1776 and the break up of the United States

(music) Abraham Lincoln called the United States the last best hope of Earth. The classic formulation of the claim that America matters because of what it stands for. I'm Adam Smith, Osborne Professor of US Political History and Director of Oxford's Rothermeer American Institute. And in this podcast, I explore the endlessly contested idea of America. Richmond, Virginia, 22 February 1862. A man stands beneath a newly unveiled equestrian statue of George Washington and is sworn in as the president of the new American Republic. The man is Jefferson Davis and the first words of his inaugural address reminded his listeners that they were gathered to bring into being the new Confederate states of America on George Washington's birthday. Davis stood beneath Washington's statue, he said, to perpetuate the principles of our revolutionary fathers. "Will you see the painting up there?" "Yes, George Washington." "George Washington." "The image of George Washington is just everywhere in the Confederacy." "He is." The rebels who tried to break up the United States in the 1860s thought of themselves as the rightful heirs to the spirit of 1776. When South Carolina declared its secession in December 1860, it took the Declaration of Independence as its template. Its grievances, rhythms, claims about consent and tyranny. It's rebellion of an aggrieved people against a despotic central power. "And one can imagine them sitting with a copy of the Declaration on one side and a blank piece of paper on the other." This is a story of an alternative legacy of 1776. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence did not just launch the United States, but provided the warrant for the greatest ever effort to break it up. In this episode, I'm exploring how that worked, how a national identity was consciously built in the four years the Confederacy lasted out of the material the founding had left lying around. The flags, seals, songs, textbooks, sermons, the fast days, the inaugurations. A century and a half later as the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, maybe it's worth remembering that the Confederates were among that document's most committed readers. I am Caroline Janie. I am a professor of history at the University of Virginia. I have authored several books including "Remembering the Civil War" and another titled "Ends of War," the fight of Lee's Army after Appomattox. Well, Carrie, thank you very much for joining me on this podcast. I want to begin by discussing the document that the state of South Carolina issued on Christmas Eve of 1860 explaining why they had passed an ordinance of succession. Just as the Continental Congress had passed a resolution declaring independence on the 2nd of July and then two days later as it were issued the press release, the Declaration of Independence, which explained why they'd done it. The same pattern was followed, wasn't it, in South Carolina. They first of all took the decision in principle to declare themselves out of the union and then they issued the document later that explained why they'd done it. Tell us a little bit about that document. The full title is "Declaration of the Immediate Causes, which Induce and Justify the Session of South Carolina from the Federal Union." This is an immediate response to their decision to leave the union and they frame it just as the founders of the United States had done just as the revolutionaries, the patriots, as they called themselves had done in 1776. And that is they were dissolving a government that they thought was no longer in their interest. They were listing their grievances, their declaring their independence from a hostile government. And indeed, they will borrow language directly from the Declaration of Independence in order to do so. I mean, it notes, doesn't it, that on the 4th of July 1776, the colonies had declared that they are under right ought to be free in independent states. And that as free in independent states, they have full power to levee walk, include peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may have right. Do. In terms of their historical claim being made there, what they're arguing to the readers of this declaration, is that South Carolina had declared its independence from the British Empire in 1776. It had done so as part of a collective, but it had first and foremost declared its independence from the British Empire as an independent state. Absolutely. It's truly using the Declaration of Independence to set up what it's about to do again. In many ways it's saying, this isn't revolutionary, but it's restoring the status quo in some ways, going back to where South Carolina saw itself in 1776. Who do you think this document was aimed at? Well, the principal audience is the other slave-holding states. This is who they're trying to convince to get one board. And it's going to be a bit of a struggle for some of the slave-holding states. By February of 1861, seven slave-holding states have come together and formed a new nation, or a new state, I should say, the Confederate States of America. But it's not clear to states such as Virginia or North Carolina or Kentucky or Maryland that the slave-holding interest will be in fact protected or better protected in this new nation than underneath the constitution that they already have. These decisions were made on the basis of, well, first of all, there's a pragmatic calculation. How do I best defend if I'm a slave-holder? How do I best defend my material interests? How, as a white community in this