Dusty Bookshelf Review – “A Government of Our Own”: The Making of the Confederacy, by William C. Davis
William C. Davis, “A Government of Our Own”: The Making of the Confederacy. New York: The Free Press, 1994. 550 pp. Paperback $11.65.
Today, this 1994 book qualifies for “dusty bookshelf” status. Let us take a look at what is now an old book.
William C. Davis, a prolific Civil War historian, here described the Confederate government as it set itself up in Montgomery, Alabama during the Secession Winter and the beginning of the Civil War, before removing to Richmond for the remainder of the conflict.
The people meeting there could be called a gathering of idealists. Their idealism was, of course, devotion to protecting and advancing the cause of slavery, which they wanted to do by setting up a slave republic in what had been the Southern United States. Since the rest of the United States showed an unwillingness to let this happen, the new government’s primary responsibility was to prepare for war to keep their new country alive.
The new government certainly made a start in this direction – working with stolen munitions and equipment and deserting Union officers, and trying to coordinate inadequate and non-standardized railroad lines – the politicians in Montgomery found the time to spend on less urgent issues – matters of low patronage and high principle. With a new government came people who wanted jobs in the new government, and who hung around in Montgomery waiting for their qualifications and connections to be recognized. Southern statesmen who fantasized about returning to an imagined version of the virtuous early Roman Republic began to see their fantasies encounter reality. The formation of political factions was another serpent in the proslavery Eden. There was quite a contrast from the subjective feelings of idealism by the people gathered in Montgomery, and the sordidness which even then was beginning.
While military readiness was of course important, of course the politicians had to spend some time figuring out what form the new government was to take. If we accept their rhetoric, they simply wanted to reinstate the U. S. Constitution as it ought to have been, before the North distorted the original frame of government to promote antislavery ideas, high tariffs, and other deviations from pure Roman principle.
So the Provisional Congress – a revolutionary committee representing delegates from various state legislatures without a specific popular mandate – drew up a “temporary” Constitution and a “permanent” Constitution. The former was to laws just over a year, after which the permanent document (once approved by the states) was to last as long as the Confederacy lasted – hopefully forever.
To an outside observer, the new constitutional documents seemed different from the U. S. Constitution. The right to hold Black people in slavery was expressly affirmed, even superseding any pro-freedom state laws where visiting slaveowners from other states were concerned. The federal government’s commercial powers were restricted, and some good-government reforms were added which would have looked good in a non-slave republic.
In the real world, all this was going on in a town clogged with muddy streets, whose winding, along with the continually changing names at different places, made navigation difficult. Enslaved people were tormented, torn from their families, and otherwise abused in the slave marts. Free blacks were only a step above this status, enduring legal oppression piled on them in the interests in making sure had no freedom to abuse.
Davis records the expressions of hope and optimism by the politicians, their families, and their hangers on. While Davis doesn’t belabor the point, given that it’s fairly obvious in hindsight, these enthusiastic and optimistic Confederates are on the edge of a horrible precipice and headed, along with their region, for a disastrous fall. Rather than continually interrupting the narrative to emphasize the future fates of the participants, Davis records their dangerously optimistic and naïve predictions of a glorious victory and independence, leaving the reader to reflect on the future catastrophic outcome.
While Davis has conducted meticulous research into events in Montgomery during the Confederate government’s sojourn there, focusing particularly in the statesmen and families involved, this is by no means a pro-Confederate book. Not when the reader knows what’s going to happen, and Davis knows the reader knows.
Wasn’t the United States in 1860 already a “slaveholding republic”?
Yes, but no. I’ll let Abraham Lincoln answer that for you: “One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.” – A. Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865
I don’t see how that contradicts the idea that the U.S. was a slaveholding republic. 15 states allowed slavery. The Dred Scott decision said slave owners could take their “property” anywhere, blacks weren’t considered citizens. The Fugitive Slave Act required states to cooperate in returning escaped slaves. That was the status quo in 1860. Pretty depressing.
Gosh, those evil, blood-dripping-from-their-fangs idealists in Montgomery, with their terrible dreams of setting up a slave republic. So evil were they that they based their Constitution on nothing less than the Constitution of that other slave republic, the United States of America, whose Constitution legalized and protected slavery…and went three years, nine months without even voting to outlaw slavery, despite having none of the Representatives or Senators from the 11 seceding Southern states present in Congress (read: Zero opposition), and conducted the war without ending slavery in five slave states remaining in the Union…and just for good measure, added a sixth in June 1863. Oooh! Too evil for words!
I’ll let Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy explain the problem with your claim:
“The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution, African slavery as it exists amongst us – the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution…
The prevailing ideas entertained by [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time…
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth…”
Alexander Stephens, March 21, 1861
One speech, by one man, on one day.
Tom
Since I can’t leave a reply directly, I’m responding to “Irish Confederate”. If you don’t like the Stephens speech, I’ve got literally hundreds of more speeches we could go to that say the same thing. In fact, Stephens was actually simply saying what Jeff Davis had said in the Senate only a few weeks before:
“It has been a conviction of pressing necessity, it has been a belief that we are to be deprived in the Union of the rights which our fathers bequeathed to us, which has brought Mississippi into her present decision. She has heard proclaimed the theory that all men are created free and equal, and this made the basis of an attack upon her social institutions; and the sacred Declaration of Independence has been invoked to maintain the position of the equality of the races…These were the great principles they announced; these were the purposes for which they made their declaration; these were the ends to which their enunciation was directed. They have no reference to the slave; else, how happened it that among the items of arraignment made against George III was that he endeavored to do just what the North has been endeavoring of late to do–to stir up insurrection among our slaves? Had the Declaration announced that the negroes were free and equal, how was the Prince to be arraigned for stirring up insurrection among them? And how was this to be enumerated among the high crimes which caused the colonies to sever their connection with the mother country? When our Constitution was formed, the same idea was rendered more palpable, for there we find provision made for that very class of persons as property; they were not put upon the footing of equality with white men–not even upon that of paupers and convicts; but, so far as representation was concerned, were discriminated against as a lower caste, only to be represented in the numerical proportion of three fifths.”
For both Davis and for Stephens the problem with the U.S. system was that phrase of Jefferson’s, that, “all men are created equal,” and that Republicans actually dared to take that language seriously. Thus, they argued, the southern states were justified in attempting to create a government to once and for all establish the principle that racial hierarchy was the true principle of a just society.
I like the speech fine. I have several – not hundreds – indicating motives other than slavery. If I post mine and you post yours, what does that prove?
Tom
I went to war in Iraq in 20025. There were about 140,000 of us in country at the time. Prior to the war, then Pres. Bush gave a couple of speeches advocating the invasion. Then Secy of State Colin Powell gave a famous (some would say infamous) presentation to the UN complete with powerpoint slides – prior to the war. Do you think all 140,000 of us were somehow motivated by, agreed with or were even aware of those speeches before we deployed? Stephen’s speech has value, but what does it show beyond the view of himself and select others?
Tom
The point of the original post is that the Confederate leaders who wrote their constitution attempted to establish a republic based on the institution of slavery. Whatever individual Confederate citizens thought about that is irrelevant to the book under review.
Over-stating the case a bit. “Stolen” munitions and equipment – well, no different than any new country. When Ireland succeeded to British munitions and equipment in 1921, there was little difference. The CSA sent a delegation to Washington offering to pay for the “stolen munitions and equipment.”
Tom