Confederate Visions

Nationalism, Symbolism, and the Imagined South in the Civil War

Ian Binnington

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780813935010
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Nationalism in nineteenth-century America operated through a collection of symbols, signifiers citizens could invest with meaning and understanding. In Confederate Visions, Ian Binnington examines the roots of Confederate nationalism by analyzing some of its most important symbols: Confederate constitutions, treasury notes, wartime literature, and the role of the military in symbolizing the Confederate nation.

Nationalisms tend to construct glorified pasts, idyllic pictures of national strength, honor, and unity, based on visions of what should have been rather than what actually was. Binnington considers the ways in which the Confederacy was imagined by antebellum Southerners employing intertwined mythic concepts—the "Worthy Southron, " the "Demon Yankee, " the "Silent Slave"—and a sense of shared history that constituted a distinctive Confederate Americanism. The Worthy Southron, the constructed Confederate self, was imagined as a champion of liberty, counterposed to the Demon Yankee other, a fanatical abolitionist and enemy of Liberty. The Silent Slave was a companion to the vocal Confederate self, loyal and trusting, reliable and honest.

The creation of American national identity was fraught with struggle, political conflict, and bloody Civil War. Confederate Visions examines literature, newspapers and periodicals, visual imagery, and formal state documents to explore the origins and development of wartime Confederate nationalism.

1

“At Last, We Are a Nation among Nations”

The Constitutional Confederate Nation

At last, we are a nation among nations; and the world shall soon behold in many a distant port another flag unfurled!

HENRY TIMROD,
Ethnogenesis (1861)

In an impromptu speech given in Newcastle, England, on October 7, 1862, William Gladstone, then British chancellor of the exchequer in the government of Lord Palmerston, remarked, “We may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the South; but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either; they have made a nation.”¹ Gladstone’s certainty on this issue may have followed from his belief, as he remarked later in the speech, that the success of the South in defending secession was “as certain as any event yet future and contingent can be.”² Not surprisingly, many Confederates agreed with Gladstone’s assessment, but they did so for one reason quite American in nature: the existence of a written, ratified constitution. Gladstone was likely not thinking about the word “constitution” as he spoke, but many white Southerners understood that before Jefferson Davis and the other leaders of the South made either an army or a navy, they had made a constitution, and thus, in their eyes, they had made a nation. Moreover, those same white Southerners saw the Provisional and Permanent Constitutions of the Confederate States as part of the constitutional tradition inherited from the American Revolution. Many of them believed that their actions represented “a restoration of the original federal order.”³ In short, the Confederate adherence to a particular vision of American constitutionalism was one of the first acts the new state took of Confederate Americanism.

In this telling of the story of the Confederate nation, in the early months of 1861, the Confederate founders laid claim to the constitutional heritage of 1787, modified it in light of the nation’s experiences, and, to safeguard their particular way of life, then set about defending it. This reality provides the context for the Southern congressman who remarked in January 1865, as the war was all but lost, “ ‘This is a war for the constitution, it is a constitutional war.’ ”⁴ Asserting this version of the American constitutional tradition would thus secure the purpose for which they had seceded: the defense of slavery. This was the understanding of Confederate Americanism with which the South began the Civil War. Due to the usurpations of the Demon Yankee, the Worthy Southron—in the Jeffersonian tradition inherited from John Locke—was honor bound to secede in order to protect himself and his loyal Silent Slaves from the depredations of fanatical abolitionists. Given that the Worthy Southron was, in his own mind, the true American, it is not surprising that he set out to demonstrate his adherence to Confederate Americanism by replicating the actions of the revered Founders, taking pains at the same time to undo the errors unwittingly made in an earlier time.