state, do we defend the slave system more broadly, which is the kind of underpinning of our society? Is it within the union or without? But so just to see it into what, then, carry? I mean, what was this Confederacy? How could it possibly be imagined? This was not a nation-building project based on language or ethnicity or any of those things that you see in other contexts. So what was it? We have to keep in mind that a Southern identity had been in existence for quite some time, certainly by the 1850s. There was a notion that Northerners and Southerners were separate people. Now, they shared a common language. They shared a common history. They shared a common government. All of those things that might have set them apart did not. But they increasingly perceived of themselves as different. Southerners looked north. And when I say Southerners, I'm overwhelmingly talking about white southerners are looking north, and they describe a people as cold, grasping Yankees as they call them. Northerners, white Northerners, look south, and they see lazy, slave-holding, arrogant people. And so they've come to see each other as different. And so as what becomes a Confederate state comes into being in February of 1861, this project of Confederate identity, of what we would call nationalism, is very easy to build. There is already a basis there. So we can see this transition of Southerner to Confederate, and then after the war, which reverts to Southerner again. But it's a surprisingly smooth and quick process. They immediately see themselves as a people. Now, building the state, the apparatus of a state with a legislature and a court system and a postal system, that's the institutional building that needs to take place with an army. But even as these men are marching off to join their state units and then their state units become part of the Confederate army in May of 1861, they are describing themselves as Confederates. They very much welcome that identity. And quickly from that, we see poetry, we see songs, we see sermons in churches, we see children's textbooks for school textbooks. So primers and geographies and arithmetic books that immediately gravitate toward that notion of, we are a separate people, and we've always been a separate people in their mind. So we need to think of Confederate nationalism as a spirit, as a mindset, as much as a state itself. I'm in Richmond, Virginia, sitting on the back steps of a rather elegant porticoid, white stuck-ode 19th-century house, which is now rather incongruously surrounded by modern hospital buildings, towering over it. But this house is known as the White House of the Confederacy, it is painted white, it was the executive mansion, the home and work. place of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. Morning Robert. My name is Robert Hancock. I am the Director of Collections and Senior Curator at the American Civil War Museum. Tell me a little bit about how this house was run while Jefferson Davis and his family were living here. This is an office building I guess as well as just a private residence. Yes this house served not only as a private residence but it was also, it really was kind of the social, military and political center of the Confederacy was located right here. But the running of this house they had anywhere up to 10 to 15 enslaved servants as well as servants who were free black and also immigrants. But most of the servant staff were enslaved. They either slaves from his Mississippi plantations or they were hired out which was a system if you needed extra help, if you needed extra servant staff in a house like this, you could hire them from other owners here in Richmond who was common in practice. You are basically leasing someone to work for you. You would pay the owner and they would come to work for you here. I am going to see over here I noticed that there is a visiting card. James A. Sedden who is the Secretary of War at various points during the Confederacy Affairs who have left the visiting card over that. Yes. When you entered this room you would have been greeted by a slave butler and he would check for the Davises. If they were steeping gas he would usher you usually into one of the first floor rooms. These served as the official rooms for the executive mansion. Right now we have it set up for a council of war meeting. This particular one we have set up is a documented meeting. He had in 1862. Jefferson Davis was here. Robert E. Lee was here. Robert E. Lee at that time did not have the field command. That was under the command of Joseph E. Johnston who is in charge of commanding the army. Lee was here as Davis is a military advisor. Also here was George with Randolph and James Longstreet. Now of course Robert E. Lee's father was Light Horse Harry Lee who served under George Washington in the American Revolution. George with Randolph was the grandson of Thomas Jefferson. So we are standing here in a very nice size. It is quite a large room with the original furniture in front of us. What you have just been describing Robert is that that is vividly in front of me now. We are standing right next to this table where these great military and political figures of the Confederacy were sitting right in front of us here and many others too during the course of the war. All of these figures were just one generation away from those who fought the revelation. A lot of these leaders that you are seeing emerge at the very beginning of the American Civil War had ties back to the founding fathers. A lot of people in the South consider this a second