hires 1820-1850, and (c) Reconstruction African Americans 1863-1883. Finally, wars are featured under (1) Mexican War, (2) Civil War Combat and (3) CivilWar Home Front.
See Also
General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
Note: Insights for these reviews include those available from articles in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Civil War Era, the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of American History.