State Rights was About Federalism, not Slavery

I just finished reading From Founding Fathers to Fire-Eaters by James Rutledge Roesch. It’s a new book (2018) on an old subject, but it’s an excellent, entertaining, and both an enjoyable and easy read considering the complexity of the subject and the brilliant minds of the Southern political theorists whose works Mr. Roesch has compiled and edited into a succinct outline of the state rights doctrine of the Old South. [Take that in conjunction with Alcorn’s comment in his 1870 inaugural speech about how Southerners should quit political theorizing and jump in and wallow in the trough with the Yankees.]

The doctrine did not begin with the abolitionists or the Missouri Compromise or even the Constitutional Convention, and it was never about slavery. As Mr. Roesch shows to any reasonably intelligent person with only a modicum of knowledge regarding this nation’s history, the doctrine was there at the beginning, inherent in the colonial charters, the oldest of which was Virginia’s. I highly recommend anyone interested in truth regarding the state rights doctrine vis-a-vis the post-republic egalitarian/centralization doctrine get the book, devour it, and share it.

The nationalists (centralizers) have been part of our government from the start, much like the serpent was integral to the Garden of Eden. They were the Tories who reluctantly joined the Patriot cause after the short-sighted British Parliament refused to stop interfering with home rule, undermining their influence at home. [This is me talking here. Mr. Roesch is kinder to all the founders.] Embracing the cause of independence, these self-aggrandizers embarked on the quest to build a new economic empire. To realize their goal, they needed a supreme, centralized government and a national “democracy,” served by said government.

Patriots to the republic managed to forestall them for the bulk of the next century, first with the Articles of Confederation, then with federalism, hallmarked by the state rights doctrine woven into the Constitution. Nevertheless, with the ratification of said Constitution, the states had sown the seeds of their demise. The destruction of the Southern Confederacy ended the federal republic and gave the ghosts of those old Tories their long-coveted crown. Hopefully they celebrated their victory in…, well, never mind where.

Today, some neo-cons still give lip service to the republic, or the Lincolnites’ perverse take on it, but with the Left picking up their banner of egalitarianism/pure democracy and exploding it, the neo-cons should be rethinking their position [Lincoln’s on the chopping block, too, and it’s not us Southerners putting him there]. Instead, they appease. Truth is the nationalists and the Left are both statists. Both need all references to state rights (true federalism) gone.

The nationalists have hidden behind the holy crusade to end slavery to justify their egregious violations of the Constitution since halfway through the “Civil War.” [They had other unifying causes before the abolitionists gave them slavery]. The farther time moves from those long-ago events, the more clouded the historical memory of everyday folk, and lack of education on the subject of both that War and the founding of the republic hastens the encroaching shadows. That is by design. There is no difference in the goal of modern Democrats and Republicans in regards to the republic.

Today’s attacks on the South not only go unchallenged by “so-called” conservatives, who by default the South supports, but are actually echoed by these same people, who mollify their treachery by stating something to the effect that we need to keep the history, but annotate it to remember our mistakes (sins). Pittance, I guess, is what these curs are trying to foster. Problem is slavery isn’t the operative mistake here, and what really needs to be remembered is being buried deeper and deeper beneath their obfuscation. The gutless wonders fear the PC crowd and believe they are protecting themselves from the Left’s onslaught by tossing such bones. Believers in the republic, or perhaps those who simply respect its memory, whether Southern or not, have no champion. Granted the republic is dead. The majority of Americans rejected it long ago. Today most don’t even know what it was, its having been perverted by self-aggrandizing politicians into something it wasn’t. But we Southerners being told to piss on our ancestors’ graves, all too often now by other Southerners, in order to further the ambitions of one statist group over those of another, is going too far.

One can pinpoint a number of places in our antebellum history highlighting the states’ and the peoples’ rejection of our federal republic. The states’ failure to support Kentucky's and Virginia's resolutions against Adams’ Alien and Sedition Acts and later South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis; the application of the Constitution to the states by the Supreme court under Marshall; and the Northern states’ answering Lincoln’s call for troops to invade the South. The Missouri Crisis was a biggie. That’s when the South should have left the Union. It was clear then that sectional interests were simply too conflicting.

Reconstruction itself abounds with violations, but those violations may not have been so pervasive had the Northern populace not given Congress to the Radicals in the fall of 1866. But what did it matter at that point? The South was in shambles, and Northerners as a block had already shown how little they cared about our founders’ republic. They had, in fact, rejected it. They wanted a centralized Union, and they created one by force of arms. Today the old republic is only a memory being twisted into something evil, the final step before the statists feel comfortable in eradicating it altogether.

We need to keep that history untarnished, y’all. It’s what our Confederate ancestors fought for. In another time and another place, Patriots will need a foundation on which to build again. 