revolution, a second war of independence. You will notice right over the side board you see the painting up there? Yes, George Washington. George Washington. He is on the great seal based on the Equation of Statue at the State Capitol here in Richmond. You will see him on stamps. You will see him on envelope colors. You will see his name and his image used quite liberally by both the North and the South during the war. Well he is the figure. He is the figure from the revolution who doesn't have any of that nonsense about equality and liberty. All those things that Thomas Jefferson will say that George Washington doesn't have any of that. But he is a martial leader who can rise above politics, can rise above partisan politics. And he is the perfect emblem as the founder. He is the perfect general/president. Indeed there was a motion made at the Confederate Constitutional Convention in Montgomery in February of 61 that the Confederacy instead of being called the Confederate States of America, it be called the Republic of Washington. How about what is this? This is a document that is, I don't know, it looks about 8 feet, 10 feet long. It's 10 feet long. This is the provisional Constitution of the Confederate States of America. It's a scroll. It is a scroll. It's made of individual pieces of parchment that were glued together to create one long scroll where they headed the top of the provisional government of the Confederate States of America and the signatures at the forehand. And he is written in beautiful, comprehensive handwriting. After two days of deliberating and making notes and drafting this thing out, at the end of that, they decided they were, the Congress basically had an order to put everything down on parchment, to commit it to parchment. So they did that literally on parchment. I think it's safe to assume that one thing they wanted to clarify was the status of that property in human beings. They did. It's right in the preamble. So in the preamble of this provisional Constitution, it states, "we the deputies of the sovereign and independent states." They're not hedging their bets here. They're not fool around. They are saying, "we are sovereign and independent states." So they're making that point right in the preamble. Although they don't explicitly give themselves the right to secede from the Confederate States of America, do they? They do not, but they do make it sound a little bit easier than perhaps it was in the US Constitution to begin with. And invoking the favor of Almighty God, a more explicit Christian sounding formulation that had been included in the United States original. Absolutely. One of the more important things that they deal with, of course, when we were talking about why the states is secede to begin with. In Article 1, Section 7, it states the importation of African Negroes from any foreign country other than the slave holding state of the United States is hereby forbidden. Now that's taken right from the US Constitution. I think it was 1808, but they also added in the Congress sell also have power to prohibit the introduction of slaves from any state not a member of this Confederacy. So they're here. They're pretty obviously they're stating that the upper southern states that had not seceded yet. If they do not join the Confederacy, they're going to lose a very lucrative southern slave market. So at the time when this provisional Constitution was being written in Montgomery, Alabama, Virginia, where we are now, had still not yet seceded. It didn't secede until after the firing on Sumpter and Lincoln's call for troops. Kentucky never seceded. And Missouri and Arkansas wasn't part of the Confederacy at this point in North Carolina. It wasn't part of the Confederacy. At this point, it was Maryland, you know, Delaware. So the authors of this Constitution was saying, "If you want to be part of our slave economy, you need to be part of our political union." Exactly. That's exactly what they were doing. And it was. It was deployed to get, especially Virginia. They very much wanted Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee to secede and join the southern Confederacy. And this was a way to try to kind of force their hand. But you're right, Virginia had already had one Sassussian convention had voted to stay in the union. It was not until Lincoln called for the volunteers and the firing for Sumpter that Virginia finally had a second convention in seceded and did indeed join the southern Confederacy. And we should note that the word "slaved" did not appear in the 1787 federal Constitution. That is correct. And that was one of the sticking points. I mean, it's interesting when you look back at what Congress was arguing about in the decades leading up to the Civil War. There are two documents both, they're being referred to by both sides, both the anti-slavery and the pro-slavery sides. That's the U.S. Constitution being interpreted two different ways and the Holy Bible. Those are the two main sources everybody can use either to justify the existence of slavery and the expansion of slavery into Western territories, which is the big thing for a lot of the free labor states up north is they did not want slavery to extend any further west. They did not want the slave power as they called it in Congress to get even stronger because at that point they would be outvoted and it all came down to politics and you're right, slavery, the word "slavery" slavery is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, yet both were citing the Constitution either for or against the institution. I