Confederate Reckoning

McCurry notes that the short, five-year lifespan of the Confederacy has obscured “the singularity of their political project and its significance as an event in the history of the United States and the nineteenth-century Western world” (11). The founders of the Confederacy sought a resolution to debates and political struggles over capitalism, labor, and democracy by establishing a nation that rejected democracy and embraced enslavement. Confederate elites sought to counter the revolutionary and emancipatory movements that had occurred since the late 18th century in the Americas and Europe. The Confederacy was “the only example of proslavery nationalism to arise in the Western Hemisphere” (12). Confederate leaders like Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens, William Henry Trescott, and Jabez Lamar Curry explicitly founded their new nation on the principle of white racial superiority and on enslavement as “a social system uniquely adapted to the conditions of the modern world” (12). At the same time, they saw the CSA as a way to restore the values present at the founding of the republic: In their view, references to property rights in the constitution included enslaved people as property, and references to “the people” referred exclusively to white people (14-15).

The Confederacy’s views were in line with those of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. In the United States Supreme Court case Dred Scott v. Sandford, Taney argued that US citizenship was reserved for white men. In Taney’s view, Black people were completely excluded from citizenship and politics, and while white women might be citizens, they were also excluded from politics. This was the view of citizenship expressed by the Confederacy’s president, Jefferson Davis, who in his inaugural address promised the “brethren” of the Confederacy that they would soon “drench [the battlefields of Virginia] with blood” (18). These brothers, McCurry argues, were understood to be exclusively white men, the only members of the Confederacy who were recognized as full citizens. Politicians who promoted Southern secession framed the Union as a threat to what they saw as the natural order: The North, they claimed, was pushing a “radical agenda of abolition and racial equality” (21), and it was the votes of Black men that had made Abraham Lincoln president.

Developments in the North threatened Southern white men’s views on gender as well as race. While women could not vote in the North either, the debate over women’s suffrage was grew there over the course of the US Civil War, while in the South “women’s status as citizens hardly mattered” (24). Since women could not fight in the military and could not own taxable property, they could not be citizens themselves, only part of a citizen’s household. The argument that Southern women needed to be protected was a key part of secessionists’ arguments. The state itself was portrayed as a woman, especially as a mother, and that became a major part of the Confederacy’s imagery. Unionists in the South also used the rhetoric of defenseless women, arguing that a war between the South and the North would endanger the women of the South. The common refrain that “Black Republicans [members of Lincoln’s party] would rape the South itself” (27) illustrates the degree to which Southern leaders allegorized the South itself as a vulnerable woman in need of protection.

In any case, both white women and the enslaved had no say in whether the South would secede from the United States. Though enslaved people constituted a large part of the South’s population, Southern politicians were convinced that they would only revolt if incited by abolitionists and Black Republicans. Their own racist ideas held that enslaved people were “by nature, good, childlike, and loyal servants to their masters” (32). One fear among the Unionists was that in the event of secession, enslaved people might be incited to violence by promises of freedom from the North. Secessionists, meanwhile, sought to preserve their enslaved workforce. The secessionists presented Southern politics “as a family romance” (36) with young brothers acting when their elders would not.