Thanks for reading,

Charlsie

Identifying Those Earliest Southern Whigs and Where That Has Led Me

This is post number seven in a series detailing Southern Whiggery. See the sidebar for earlier posts.

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The proof is in the pudding, and by that I mean the “truth” is in the pudding—in the taste, not in the pretty picture on the box. Calhoun and his fellow nullifiers from South Carolina were the Whigs and the original anti-Jackson “party” as opposed to a mere “faction” of the Old Jeffersonians. If the Whig Party had looked at the beginning like what it evolved into (over a relatively short period) there would have been no reason to involve the Southern state righters. The National Republican faction (which already contained Southerners) would have simply broken with the Jacksonian Democrats (which had a lot more Southerners) and life would have continued pretty much as it eventually did anyway. Ah, but Henry Clay would have had no more Southern support in 1836, 1840, or whenever, looking into the then unforeseeable future, than he’d had in 1832 when Andrew Jackson smashed him in his second win of the presidency. Southern Whiggery, at its inception, was not an endorsement of Clay’s policies, but was anti-Jacksonian in its own right. The National Republicans and the state righters making up the new “Whig Party” were allies operating on opposite ends of the spectrum regarding Constitutional interpretation and were personified in the beings of Clay and Calhoun.

From the very beginning, there were Americans in the young Republic, in then much less polarized sections, who fought liberal interpretation of the Constitution. But with the end of the War of 1812, a spirit of nationalism swept the country and found a home in the hearts of many Southerners, Calhoun among them. Recall that Federalist New England had opposed the war because, simply put, blockades and embargoes declared necessary by the central government hurt her interests. As a result, focus was placed on the interests of the nation as a whole, which meant using the powers of the central government for the “general welfare” of all. By the 1830s the “revenue” only tariff had morphed into a high protective tariff benefiting New England (and Midwestern) mercantilists to the detriment of everyone else, in particular the agrarian South. The by now more pragmatic ex-young nationalist John C. Calhoun had stopped second-guessing what had gone wrong and was determined to set things right. Funny thing about setting precedents, once that cat is out of the bag, it’s hard to get him back in. A generation of American leaders had failed to heed what the political theorists of the founding generation had warned against, utilization of a centralized state to promote self-aggrandizing, un-republican values. Folks tend to cite Thomas Jefferson here, and I certainly have no problem with that, but he did support ratification of the Constitution. My favorite is Patrick Henry who warned us not to ratify the thing with its nominally limited central government...the first and biggest precedent of all.

Another, who was still around and kicking at the time, was North Carolina’s Nathaniel Macon, who also opposed ratification, but represented his state in the House and later the Senate almost from the inception of the new government. The focus of his career of thirty-seven years was keeping the central government limited as decreed by its charter. An original opponent of the Federalist Party, Macon never fell under the spell of its brand of economic nationalism, forwarded in turn by Clay and the National Republicans. The fact remained that a central government had been created and what would follow would be generations of self-serving men seeking to control it. Their weapon of choice and, not coincidentally the one most conducive to wheedling power and money from the people in the name of common good, was the general welfare clause.

By the time the nationalistic ardor created by the War of 1812 had cooled and the stark reality of having fallen victim to its passion struck home, dramatic action was called for. President Andrew Jackson, an ardent nationalist of the Jacksonian mold (I’m being facetious, but I can’t think of a better way to say it—he was an anti-New England Unionist) struck against Biddle’s National Bank to the cheers of the common folk in the South and the West and the jeers of the National Republicans regardless of section. Calhoun (and South Carolina) struck against the tariff. Ah, but a strike against the tariff was a strike against the national government, which the nationalist Jackson could not tolerate. Jackson’s counter was to propose a military strike against South Carolina. That was something the Jacksonian-Democrat state righters—even those not in sympathy with Calhoun—could not sit idly by and abide. The nullifiers were limited in number and weak, but Southerners were plentiful, and Jackson was pushing the envelope (and Southerners made up a good chunk of his base).

But the Nullification Crisis didn’t occur in a vacuum. Many wealthy and powerful Southerners (the sugar planters of Louisiana, Kentucky hemp-growers, the mining industries of western Virginia) supported a protective tariff, but also of significance in the abandonment of Jackson by some state righters was the issue of the U.S. National Bank, an entity which had Southern supporters in the aforementioned sugar merchants, miners, and hemp-growers as well as black-belt cotton planters. These men were primarily of the National Republican variety, but the existence of nominal supporters of a national bank among state righters does have purchase. A national bank stabilized the money and banking in general. The problem with Biddle’s bank was its partisanship; it catered to and was supported by, a certain, finite, class of people.

[I believe an argument could be made that support of Biddle’s bank was not necessarily the same as support for a national bank for which, at a number of junctures in our early history, an amendment to the Constitution was suggested to accommodate.]