mean, we often, when we talk about this, we emphasize the differences which are important and telling. Should we not also be struck by the fact that almost all of it is exactly the same as the United States Constitution? What do you make of that? They don't want a new Constitution. In fact, if we look at the South Carolina Declaration, they're calling for the Constitution to be upheld and to be observed and they're accusing northern states of not not adhering to the Constitution, so it should not be surprising whatsoever. that they've taken the Constitution and only made a few slight changes, only inserted a few things that will protect their status and their notion as a slave-holding republic. They claimed that the United States was a slave-holding republic, and they were right about that, but the word "slavery" never appears directly in the United States Constitution. It is explicitly protected in the States and in the territories within the Confederate Constitution. In other words, that's their main gripe. And there are smaller tweaks, the six-year term limit, a single six-year term limit for the presidency. But otherwise, they don't want something radically new. They want what they had in previous decades. They want the Constitution as they had understood it as a document that protected slavery. Since they are reading it, the northern states have renaked on their obligations under the Constitution, and the United States Constitution is therefore, seemingly, no longer protecting their slave property. It's necessary for them to withdraw from the union, but not to rewrite the underlying institutions and documents, indeed, to recreate them in a more purified form without the polluting influence of the Yankees. How did they describe the character of this nation, which is you've just very importantly said there, had not just been conjured out of nothing? They were describing a people, the southern people, who had always been there, and they had then, in the sense that perhaps, is analogous to claims to nationhood in Europe at the same time, and they were finding a national expression of an identity that had already existed. What constituted that identity? Tell us more about what was in those sermons and textbooks and so on. Well, there's certainly a lot of seeing themselves as a separate people as ordained by God. There's a lot of providential language that we are God's chosen people, and we see that both in sermons, we see that in private writings, we see that in letters and diaries, and expression of a group set apart from Yankees, and that is the derisive term that they will use to talk about Northerners. They also see themselves as persecuted by Northerners, and having a common enemy is a really important aspect of this. The fact that this is all happening in a wartime context is critical, isn't it? Very, very helpful. And especially after Robert E. Lee takes command of the principal Confederate army, the army of Northern Virginia, which of course does not happen until the spring of 1862, Lee starts to personify many of the elements that Confederates like to see in themselves. They present a rotation of Lee as gentlemanly courteous. What other words do what other? How else would you describe what Lee is embodying? He is a gentleman, as you say. He is religious. He is sober. He is paternalistic. Humble. The humble is key to this. He's not bombastic. He's not. He's not even the cavalier, which is the image that many Confederates want to embrace. There are those people. You've got your general pickets on the flamboyant character. Oh, they've got those in spades. Lee can be the grown up in the room. The cavaliers are doing those things and the Jeb Stuart or whatever doing that kind of glamorous things, but they need somehow need Lee as this sober, Centa, self-sacrificing, central character. He's only in his late 50s, but he has the aura and carries himself as an older, distinguished man. That gives some gravitas to the army and to the position. He's not out there gambling and drinking and doing all of those crazy things. He is saint-like, which will become very important in the post-war period too. This is an example of the first national pattern Confederate flag, called the stars and bars. Again, it looks very much similar to the United States stars and stripes. You have a blue canton, the big upper left-hand corner, just like the US flag, with a circle of stars, which again is very reminiscent of the American Revolution. One star for each to see to state. At this point, nine states is acceded. There's nine stars in that circle. Then the rest of the field of the flag are three bars. Red bar, then a white bar, then a red bar blue, that. This flag was used for the first year and a half or so of the war until they decided this one started to look a little bit too much like the stars and stripes. After going through hundreds upon hundreds of design elements, they decided to, and coming up with this one, they decided to change it to something completely different. This is an example of a second national pattern, which I'll pull. So, this is the second national pattern Confederate flag. The first time this pattern was used is when Stomel Jackson lay in state after he was killed, after he died, at the state chapel here in Richmond. So that was in 1863. That's 1863. And this image that we're looking at here, this is the famous Confederate battle flag. This is on the top of the, the scene of the car and the juke's of hazard. Right. Exactly. This is what most, when you say Confederate flag, this is what they