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

In the South, the Democratic Party advocated forcefully for secession and held a reputation for radicalism. Some prominent pro-slavery Democrats gained the nickname “Fire-Eaters” for their harsh rhetoric and tendency to foment disunionist sentiment. Following Lincoln’s election, some Southern governors named both extremist Democrats and more moderate Whigs as secession commissioners, “clearly attempting to signal that the sectional crisis had obliterated long-standing party loyalties” (23).

Fort Sumter is an offshore fort in Charleston, South Carolina. The Civil War began in earnest at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 when Confederate forces opened fire on the Union garrison stationed there. Prior to the start of the war, tensions mounted in South Carolina as Union troops moved to occupy Fort Sumter in late December 1860, and South Carolina shot down a relief ship carrying supplies to Union soldiers there on January 9, 1861. Anticipation of military conflict with the North added urgency to the commissioners’ calls for secession in the early months of 1861. 

The Haitian Revolution was a successful rebellion by former slaves against their enslavement and French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue (or “St. Domingo”). The insurrection occurred between 1791 and 1804 and led to the formation of the sovereign nation of Haiti. Secession commissioners, such as Henry L. Benning in Virginia, invoked the liberation of slaves in Haiti from French rule as an image of the loss of property, lack of control, and threat of violence against slave-owners that might occur in the South under Lincoln. 

The “Irrepressible Conflict” is a term coined by anti-slavery politician William H. Seward and used by Abraham Lincoln, among others, to refer to the irresolvable disagreement in the 1850s over systems of free labor in the North versus that of slave labor the South. Rather than allowing that both Northern and Southern socioeconomic systems could coexist, the “‘Irrepressible Conflict’ school” in the North defended the abolitionist movement and sought to stop the further spread of slavery in the United States. (Notably, Northern proponents of the “Irrepressible Conflict” did not necessarily believe that the clash had to end in violence.) Many secession commissioners antagonized proponents of the “Irrepressible Conflict” view entirely, but others, such as Leonidas Spratt before the Florida delegation, embraced the rhetoric in service of the secessionist cause: “Two distinct and profoundly different civilizations had thus emerged in the United States, ‘and the contest was inevitable,’ Spratt claimed” (43). 

In October of 1859 the abolitionist John Brown attempted to initiate a slave revolt by leading a raid on a federal armory in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. The raid was defeated by the US Marines, and Brown was tried for treason and hanged shortly afterward. The event inflamed Southern fears of armed slave insurrection and confirmed their view of an aggressive, militaristic attitude in the North. The secession commissioners—particularly in their crucial address to the Virginia Convention—referred to John Brown’s raid to persuade Virginians that joining the South in secession was in the best interests of their safety and prosperity. 

The “Lost Cause” refers to a revisionist view of the Civil War in which slavery was not a driving force for secession or the resultant armed conflict. Proponents of the Lost Cause paint Confederate soldiers and forces as morally righteous revolutionaries defending the constitutional principle of states’ rights against an aggressive and domineering North. While Dew does not treat the term itself in detail, he uses the term as part of a larger summary of Neo-Confederate sentiments—which Dew himself espoused in his youth—which persist in the South today due to a historical failure to reckon with the true causes of secession. 

The “Sectional Crisis” refers to a period of several years before the Civil War in which the Northern and Southern United States clashed politically and culturally, primarily over the expansion or abolition of slavery. Criticism of slavery grew more potent and vocal in free states, and defenses of slavery in Southern slave states grew more dogged and intense. Legal measures, such as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Compromise of 1850, attempted to alleviate the crisis; however, the radical “Fire-Eater” Democrats in the South and the “Irrepressible Conflict” school in the North continued to sow discord between the regions. During late 1860 and 1861, secession commissioners spoke of the sectional crisis, after Lincoln’s election, as hopeless and irresolvable, a point of pain, fatigue, and anger for an aggrieved and exhausted South. Commissioners presented secession as the only way out of the crisis that would preserve the institution of slavery and the Southern way of life.