To rehash, Dr. Michael Holt in the Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party states that at the opening of Congress, December 1833, there were twenty National Republicans and twenty Jacksonians squaring off in the U.S. Senate along with two nullifiers and six Southern state-rights senators who had abandoned the Jackson camp in the wake of Jackson’s overt threat to South Carolina. These eight senators held the balance of power in the Senate. Neither Holt nor Arthur Cole in History of the Whig Party of the South identified precisely who these men were. South Carolina’s nullifiers, of course, are easy to identify: John C. Calhoun and William C. Preston. I’m not absolutely sure who the other six were, but having done a little research, I hereby take a stab at identification: Gabriel Moore of Alabama, John Black and George Poindexter of Mississippi, Willie P. Mangum of North Carolina, John Tyler of Virginia, and Joseph Kent of Maryland.

Originally a Jacksonian, Mangum is on record for warning his fellow Southerners to trust no administration forcing the South to wear the chains of the American System, and in 1833, he broke with Jackson for doing what he perceived as that very thing.

Just for the record, at the same time the anti-Jacksonians seized control of the Senate, the House gained an additional eleven Southern anti-Jacksonians and five additional nullifiers—four of the latter from South Carolina and one from Alabama. Of course, it made no difference in the House, where Jacksonian Democrats had things locked up.

In the course of searching for the identity of those six senators, I came across a 1954 article by Princetonian Charles Grier Sellers in The American Historical Review titled “Who Were the Southern Whigs.” From the title, as you may have guessed, I had hoped for specific identities of those six men, but his article didn’t deal with the U. S. Senate, but rather focused broadly on the House and on state legislatures. Mr. Sellers’ argues it was the Bank War, not state rights, that shaped the Southern Whig Party. He appears to be challenging the prevailing belief 63 years ago that state rights shaped Southern Whiggery. Perhaps this is still the prevailing academic position, particularly among Southerners. I admit that I have trouble seeing the Southern Whigs as state righters, but I have less of a problem seeing them as strict constructionists, and therein might be the problem—using the term “strict constructionist” interchangeably with “state righter”. Swap nullifier and secessionist for strict constructionist and the problem increases. Those latter were definitely strict constructionists, but does it follow that all strict constructionists were secessionists?

[Now, in my mind, if you apply strict construction to the Tenth Amendment, then you believe in the right to secede—how could you not? Whether you’re in favor of secession or not is a different question. But that’s me.]

Throughout their history, Southern Whigs compromised their strict-constructionist stance, condoning violation of the Constitution only in “certain situations.” But who determines what constitutes those “situations”? One cannot simply qualify what is necessary and proper under certain conditions, then proceed with the violation in the name of an arbitrary, so-called good. Not, that is, and remain a strict constructionist. A “so-called good” is relative, all too often, to one’s self-interest, and the basest form of self-interest is greed. This is a classic un-republican concept. Further, one can’t advocate the sanctity of Union, then vote for secession, which is what a lot of them eventually did, indicating the Union wasn’t quite so sacred after all. Pondering that, when push came to shove, sounds like the Southern Whigs’ state-right colors bled through.

I’m gonna close the post at this juncture because the story of Southern Whiggery is as much about what the Southern Whigs were as it is about who they were. Throughout its evolution, the character of Southern Whiggery varied from state to state and was shaped not only by the interests of the individual states, but by the interests of different sections within each state. The story is as rich and varied as everything else about the South and goes hand in hand with what can be detailed about the opposition Southern Democrats. Each state had a healthy, viable two-party system before sectionalism (and nationalism, darn it) clouded the political horizon. I think it’s a story worth telling and is, in my humble opinion, critical to understanding what led to sectionalism, war, discord within the Confederacy, Reconstruction, Redemption, and eventually the solid “Democratic” South.

So, my anticipated “brief” junket into the history of Southern Whiggery has taken on a life of its own. I will continue with who/what were the Southern Whigs next time. At the same time I plan to return to Alcorn and the dark days of Reconstruction, and the two series will parallel each other.

Thanks for reading,

Charlsie

James Lusk Alcorn, The Dawn of Reconstruction

This post is number ten in a historical review of Mississippi’s Union Whig/Republican governor and senator during Reconstruction. See my earlier posts, best read in sequence from oldest to most recent, from 17 February, 16 April, 24 March, 17 July, 24 July, 18 September, 9 October, 18 October, and 5 November 2014.