think of. It's a St Andrews Cross, a blue St Andrews Cross with 13 stars in a red field. This is the one you see if you go into any rural area or in any state in the United States right now, you're going to see this and then people's houses and flying by the red side. That is correct. They're not changing the colors. They're not changing the colors, are they? Because they don't want to give, I'm presumably, there must have been discussion about that. You know, should we have a flag that's green and purple? We'll know because- It's because we're the Americans. We are after all Americans. So they don't want to give that up. They're right to use the red, white and blue and the stars and the stripes. They just want to rearrange them. But the fact that the St Andrews flag is used is also telling about this Anglo-Saxon heritage. And, you know, enveloping themselves, wrapping themselves in that iconography, in that image. They're very much holding on to that part of their story, their alleged, their memory of their past as well. But yes, it's not radically different. And you've got this whole collection of flags here. Yeah, speaking of battle flags, this is one of the prototypes. One of three, the very first armoured northern Virginia pattern battle flags that were produced. Now, it seems to me this can't really have ever been taken into battle because it looks in beautiful condition. It looks like it's made of silk. It's got gold tassels around the edges. It looks like the sort of thing you'd see, I don't know, hanging in a manor house pile or somewhere. This was actually a headquarters flag for Joseph E. Johnston. Now, it is an amazingly good condition. So how long he used it, we don't know. But it was originally made as a headquarters flag for Johnston. So the flag that we think of today was the flag of the army in northern Virginia. And there was a national flag. There were many national flags. We refer to those as the stars and bars. They changed over time. But the flag, the St. Andrews cross flag that is on any number of paraphernalia that one could buy today, that was specifically the army in northern Virginia's battle flag, the way in which it became in the post war era, the Confederate flag is because veterans used it at first. And we would see the United Confederate veterans who don't formally organize until 1889. They are the ones who are using that flag. But still, the stars and bars was used by a group such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy. And they were very adamant that the battle flag only be used to represent veterans. And so they didn't want it strewn all over the place. They would have been absolutely appalled at the way in which it has been commercialized throughout the 20th and into the 21st century. That notion that the army of northern Virginia was the Confederacy became part of the mainstream culture in the late 19th century and into the 20th century. And it pushed out the stars and bars. If people see the stars and bars now in the United States in 2026, do you think most people wouldn't recognize it? I don't think it's as recognizable. And it hasn't been used by groups such as the Klan or other white supremacist groups in the same way that the battle flag has been used. And what would you say? I mean, in just going back to the war itself, what would people have seen flying on flag poles? Given the fact that the Confederacy kept on changing their mind about the national flag? Well, who knows? What's flying enrichment is not the battle flag? That's going to be whatever version of the stars and bars, which part of the problem was when that was furled, it looked a heck of a lot like the American flag. So that's not a flag you want to use on the battlefield. When we talk about banknotes or money during the war, of course the U.S. Greenback didn't exist. It was created during the war to help pay for the war. In the Confederacy and in the North, before the war, banknotes were generally issued by banks, sometimes mercantile companies, which issued their own currencies. So it was very confusing. In all these drawers, these are all individual banknotes and individual designs. Some of these are Confederate state treasury notes, which came from the Central Government. And others are from, for instance, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Tennessee, state notes, and state banknotes as well. Not for the Confederate notes, they use a married of different designs. This one, for instance, $20 note has a sailing ship. Others you will find with allegorical figures that you typically see, you know, Amazon's or virtues, figures of virtue. On this one you also have Eagles, which was a symbol of the Confederacy as well as the U.S. What are looking at that? There we go, right. So this is. Okay, so we've got John C. Calhoun, the great champion of Southern rights on the bottom left hand corner looking glaring with his mad hair as he always is on pictures. On the right hand side we've got Athena. And in the top, the central image is of two African American men and one African American women working in the fields, presumably enslaved people, untiling the fields. That's $100. At the end of the war, a lot of people in the South of course were stuck with a pile of, you know, by 1860, into 1865, completely worthless paper. I mean, it could not be redeemed anywhere. Good bunch of it. It ended up in the American Civil War Museum enrichment. Do you think they thought that they had a difficult task there to convince their fellow white southerners that they were now part of something different? They