Hillary writes: Last Sunday one of the new volunteers moved into the house with us. Linda is from Alabama, assigned to help park staff develop curriculum for schools visiting the park, incorporating the Tennessee Core Curriculum. With a PhD in education she is well suited for this task!
Needless to say we have had wonderful conversations, especially around the South and the Civil War. I must admit to having a bias about the South, viewing it as one, monolithic, slave-holding area, and in which all states were like minded in leaving the Union after the election of Abraham Lincoln. I have again discovered that using a very broad stroke often leads to messy and, usually, wrong thinking.
Linda told the story of Winston County, Alabama, which was settled by followers of Andrew Jackson during his campaign of 1813-14. The people in this county, as well as of other hill counties in northern Alabama and Tennessee, were strong supporters of Andrew Jackson. In about 1832, when South Carolina passed the Nullification Act, John C. Calhoun resigned and returned to his home state. Then his friends printed buttons calling him the "first president of the confederacy," President Andrew Jackson declared, "We will have none of that."
In 1860 14 slave owners resided in Winston County, owning 122 slaves, one of whom was a former Pennsylvanian who owned 20 slaves himself. However, 637 families in the county owned no slaves and they were die-hard Union people; they had been born in Union homes, attended Union schools, and believed in the principles of Washington and Jackson, as their teachers had instructed them. In 1860 Winston County supported the Democratic ticked and opposed the movement toward secession. They were "Jeffersonian - Jacksonian Democrats." Residents of Winston County called the southern Democrats attending the Baltimore Convention of June 1860, "bolters" because a small minority of slave owners had nominated John C. Breckenridge as a candidate as a presidential candidate.
In his history of Alabama, Moore states that on January 14, 1861, Alabama "went out of the Union" (p.514) by a vote of 61-39. The people of Winston County regretted that resolution; they believed it meant "war, death, and destruction." In the first volume of his history of Alabama, Moore writes, "Many people in North Alabama were not pleased with the work of the convention or with the South Confederacy ... Secession was distinctly a south Alabama achievement." As a result meetings and and conventions were held in various counties in which a desire for neutrality was strongly expressed. On July 4, 1861, Looney's Tavern was the site of a convention of over 2500 residents of nine different counties including Winston. They passed resolutions with three major points:
- support of those who voted against secession "first, last and all the time"
- agreement with Jackson that no state could legally get out of the Union, but if that thinking was mistaken, then a county could legally leave a state by the same reasoning
- belief that the South had made a mistake when they left the Union. These counties decided "not to take arms against their brothers nor shoot at the flag of their fathers" - Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson.
I have learned another interesting facet of how complex the South, as well as this "civil war," really is.
Bruce Levine's amazing book “The Fall of the House of Dixie” makes many of these same points. He points out that secession was promulgated and pushed through by the efforts of a small, slave-holding elite in the South, and that the primary purpose of secession was to preserve the institution of human bondage. Although this planter elite was very tiny, it dominated Southern economic, social and political institutions. Most white people in the South before the War were not slave-holders; nevertheless, the great majority of whites in the South supported secession and the Confederacy, even though they might have been indifferent or even opposed to the institution of slavery itself. Of course, as Levine and your colleague point out, there were pockets of pro-Union sentiment scattered across the
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However, as Levine documents, as the War dragged on, this Southern white solidarity started to crumble and at last collapse. The poorer, non-slave-holding whites started to feel that the burdens of the struggle were falling primarily on their class: that they were being asked to sacrifice their families and economic security for a cause (i.e., preserving the institution of slavery) which solely benefited the elite planter class. At the end, the elite planter class was isolated and was, as we know, completely swept away.