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This article brings me to the period of history that initiated my interest in James Lusk Alcorn and is the setting for a number of my novels. “Reconstruction” is a term that has left a bad taste in the mouths of generations of white Southerners along with the epithet scalawag, which taints the name J. L. Alcorn to this day. After years of study, I see everything in a clearer, if not brighter light. If anything the taste of Reconstruction is fouler than ever. As a child I adhered to the simplistic approach that it was a period when a bunch of greedy, corrupt Northern opportunists and politicians, protected by the Yankee army, came South to plunder the spoils of war. Not much more to it than that. Later the “noble” ideas of civil rights for the Negro—a natural adjunct of his emancipation—seeped in. That noble idea translated, and rightly so, to Negro enfranchisement, which coupled with the disfranchisement of Southern whites, put in place a constituency designed to keep the Republican party in power for as long as it was able to hold the white South at bay. Both are true, simple concepts designed to get the blood of any self-respecting white Southerner boiling. These concepts would later be used to keep in place a constituency of a different sort—but this group, at least, was our own.

Putting aside the propaganda and ulterior motives of later generations of Southern demagogues, the tyranny and malfeasance of Reconstruction that ran rampant across the South, for over a decade in some places, were merely tools that apologists euphemistically refer to as the failure of a benign experiment in political and social awakening. My take on the apologists—smoke and mirrors in an attempt to create a faux truth from a lie.

Reconstruction was the realization of a pact loosely drawn by morally corrupt, self-righteous leaders, social, economic and political, to “Reconstruct” the South into what they thought it should be (socially) to serve their needs (economic/political)—needs reflected in the manifest destiny of the United States. The plan was not drafted with the South’s defeat in 1865. It was on the drawing table and set for necessary alterations by the 1850s. The South, its future clear within the “Union”, opted out. No war, no violence, just “you go your way and we’ll go ours”. But with its secession, the South had presented those Northern “architects” of what the United States was really meant to be with the opportunity to carry out the plan. It took some work to bring the rest of the North in line under the concepts of “Union” and “liberty and justice for all”, but ‘architects’ such as those always seem to achieve their ruthless goals. Hence a horrific war that took so many American lives, wasted the South, and destroyed the Founders’ Republic. Reconstruction was not an adjunct to the war. Reconstruction was the reason for the war.

But while research has hardened my frustration for those who view the South’s meager “victory” during Reconstruction as one of white Southerners against the defenseless and oppressed, my view of Alcorn is now more appreciative. In my opinion the term scalawag fits him less than simply noting what he was, a pragmatic Southern Whig who struggled to do what was necessary to return his Mississippi of old to its rightful place in the Union—given the terms demanded by a hate-filled victor.

It would never happen, of course, not for Mississippi nor the rest of the South. As stated above, Reconstruction did not refer to reconstructing the physical infrastructure of the devastated South. In fact, Congress (in which there was no Southern representation early on, an unconstitutional omission it later “corrected” by the introduction of Republican puppets as the Southern taxpayers’ representatives) and the powerful Northern constituents (industrialists, social engineers) that it represented went to great lengths to ensure the South’s recovery would be both slow and painful. Indeed, a case can be made that many of those people opposed recovery at all. Loyal Americans lived in the North—they’d saved the “Union” after all (Republic be damned)—and anything that would rise from the ashes of the South would be North-like in appearance and to the benefit of the North. I would like to make my point using an early example from Alcorn’s own history:

Thanks to his dealings with the occupying forces during the war, Alcorn returned to Coahoma county in the summer of 1865 with his lands intact and a supply of gold with which to rebuild. In the fall, the Union army released his home at Friar’s Point, and it is here that he brought Amelia and his children vice returning to Mound Place on the Yazoo Pass. Friar’s Point became the seat of operations for his post-war activities. He returned to his law practice and operated his plantations, acquiring new property east and south of his original holdings.

Long a Delta planter dependent on the rich alluvial land born of centuries of Mississippi River floods, Alcorn had spent his entire life in Mississippi focused on levees to control the “Father of Waters.” The river giveth, but it also taketh away—in a heartbeat. His determination to construct an adequate levee system meant constant battle with both the state and the counties making up the Delta—and interior counties that didn’t really care if the Delta flooded or not. In the early fifties, he’d become president of the Superior Board of Levee Commissioners created to coordinate all levee activity among the concerned counties. In 1861 he threw up his hands in defeat (apparently the players never, ever, all agreed) and resigned as president of the board. Disunion was on the nation by then, war followed, but Alcorn’s interest in levee construction never abated. As many of you Civil War buffs know, Grant did extensive damage to the existing levees—just one of the peacetime projects in need of real “reconstruction.”

In August of 1865, a state convention (this one blessed by President Johnson—see my 5 November 2014 post) appointed Alcorn as one of three commissioners to go to Washington to enlist Federal aid to rebuild the levees and/or find private investors. Since the state convention forbade the commissioners from pledging state funds in repaying the loans, private investors were not enthused. Needless to say, the thirty-ninth Congress was downright hostile. Regardless of Congressional sentiment, Alcorn was an optimistic Whig at heart, so it was the Federal government where he focused his hopes for support by depicting Mississippi River levees in terms of “national” interests.