Not understanding this interpretation of Confederate Americanism, historians tend to concentrate on the speed with which the Confederacy created itself and miss the significance of that haste. For example, Donald Nieman notes, “The priority that the Confederates gave to constitution making—especially when faced with the prospect of war with the United States—must have struck foreigners as quintessentially American.”⁵ Similarly, in another interpretation of the causes of the Civil War, Brian Holden Reid comments that “it says a lot for the legalistic bias of American political culture in the nineteenth century that immediate priority was allotted to perfecting this provisional document instead of taking practical measures to secure Southern independence, working out a viable policy towards the Upper South, and establishing a satisfactory foreign policy and the means to implement it.” Reid later argues that “drafting a constitution, no matter how delicate the legal refinements, does not make a nation.”⁶

At some level, this is undoubtedly true. This narrative, however, deals with the foundation of an American nation, and the existing tradition of such nations, from the 1777 Articles of Confederation to the 1787 United States Constitution to the 1861 Confederate Constitution, says otherwise. In this context, we need to understand the force of the constitutional imperative in the United States. We need to take seriously, for example, the opinion of a Louisianan author for De Bow’s Review, who declared in March 1861 that “every nation and every sovereign State exists only by virtue of a constitution.”⁷ After all, this was a central way in which the United States distinguished itself from European monarchies, and in the first eighty years of the Union’s existence, the Constitution of 1787 came to occupy a very important place in the national self-image. That this was the case in the South as well seems quite certain from the tone of the editorial debates surrounding the Confederate Constitution. The Confederate nation was, in that respect, an American nation. Indeed, for Confederates it was the American nation.

John M. Murrin persuasively argues that “the Constitution [of 1787] became a substitute for any deeper kind of national identity,” because the “Americans had erected their constitutional roof before they put up the national walls.”⁸ In like fashion, the Confederacy’s Permanent Constitution of 1861 was an attempt to repeat the experiment, getting it right this time, at least in the eyes of a section of political and editorial opinion in the South. Had the Confederacy won independence during the Civil War, its Constitution might have acted in the same way, providing a roof under which the new nation could grow and coalesce. We will never know the outcome of this process, but it does demonstrate that in the American experience, nation-building has had two distinct parts: first creation out of whole cloth, and second, sustenance, if necessary in the face of hostile enemies. The Confederacy failed miserably in the latter aim but had the war ended differently, the groundwork was laid for a future, less contested nationhood in the American tradition. So to suggest that failed Confederate nationalism was a root cause of the Civil War’s result is to put the cart before the horse; rather, we should say that the Confederacy, and particularly its military, ultimately failed Confederate nationalism. The latter could not and would not survive without the nourishment of military victory and political success.

Nation, nationalism, and national identity are deceptively simple concepts, as the wealth of literature attempting to explain them demonstrates, and we must come to terms with them if we are to understand what the Confederate Constitutions were really about.⁹ In one sense, nation is conflated with state when taken to mean simply a politically organized entity ruling a specific geographic area. In the American context, however, this association is complicated by the peculiar development of the governmental system of the United States.¹⁰ The term “nation,” when associated with government, tends to assume a relatively unitary form of government, perhaps because the word developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with special reference to the monarchies of Europe. In the United States, by contrast, the national “roof” of which Murrin writes was a federal one, that is, a form of government that shares power among a central authority and a number of constituent territorial units that retain some degree of individual sovereignty. Thus, the state over which the umbrella of American nationalism developed under the Constitution of 1787 assumed a distinctly federal tone. By 1860, the South feared that the federal government, in practical terms, was coming closer and closer to the unitary system the colonies had rejected during the Revolution. Yet we can still best understand the intentions of the Confederate framers concerning nationhood if we bear this idea of a relationship between federated states and nationalism in mind. These Southerners were experienced politicians, and we should take their efforts seriously.¹¹ What they sought, however, was a return to their understanding of the original American idea of nationalism, as remembered from previous generations.

From this viewpoint, the Confederate Constitution and the debate surrounding it form part of an attempt to turn the imagined community of the Antebellum South into a freestanding nation, from the fictive past of an imagined South to the mythic present of an imagined Confederacy.¹² That community desired a return to an earlier form of national government and was white in color, quite local in nature, and connected to the wider world by kinship ties as much as anything else. The project of the Confederacy in 1861 was to turn this foundation into a wider political and cultural affiliation.¹³ We should therefore be clear about something else peculiar to the American national tradition. As Murrin’s idea of a national roof implies, in the case of the United States after 1787 and the Confederacy after 1861, we are discussing state nationalism, produced from the upper echelons of politics and directed downward toward the masses of citizens from whom it requires loyalty and service. As a concept, we must distinguish it from popular nationalism, produced from the lower echelons of society and directed upward toward political elites. The two, of course, are not mutually exclusive: to be successful, they must be symbiotic, and the effort to sell the Confederate Constitution was precisely an attempt to legitimize the actions of state nationalists in the popular mind.