were part of a separate national entity? I don't think so. A lot of people, of course, will make the argument, well, you know, most people in the South are not slaveholders, so why would be fighting a war for slavery? And it's a fair question. Yes, true. Most people in the South did not own slaves, however the economy was built around the institution, slavery. Everyone benefited from it. Whether you own a slave or not, it didn't make any difference. The reason you could buy things at these certain prices is because the slaves are the ones that were either producing it or working in the fields, that sort of thing. So it's also just like in any war, the rhetoric starts saying, you know, we're going to be evaded by these abolitionists, you're going to change the way we live here. They scared people, basically scared people to death. And so it became, for most people, an act to defend their home, independence and defending your home. I mean, this was a real thing, this commitment to the Confederacy. It wasn't just a transactional passing thing that, you know, some elite men were obsessed with and others got drawn into. I mean, in your view, are my right to think from the base of what you've been saying, that you think this was a real commitment felt by people, not everyone, of course. And they were important pockets of resistance within the White South, but felt quite far down in the sort of social spectrum within the White South. Is that the right way to see it, do you think? I do. And I believe this devotion to the Confederacy, Confederate nationalism, Confederate spirit, whatever we want to call it, it comes from the bottom up. And there are absolutely people who don't buy into this enslaved people and the black population in the South does not buy into this. There are unionists in the South, but overwhelmingly, there is a deep well of belief in this Confederate project. And the fact that it continues well after the Confederate state has collapsed, I think, is evidence of that. These Confederates, these White southerners saw themselves very directly and passionately as the inheritors of 1776. So does it change the way in which we should think about the 250th anniversary about the alternative possibilities, about the other readings that are available? What's the list and make of that? Well, I think if we connect the dots back between 1861 and 1776 as Confederates did, it helps us both to understand 1776 and what it still meant to Americans, to White southerners, to White Northerners, to African Americans in 1861, as much as it does to help us understand what 1861 means to us today. I mean, they wanted to hold two things in their hands at the same time. They claimed that the 1776 revolution was radical in one hand of breaking away from the monarchy and yet holding on to values that they already had. We see a repeat of that in 1861 that we're going to break away to protect what we had to begin with. And I think just in a larger sense, the ways in which societies, individuals, communities use the past to help explain their present is something that we continue to do. We are absolutely, we're doing it right now as we talk about the 250th. As we talk about what the revolution means, it's very different than what it meant in 1976 or what it meant in 1876, and the Civil War generation was absolutely no different in using the past for their present political needs. I was speaking to Caroline Jani, the John L. Nyer professor in the history of the American Civil War at the University of Virginia, and to senior curator Robert Hancock, who showed me the collections of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, which includes the White House of the Confederacy. Well worth a visit if you're in that beautiful part of the world. A year before Jefferson Davis's inaugural address in front of that Washington statue in Richmond, his future vice president, Alexander Stevens, gave a now notorious speech in Savannah, Georgia, justifying the creation of the new Confederacy. For Stevens, the Declaration of Independence of 1776 was a double edged sword. The idea that all men had created equal, which Jefferson had sought to self-evident truth, was for Stevens an error. The Confederacy, he said, was founded on exactly the opposite idea. Its cornerstone resting upon what Stevens thought the great truth, but the Negro is not equal to the white man and that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. And at the same time, the Declaration of Independence was essential and unavoidable, since it was the document that explained and justified how a people could legitimately alter their government. In our two-part documentary about the Declaration of Independence, which we put out earlier this year and give those a listen if you haven't already, I explored these two different aspects of that revolutionary document, its idealism and its claim about power. But Lincoln at Gettysburg called the American Republic's conception in liberty and dedication to equality, which was described by Confederates as glittering generalities. They were not what mattered. More important were the grievances against the King, for it was those that had made the moral case for succession from the British Empire in 1776, just as a similar set of grievances justified succession from the American Union in 1861. You've been listening to the last best hope from Oxford's Rodermeer American Institute. The podcast is kindly supported by listeners and I want to thank in particular Tom and Rary. Our producer is Emily Williams and I'm Adam Smith. Goodbye.