In the summer of 1866, opportunity knocked when Congress began debate on a revenue bill. In 1863, when there’d been no representation of the cotton states in Congress, that body passed a law placing a 3¢ tax per pound on raw cotton. Now, the Southern states still not represented, it proposed to increase this tax to 5¢. It just so happened that at this time the U.S. District Court of Northern Mississippi was in session and contained a goodly number of the Delta’s lawyer-planters. Alcorn was one. This group took advantage of the session to hold a protest meeting against the proposed “cotton tax”. The district judge adjourned court so the protesters could hold their meeting, which Alcorn dominated. He nominated and secured the election of his friend and fellow Whig, C. D. Fontaine, as chairman and proposed a set of resolutions to be set before Congress.

One argument urged planters, in view of the tax’ probable passage, to plow up unpromising stands of cotton and plant corn since the state wouldn’t have funds to buy food from the North and West that winter anyway. That argument was countered by one that emphasized the value of cotton as wealth for the entire nation, which made it an instrument in foreign affairs. The Northern blockade during the war had forced the traditional European markets for Southern cotton to supplement their purchases of raw cotton from elsewhere. Indeed, Britain was encouraging the cultivation of cotton in her colonial possessions. Cotton, the counterargument concluded, provided the South purchase power to buy Northern goods. Southern commercial credit was based on cotton; therefore, the well-being of all Southerners, black and white, was dependent on it. A committee was appointed (Alcorn was a member) to write and present a memorial to Congress protesting the cotton tax and arguing for why it should not be.

Before the petition was drafted, the New York Chamber of Commerce memorialized Congress against the increase to 5¢, stating that taxation without representation was tyranny; the tax, at least in spirit, was unconstitutional; and the increase “lacked an impartiality which was calculated to provoke hostility at the South.” Congress, it argued, should be producing legislation to inspire the Southern people to hope for better days instead of continuing to beat them down. The tax was not removed, but was decreased to 2.5¢ per pound as of 1867.

In his annual report for the year 1867-1868, Secretary of the Treasury, Hugh McCulloch recommended repeal of the tax as a measure to restore the productive power of the Southern states as soon as possible. (Note that McCulloch was a free-market fella and perceived opponent to the “American System.”) He stated: “Even in their deplorable condition, more than two-thirds of our exports last year [1866] consisted of their products, and it is the crop of the present year [1867], small though it is, that is to save us from the ruinous indebtedness to Europe.” Don’t jump to the conclusion that this was support for the South—think of it as, “we need to jump start our new colony’s economy so we can pay the national debt we created by waging the war to destroy the South.”

Just for the record, here’s Mississippi’s share of the cotton tax, paid when the state was not represented in Congress: 

1866—3¢ per pound— $756,289.00

1867—2.5¢ per pound—$4,640,664.00

1868—2.5¢ per pound—$3,521,702.00

                For a total of—$8,918,655.00 

Between 1863-1868 when the tax was repealed, the Southern states paid $68,072,385.00 in cotton tax, all during a period when they were not represented in Congress.

Regarding Mississippi’s burden, note that the cotton crops of both 1866 and 1867 were near failures; the amount of the cotton tax paid in those years was 6 and 8 times state expenditures; and the tax was estimated to represent one quarter the value of the crops (remember that the tax was based on the weight of the cotton, not the market price).

Now, let’s go back a bit to Mississippi. That half-cent reduction in the cotton tax disarmed the 1866 planter protest, but Alcorn was not done with the tyrannical cotton tax. Now he put on his “Whig” hat and on 18 December 1866 presented a petition to both houses of Congress, which bore his name alone. In it, he cited his life-long activities with the levees in Mississippi; he highlighted the potential of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta—to include tax revenue; and he emphasized the threat of foreign cotton production to the U.S. cotton industry (I’d be willing to bet that Congress was preoccupied with U.S. industry—maybe even the cotton industry—but not in the South.).

Then he came to the crux of his address: The people of the South considered the cotton tax not only a grievance, but a wrong. If it had to be enforced he said, mitigate its existence by using that tax on the South for the South. In the case of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana, spend the revenue on the levees to protect the alluvial cotton lands subject to flood. [Recall that such use of national subsidies for internal improvements was integral to the Whig platform.] The national government was being generous with subsidies to the North and West, particularly regarding railroad construction. Alcorn’s argument was to give the devastated South her share of her contribution (goodness knows she needed it).

Congress did not respond.

Point made.  

Thanks for reading, and more to come, Charlsie

 

 

James Lusk Alcorn’s Role in the War Between the States, The Early Years

This post constitutes the third in a series dealing with James Lusk Alcorn, Mississippi Whig, Union Whig, and Republican Reconstruction governor/U.S. senator from Mississippi. An ardent Whig who rose to power and wealth during the decades leading up to the War Between the States, Alcorn successfully thwarted the forces of secession in 1850 and argued passionately against secession in January 1861, succumbing to the tide only when secessionist sentiment had become so strong he knew there was no way to curb it. During the fateful roll call vote at the Mississippi State House in Jackson on 9 January 1861, he finally capitulated and to the jubilant hurrahs of gallery observers, he cast his lot with Dixie and signed the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession. All but one of his fellow Union Whigs, John W. Wood, followed suit. Wood proved to be the lone dissenter of all the delegates. 

