Dusty Bookshelf: State Rights in the Confederacy by Frank Owsley
State Rights in the Confederacy. By Frank Lawrence Owsley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925. Hardcover, 290 pp.
Frank Owsley was an historian who ended up at Vanderbilt University, where he was one of the authors of the famous manifesto I’ll Take My Stand. According to the Tennessee Encyclopedia:
“Throughout the first phase [of his career] – bounded by his States Rights and the Confederacy [sic] in 1925 and King Cotton Diplomacy in 1931 – [Owsley] warned that Southern defeat in 1865 and the South’s continued subjugation in his own time resulted from internal divisions.”
In accordance with this idea, State Rights in the Confederacy lays the blame for Confederate defeat, not on the sheer military and economic power of the North (the traditional face-saving explanation among Confederate nostalgists), but on the selfish individual actions of the Confederate states in undermining the military efforts of the Confederate government.
Here is Owsley’s thesis:
Several Confederate states insisted on protecting their own interests and defending their own prerogatives and their own citizens vis-à-vis Jefferson Davis’ government while the latter was in a death grapple with the Union forces and needed all the support it could get. But the obstructionist states obtruded their selfish interest onto the Confederate war effort, considerably hampering it. The most noisy culprits were Georgia under Governor Joseph Brown, and North Carolina under Governor Zebulon Vance (I’ll look at examples of obstruction which Owsley cites from North Carolina, but Owsley has other states in his sights, too). But other states like Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida were also culprits.
States kept their own state troops to defend themselves from Union forces. These troops were no match for regular Army troops, and the men in these state units sat around uselessly when they could have been fighting Yankees in the actual Confederate army. Likewise with the draft-age men exempted, at state insistence, because they were on state service. Regarding men withheld from the Confederate army by Governor Vance, Owsley suggests they may have made the difference in stopping Sherman’s march (215-16).
Coastal states, especially North Carolina, had their own blockade-running operations independent of the Confederacy, undermining foreign backing for the Confederate blockade runners and allowing North Carolinians to obtain clothing and supplies of Tar Heel troops. Troops from other, less fortunate states (e. g., not on the Atlantic coast) were meanwhile ill-clad and close to starvation.
States resisted the Confederate policy of “impressment,” or in plainer terms, the army taking property from citizens with nominal compensation. Owsley agrees the policy was quite unpopular, but in North Carolina “the people would have borne it had [governor] Vance supported the Confederate government.” But with Vance’s resistance, impressment “utterly failed” in his state (248).
Conscription (Owslet also claims) was necessary to sustain the Confederate army, yet the states obstructed that, too. Unlike in the North, the Confederacy was never fully able to suppress the writ of habeas corpus for deserters and those who otherwise obstructed the war. State courts were able to use habeas corpus to release conscripts from military custody. Owsley claims “it is not a mere coincidence that in 1863 – when there was no law to suspend the writ – was the turning of the tide against the Confederacy; and that after August 1, 1864, when the last act suspending the writ had expired, the fortunes of the South never rose again.” (202).
Owsley found some juicy quotes from Confederate politicians hinting strongly that they would prefer losing the war to giving in to the Davis administration’s encroachments. Georgia’s Governor Brown said: “I fear we have more to apprehend from military despotism [by the Confederate government] than from subjugation by the enemy [the Union]” (163). Preston Pond, who represented the Confederate governor of Louisiana, wrote his boss that abuses of state rights and popular rights by the military would cause “a bloodier revolution than the present” – the present revolution presumably being the attempt to establish the Confederacy (183).
Owsley’s is a tale of heroes and villains, with the heroes being President Davis and the supporters of his war measures, and the villains being the state leaders who short sightedly hamstrung the Confederate war effort. Those who don’t accept Owsley’s particular perspective can at least acknowledge that Owsley helped promote serious study of the significance of internal divisions within the Confederacy. These internal divisions must be studied along with literal army divisions as factors in the slave republic’s rise and fall. Later scholarship looked not only to state obstruction but to the popular discontent which that state obstruction tapped into. Dissenters, white as well as black, didn’t have to wait a signal from their states before opposing conscription, property seizures, or the Confederacy itself.
Owsley occupies a unique position in Confederate historiography, neither fish nor fowl. Much of what he said worked it’s way into Shelby Foote’s magnificent narrative, though Foote refused to give this political infighting center stage for Confederate defeat. They both recognized how fragile Confederate nationalism was. However, the numbers on the opposing team really mattered, especially in the hands of Grant, who knew how to use them. Nothing “nostalgic” about that.
“Died of a theory.” – Jefferson Davis.
Well, US Nationalism was fragile as well. If it weren’t, the Civil War would never have happened. Let us never forget: Abraham Lincoln received 0 votes in the South, and less than 50% of votes in the north. The Electoral College – that genius invention of James Madison that has saved the Republic again and again – worked properly, and Lincoln won the election, but he hardly had a mandate from the American people. As such, there was just as much resistance to the war as there was support for it, from start to finish. There were huge differences between the States in the North, and their people, over the conflict – mainly, the 10% who wanted a war of Abolition and the 90% who did not. But this is the nature of democracy, especially in the American design, wherein the States have powerful rights as opposed to the Federal Government, which is supposed to be small and limited in its power. It may be slow, messy and ugly a lot of the time, but it prevents us from becoming Europe. This mindset was in all Americans, and it is why the Constitution of the Confederate States was so closely based on the US Constitution – including, as well, slavery – which remained legal and protected in the US Constitution until after the Civil War ended. That war, incidentally, was a war between Federalists (States’ Rights, as designed by the Constitution, with the Federal Government small and limited) and Anti-Federalists (the vast majority of power drained from the States and into the Washington Swamp, where corruption would be allowed to run wild because now there was no one who could stop it).
And so Yes, in the South you had the Gordian Knot of States leaving the Union in order to retain the idea of Federalism…then putting Federalism to work in the South, which weakened the war effort and was a contributor to the demise of the Confederacy. And so it goes…with today’s America now going right past acting out all the flaws and weaknesses of Europe, and embracing the insane, out of control, run amok corruption of Latin America and Africa – which was deliberately imposed upon the nation by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and their party.