That the Confederacy began as the nationalist project of a central state authority does not, and should not, make it any less valid as a species of national feeling. This chapter demonstrates that a certain sector of white Southern opinion was generally receptive to this effort, but an attempt to sell the Constitution occurred regardless.¹⁴ This was an effort to sell not the provisions themselves but rather the idea of a Confederate nation to the Upper South, North, and the world. Such an action was necessary as nations have to be validated both internally and externally. It is insufficient that a people regard themselves as a nation; they must be recognized as such by others. The Confederacy sought such recognition long and hard, most notably from the British, but in spite of Gladstone’s opinions, they never really came close to obtaining that much sought-after external validation.¹⁵

The window through which we can begin to see this effort is the Southern print media. The sources used here are periodicals and newspapers primarily from the states that participated in the Montgomery Convention.¹⁶ It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of print media in the political life of the Confederate nation at this time. There were no other regular, alternative sources of news, and newspapers especially assumed an importance they have lost in the multimedia environment of the twenty-first century. In this case, Southern print media provided a vehicle through which the producers of Confederate nationalism tried to reach their intended constituency and in which the latter replied. First, before the Montgomery Convention, a spirited discussion took place in the periodicals over a purportedly organic idea of nationhood that militated against the establishment of any federal nation. For some of these observers, though they did not say so directly, a government with the powers of the Articles of Confederation appears to have been the ideal. Their opponents, meanwhile, perhaps recognizing more acutely the coming need to defend their new nation against Northern tyranny, rejected this 1777 notion in favor of the 1787 concept of a more centralized government. This was the anticipation phase.

Second, after the publication of the Provisional Constitution and through the promulgation of its successor, the Permanent Constitution, commentary on the new documents filled the pages of Confederate newspapers and periodicals, mostly approving but not exclusively so. Almost every newspaper considered these constitutional developments important enough to print both Constitutions in full, taking up a considerable portion of their pages.¹⁷ This is the reaction phase.

Third, leading Confederate politicians recommended the documents to their constituents using language that associated nation with a people and an American political system. Among these speeches and letters are contributions from President Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, and Benjamin H. Hill of Georgia, Robert H. Smith and Thomas Fearn of Alabama, and Louis T. Wigfall of South Carolina and Texas.¹⁸ This is the legitimation phase. After this time, by late April 1861, attention in the Southern print media had turned to the unfolding war, and discussions of nationhood and nationalism moved away from the Constitution. These three phases were not discrete, separate, or neatly consecutive periods of time; in many cases, they overlapped. They do, however, allow us to organize the constitutional debates into a coherent process.

Two caveats are necessary at this point. First, while this approach tends to flatten out political differences among the debate’s participants, it would be an error to ignore their existence altogether. Discussions over the provisions of the Constitution, although they occurred in secret, were not without argument and controversy. The South Carolina delegation, perhaps more than any other, failed to get its way, even though South Carolinians chaired both drafting committees.¹⁹ Notably, then, sources from South Carolina were the least likely to fit the mold described here. In addition, very real political differences soon split the participants in the constitutional debates over the prosecution of the war, of which the schism between president and vice president was only the most visible. This chapter highlights strands of political and editorial opinion that, while not necessarily identical on every issue, were pointing in the same direction in early 1861: toward the Confederate American nationalism outlined above.

Second and more important, considering the impact of the debate on the wider public, we should be careful not to suggest that editors or politicians could shape public debate at will. As one commentator observes, the public nature of the news meant that “editors could preach, but, unlike in a church, heretics sat in the congregation and some were passing out their own versions of the truth.”²⁰ People had their own beliefs, prejudices, and preferences, and they saw the vitally important issues of the day through those lenses.

Confederates, therefore, had ample opportunity to notice the importance their leaders attached to creating a frame of government, and to follow the debate that accompanied their actions. Constitution-making was one of the first collective actions the seceding Southern states took, well before the creation of an army or navy. Very soon after South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860, plans went forward to call a convention of the South in Montgomery, Alabama, for February 4, 1861. At that convention, after presenting their credentials and establishing procedures, the delegates resolved to draft a Provisional Constitution.²¹ Only once that document was in place, on February 8, 1861, fo...