Almost immediately, the Secession Convention offered Alcorn a commission of Brigadier General with a post on the State Military Board, and believing the position merited political capital in case war ensued, he declined a seat in the Southern Congress at Montgomery and accepted the commission. Major General Jefferson Davis headed Mississippi’s military board. Alcorn’s fellow brigadiers included Earl Van Dorn, Charles Clark, and C. H. Mott. All these men, with the exception of Alcorn, had served in the Mexican War. 

Alcorn took his position to heart. He, along with Van Dorn, believed war was imminent; however, it appears, they were the only two on the board to believe the state’s number one priority, while the winter of ’61 waned, was war preparedness.  Davis’ tenure as head of the board, of course, was short-lived, for he left to become the Confederacy’s only president. Van Dorn, Clark, and Mott left shortly thereafter to accept commissions in the Confederate Army. From the moment of his capitulation to the forces of secession and his “crossing the Rubicon” speech, Alcorn coveted a commission in the regular army, but his request to Richmond was met with silence.  

Worse, with the departure of his four fellow board members, Alcorn should have been promoted to head Mississippi’s State Military Board. Instead, Governor Pettus appointed Reuben Davis to the senior slot. It was Reuben Davis, a man who was, or would become, a friend, who dissuaded Alcorn from resigning his commission and returning to his Yazoo Pass plantation home. Alcorn is on record for reviewing recruits in Corinth during this early period.  

Throughout the war, at times more vehemently than at others, particularly after his worse fears of invasion had been realized, Alcorn argued that we should go out and meet the enemy, not wait until the enemy was on Mississippi soil. He had no qualms about voicing this strategy with his initially unconcerned leaders. In addition to being snubbed for head of the State Military Board, Alcorn’s attempts to raise and outfit individual units under his own command were rebuffed. One such request was returned by President Davis’ Secretary of War, L. P. Walker, annotated “No Brigades auth.” [auth.=authorized] It is fairly easy for the uninitiated such as me to make a wild-ass guess as to what was happening here—one of two things or a combination of both.  

(1) James Alcorn’s lack of military experience, compounded with his political opposition to military hero and former U.S. Secretary of War, Jeff Davis, determined Alcorn to be a military officer of unknown quality, and/or  (2) the Confederate government might have considered independent units under the command of aggressive, autonomous leadership as the metaphorical loose cannon, particularly egregious to a man convinced that by announcing to the enemy “we only wish to be left alone” that he would ensure the enemy would indeed leave us alone. Certainly Jeff Davis would not have relished the likes of James Alcorn charging up the Mississippi Valley, untested saber raised high and glinting in the sun. 

You know, ever since I was a kid (and I am not a young woman), I’ve looked at maps of Mississippi highlighting Yankee incursions into the state during 1863-1864. And ever since I was that kid I’ve noted there sure were a lot of Yankees running around loose and unconstrained by their own seniors, much less the Confederate Army. Okay, perhaps I’m being too kind to those U.S. military seniors given that the behavior of their men was a matter of policy, but that’s another story. The point I’m trying to make is that the barbarous behavior of the Union Army was not countered in the manner to which I believe they deserved while a Confederate army of 30,000 men remained holed up and starving in Vicksburg. And please don’t, “oh duh” me. I know this observation is not original. My point is that even to a child a hundred years after the fact, it was obvious something was missing in our grand strategy. I don’t know how far up the Mississippi valley Alcorn (and he wasn’t the only man using his head back then, either) may have gotten before he was stopped; certainly his effort should have been directed, but I do think his grand strategy was right—and the best part is that it wasn’t twenty-twenty hindsight. It was foresight. 

More on Alcorn and the war years in my next post. Thanks for reading.

Charlsie

 

 

 

 

James Lusk Alcorn, Prelude to War

This post is an outgrowth of my decision to correct historical mistakes I’ve discovered in my work over the years (see my post of February 10, 2014). I find the subject of J. L. Alcorn interesting and relevant to my future work, so I’ve decided to continue blogging about him for several more posts, highlighting his actions during the War, Reconstruction, and finally the Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890. Before I get off the subject of confessing my historical mistakes, the implication made in my 17 February 2014 post that Alcorn was too cozy with the enemy during the War may have been hasty (I’ve been doing a lot of research during the past month). The term double agent could hit closer to the mark. 

