Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War

Virginia held unique importance for advocates of secession. Its location, abundant resources, and symbolic status as the cradle of American civilization made it a powerful prospective ally. However, the state was much more moderate than some of the states in the Deep South; fewer than 40 delegates out of the 152 total favored secession. The state passed legislation to hold a secession convention on January 14 and began its convention on February 13, as three commissioners arrived to make the case for secession: Fulton Anderson of Mississippi, Henry Lewis Benning of Georgia, and John Smith Preston of South Carolina. They arranged to speak to the delegation on February 18. Contemporaneous letters sent by Preston show that the commissioners were aware of the uphill battle they would have in persuading the moderate delegation. Prior to their speeches, the commissioners met privately to build a strategy for their presentations. They determined their own speaking order: Anderson, the most moderate of the three, would speak first, and Preston, a renowned Southern orator, would speak last.

The formerly Unionist Anderson described the path by which, under Lincoln’s government, slavery would be progressively abolished; in Anderson’s view, Northerners were fanatics who saw the South as inferior. The South had to protect the institution “at the core of its political and social fabric” (63) by seceding and, if necessary, taking up arms. The delegates listened attentively to this but did not appear swayed. Benning, a staunch Southern rights defender, stood and made an emotionally charged appeal to Virginians’ sense of honor and purity, vividly describing the dark future that might descend upon the South without a move to secede: “[W]e will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything” (66). White Southern men would become vagabonds, women would be endangered or violated, and land in possession of black slaves would “go back to a wilderness and become another Africa or St. Domingo” (67). He lifted the cause of secession as the way to save the South.

Preston gave his eagerly anticipated speech the next day, February 19. He first named the North’s aversion to slavery as the driving force of South Carolina’s actions. He flattered his audience, casting Southerners as faithful upholders of the Constitution, while Republicans were violent, rebellious, antagonists of the white South. He spoke in vivid heightened language, stirring the crowd to tears. He called upon Virginia to join the secessionist cause: “Would the sons of the Old Dominion stand idle at this moment of supreme peril?” (71). In closing, he invoked the “two civilizations” argument put forth by Spratt in Florida, noting, “The South cannot exist without African slavery […] None but an equal race can labor at the North” (72). These differences would never be resolved; secession was the only way to preserve the South. Preston’s oratory moved his audience to wild applause, with praise following in newspaper reports on the event. Virginia’s secessionists remained a minority, but after the shot at Fort Sumter that April, the Convention moved to secede, as the commissioners had hoped.