James Lusk Alcorn was a Whig. The Northern wing of the American Whig Party became the Republican Party. Mississippi had, at the time of the War Between the States and for decades prior, been a Democratic bastion. At no time in the state’s history was its legislature comprised of more than one-third Whigs—the remaining two-thirds being Democrats. Jefferson Davis was a democrat.  Democrats and Whigs hated each other. These last two sentences are important to remember. 

There were states in the South fonder of Whigs than Mississippi—Louisiana, North Carolina, Florida, and Georgia represent the best examples. But all the Southern states had viable Whig parties comprised of large land owners, but also successful business people. If you think Republican of today (or even yesterday), you’ll have a general feel for Whigs. But like the Democratic Party, the Whig Party had Northern and Southern wings and the great divide—I’m sure you’ve guessed it—was slavery.  

The Whig Party began life (metaphorically speaking) in 1833-1834 dispassionate toward slavery, and the Northern and Southern wings managed to work together until the 1840s when the more adamant Free Soil Party, ineffectual on its own, began to sell its votes to the highest bidder (Democrat or Whig) in the Northern state legislatures in return for senate seats. State legislatures couldn’t change slavery; that had to be done at the Washington level. So in return for Free Soilers’ consolidation with either the Democratic or Whig legislatures, in whatever state we happen to be talking about, the victorious party would reward the “spoilers” by sending a Free Soil senator to Washington. [This was before passage of the 17th Amendment.] Too often, Northern Whigs ended up making their beds with Free Soilers, which did not rub well with their fellow Whigs in the South. 

The sectional divide was further exacerbated by all that new territory that came with U. S. victory in the Mexican War (i.e., whether slavery should be allowed or not) and the subsequent Compromise of 1850. Controversy over said Compromise led to the founding of the Union Party, put simply here, the brain-child of Georgia Whigs, Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs, and Georgia Democrat, Howell Cobb who teamed up to offset the sectional strife between the Northern and Southern Wings of the Whig Party and counter the State Rights Southern Democrats who were calling for secession. The “State Righters” were themselves offset by moderate Democrats who did not advocate secession. The “Union” movement also proved popular in the North, but its most secure foothold, though brief, was in the South and represented a moderate, pro-Union fusion of Whigs and Democrats. In Mississippi, J. L. Alcorn, along with many other influential Whigs in the state, became members of the Union Party and that party elected Henry Foote, a Union Democrat, governor in 1850. In my humble and admittedly academically limited opinion, the Southern Whigs did more to curb the secessionist movement in 1850 and get the Compromise through Congress than anyone else, North or South, because everybody had problems with it.  

Needless to say, things continued to degenerate between the North and South and both parties skewed along sectional lines. 

You know, sometimes I think it was really the political parties that, in their need for dissension in order to gain adherents, created the sectional rift, then dragged their constituents along with them into war. That would mean Calhoun of South Carolina was right. But I wax philosophical here (plus, this is hardly an original concept), and I will now desist, leaving that thought as fodder for another post. 

Officially the Whig Party fell apart. The subsequent split in the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic Party in 1860 resulted in the election of the (it’s just my opinion, but hemlock by any other name is still hemlock) Republican Abraham Lincoln, and we all know what happened next. And yes, Lincoln was a Whig. 

James Lusk Alcorn never stopped being a Union Whig and better informed historians than I agree. I think we can safely assume his dislike of Jeff Davis and the Democrats was reciprocated and subsequent slights by the Confederate government possibly reflect this. But most importantly, and I’m believing this more and more as my research continues, James Lusk Alcorn never stopped being a Southerner and a Mississippian. In my 17 February post, I quoted Alcorn’s speech right before he voted for the Ordinance of Secession. It was the overtly dramatic statement that ended “...I  enlist in the army that marches to Rome.”  

This, after he and a handful of fellow Union Whigs’ had spent two days arguing against secession! I don’t know if he’d prepared his allies for what he was about to do. It was a roll call vote and his was the first name called (A-lcorn—I’m assuming the delegates names were listed alphabetically). The subsequent applause brought down the house and all but one of those Union delegates voted for the Ordinance, then consecrated their “yea” vote with their signature. Alcorn, no doubt, had seen the handwriting on the wall; it was as if he thought, well, hell, they’re going and they’re not going with out me. He might have guessed he’d be on the wrong side of history, but (at least at the time) he wasn’t going to be on the wrong side of Mississippi. 

And another thought: One has to wonder what might have happened had there been an Alcorn in Richmond who realized that the army needed to march on Rome and it needed to be quick about it.  

Despite Alcorn’s dramatic capitulation in support of secession, his words qualified how he thought the coming war should be fought. It also says a lot about how well he understood the hate-filled enemy residing above the Mason-Dixon line, and I believe it explains his actions during the War, into which I will delve in my next post.

 

Thanks for reading.

 

James Lusk Alcorn’s Role in Secession

     This post is the second in a series correcting historical errors that I have discovered in my work. Divulging the embarrassing finds are, I humbly propose, to my credit because they show that I continue to research and grow as an amateur historian. As my time on this planet wanes, I intend to focus my study on the history of the Southern states from their earliest exploration by Europeans through colonization, the Revolution, the Confederacy, and beyond. Okay, studying the present is pretty convoluted. Yoda was wrong. It’s not the future that’s hard to see because it’s “always in motion.” It’s the present, which is a darn cyclone, but I digress.

Following up on my February 10, 2014 post, the next misspeak I’d like to set right is that regarding James Lusk Alcorn in the introductory “Historical Note” to my novel Wolf Dawson. This historical suspense, replete with romance, mystery, and its touch of the paranormal, is set near the close of Congressional Reconstruction in Mississippi. To give the reader a perspective of the setting, I provided a brief outline of the conditions in post-war Mississippi. I wrote the paragraph below in respect to the 1873 gubernatorial election pitting two Republican candidates against each other, Adelbert Ames, ex-brevet General U.S. Army and Maine native who’d never stepped foot in Mississippi before the war, and Mississippian J. L. Alcorn. In the second full paragraph on “page ix,” I stated:

“J.L. Alcorn, the man Ames defeated, was a Mississippian. He was intimately familiar with Southern politics in general and Mississippi politics in particular. Since the arrival of Federal troops during the war, this man who had passionately supported and voted for secession had accepted reconstruction and urged white Mississippians to embrace the Negro. He warned that otherwise the Negro electorate would fall under the influence of corrupt Republicans.” 

Most of what I say is correct—at least as the record shows—but there is a misrepresentation—that being the implication Alcorn was a zealot on the subject of  secession. James Lusk Alcorn was a Whig, as ardent, according to Hodding Carter (The Angry Scar) as Henry Clay himself. Kentucky-born of hard-working common folk, Alcorn attended one year at Cumberland College, taught school in Jackson, Arkansas, and in 1838, became a member of the Kentucky bar. Between 1839 and 1843 he served as a Livingston County, Kentucky deputy sheriff from where he resigned and served one term as a member of the Kentucky legislature. In 1844, he migrated to Mississippi’s Coahoma County where he practiced law and established a small plantation, dubbed Mound Place, on the Yazoo Pass. In time he became a very wealthy cotton planter with land holdings of 12,000 acres.  

Two years after coming to Mississippi he was elected to the state legislature on the Whig ticket. He was always a Union man and ardent anti-secessionist. On 7 January 1861, a hundred delegates gathered at the capitol building in Jackson to vote on secession. William Barry, a secessionist from Lowndes County, defeated Alcorn to become president of the convention. Barry then appointed a committee of fifteen to draft an ordinance of secession. L. Q. C. Lamar chaired the committee—and he just happened to have brought the draft of a proposed ordinance of secession with him. Judge J. S. Yerger (like Alcorn, a Unionist Whig) proposed approaching the North for concessions [in return for shelving secession] and thereby wait before taking a vote. When the committee voted down Yerger’s proposal, Alcorn proposed waiting until Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Louisiana voted to secede, then follow them out. Alcorn’s proposal was also voted down at which point Walter Brooke requested the vote be taken to the people in a referendum to be scheduled for 2 February. This proposal was also voted down, but a proposal to have the people vote on the ordinance as part of the state elections in the fall was floated by some on the committee—a proposal not formally voted down. War intervened and that vote never took place. 

In The Angry Scar, Carter states there were four committee votes against and eleven votes in favor of secession (Lamar’s Ordinance of Secession). The convention approved the committee’s vote and as Coahoma’s representative to the convention, Alcorn, as well as Yerger (Washington County) and Brooke (one of two representatives from Warren County) signed the Ordinance of Secession on 9 January 1861 along with ninety-five other county representatives. Regarding that decision, I quote Alcorn from Hodding Carter’s The Angry Scar:

 

“I have thought that a different course...should have been adopted and to that end I have labored and spoken,” Alcorn told the convention. “But the die is cast—the Rubicon is crossed—and I enlist in the army that marches to Rome.”  

And he did (join the army, I mean). Actually, his avowed proclamation above is a double entendre. Ultimately, he “served” both armies, to the detriment of the reputed “initial” commitment he made above and to the benefit of both the “Union” and himself once Grant and Sherman started stomping around, first plundering, then burning the state. But I would argue that his “first” loyalty was fomented as a Whig and that his subsequent two-faced double-cross when the going got tough (or the advantages became clear) was such a Whig thing to do. 

But I will grudgingly submit that there was more to Alcorn than greed and self-aggrandizement—even though that “more to” in reference to the State was to his own good—and believe me, he saw it. Vis-à-vis the likes of Adelbert Ames I can bring myself to side with the man. On that, there’s more to come. 

Thanks for reading. 

Charlsie