by Bruce Catton
The provisional constitution (which differed only very slightly from the permanent constitution of the Confederate States, adopted a month later) was indeed the old familiar United States Constitution with small but significant changes.
The famous “We, the people” opening sentence was modified so as to suppress the faint, haunting echo of Democracy’s trumpets; it was made clear that the people were acting through sovereign and independent states rather than just as people. Negro slavery was specifically mentioned, and was given permanence; there never could be a law “denying or impairing the right of property in Negro slaves,” and slavery was fully protected in territories then or later acquired. The old fugitive slave law was retained, and its mealy-mouthed locution about persons “held to service or labor” was straightened out to read “slaves.” The absence of true fire-eater influence, however, was visible in a constitutional prohibition of the old African slave trade, which the more dreamy-eyed visionaries of slave-state empire had talked of reviving, and Congress was given power to prohibit the importation of slaves from non-seceding slave states.
But the delegates thought about much more than the simple protection of slavery. They tried, obviously, to build a government that would be better than the old one, and some of the reforms they brought forward had nothing at all to do with Southern rights. It was, to be sure, specified that there never could be a protective tariff, and Congress was barred from appropriating money for internal improvements, but most of the changes came from men who had been doing a good deal of abstract thinking on the way governments work. In some ways the President was given more power than in the United States; he could veto individual items in an appropriation bill without vetoing the entire bill, and Congress could appropriate money only by a two-thirds majority unless the appropriation had been specifically requested by the President. At the same time, however, the President was limited to a single six-year term, and Congress, if it chose, could give cabinet members seats on the floor of either house so that they could be questioned about departmental matters—a clear step in the direction of parliamentary authority after the British manner.5
To a certain extent, at least, this concern over improving the machinery of government reflected a feeling that an aristocratic society must, in the very nature of things, be able to govern itself better than a democracy. Undiluted democracy, indeed, was one of the things from which the cotton belt was seceding, as an editorial in the February issue of the Southern Literary Messenger made clear. The creation of the new Southern republic, said this magazine, would leave the states that remained in the old Union “absolutely at the mercy of an unprincipled, cold-blooded, tyrannical, remorseless horde of Abolitionists, whose anti-slavery creed but thinly disguises mob-law and agrarianism which surely overtakes all free society and which is the root of all Republican offending.” Enlarging on this point, the editorial writer continued: “It is not a question of slavery alone that we are called upon to decide. It is the far greater question of civil liberty, of government of any sort. It is free society which we must shun or embrace.”6
The new constitution was slightly odd in just one respect: it said nothing whatever about the right of secession. The states were recognized as sovereign powers, but whether any one of them could leave the Confederacy as simply as it had entered was left unmentioned; the right to secede may have been an article of Southern faith from the cradle upward, but it was not provided for in the Confederacy’s basic charter.
In any case, the provisional constitution was adopted on the night of February 8. (It would be submitted to the states for ratification, and there would be a purely provisional government until February 22, 1862, but in effect the Confederacy would be a going concern as soon as it got its executive officers.) Things had gone with uncommon smoothness, so far. If the same smooth unanimity could govern the choice of a President, the world would be given a striking demonstration of the harmony and singleness of purpose which had created the new nation.
The excesses of the old nominating conventions would be avoided—which, considering the displays that had taken place at nominating conventions during the preceding year, is hardly surprising—and if men caucused earnestly in smoke-filled rooms, they would at least do so out of the public gaze. Their task would not be too difficult. This convention was of manageable proportions. It now contained thirty-eight members, from six states, and all of its votes were to be cast by states, with each delegation possessing one vote. Instead of oratory from the floor, in the regular sessions, there would be simple private discussions within the separate delegations. It was generally agreed that the choice of a President ought to be unanimous; if there should be a contest among two or more candidates, it would be resolved before the business came to a formal vote. Whenever four of the six delegations had settled on a man, it would be time to vote.
There was a great deal of discussion, but no real campaigning, and apparently by unspoken agreement the delegates shied away from the fire-eaters. Yancey was in town, and if any man could claim to be the father of the new nation, he was the man; but he was too much the extremist, the people in Virginia and the other border states felt that he was dangerous, and he was not seriously considered for the presidency. The same was true of the elder Rhett, who was leader of South Carolina’s delegation. Rhett believed that he was abundantly qualified for the post, but there was never much chance that he would be chosen, and he made no serious effort to get the place. It appeared that much would depend on how the Georgia delegation felt, and it was generally assumed that Georgia would offer the name of Howell Cobb; an assumption which led to a slight mix-up, which had far-reaching consequences. Cobb was a man of much stature, perhaps the ablest leader in the South—Stephens said afterward that if it had not been for Cobb, Georgia might not have seceded—but there was opposition to him in the other delegations. Many good secessionists felt that in the past he had shown altogether too much love for the Union, and in addition there were tag ends of old party animosities clinging to him, and when the state delegations began to talk candidacies on the night of February 8 (the President was to be chosen the next morning), members of at least three delegations, believing that Cobb would be named by Georgia, cast about for some other candidate. More or less inevitably, they gravitated toward Jefferson Davis.7
Davis was not present. Men on the Mississippi delegation knew that he did not want to be President. He presently held a major general’s commission from Mississippi, he believed that his talents lay in the military field, and if the new Confederacy was to give him anything, he wanted command of the Confederacy’s army—for which, indeed, everyone felt that he was highly qualified. At the same time, it was logical to consider him for the presidency. Like Cobb, he had national stature, and although he too had shown a deep attachment to the Union, he enjoyed the active support of one of the most active of the South Carolina fire-eaters, Robert Barnwell. In the belief that the business would come down to a choice between Cobb and Davis, at least three of the delegations that night agreed to vote for Davis.
The Georgia delegation, meanwhile, was not doing what people had expected it to do. Cobb had never been an active candidate. He had written to his wife when the convention opened that “the presidency of the Confederacy is an office I cannot seek and shall feel no disappointment in not getting,” and on this night of February 8 he was repeating that “far from making an effort to obtain that position I have frankly said to my friends that I would greatly prefer not to be put there.” Learning that strong sentiment for Davis was developing, Cobb told other Georgians that he hoped Davis would be chosen unanimously.8
The Georgia delegation was not quite ready to agree to this. If they could not put Cobb over, they had another candidate in Robert Toombs, whom Stephens considered by far the ablest man the convention could select. There were those who said afterward that Stephens would have been happy to be selected himself, but as a man who had supported Douglas (who had talked of a high gallows for traitors), Stephens
was not quite the ideal candidate. Not realizing that some of the state delegations were by now committed to Davis, the Georgians at length agreed to vote for Toombs.
If they had come to this conclusion earlier, Toombs might have become President of the Confederacy; the groups that had swung to Davis had done so largely to head off Cobb, and it is quite possible that they would have followed Georgia’s lead if they had known Georgia was going to name Toombs. Toombs was popular, and he was an attention-getter in any company; an outspoken, hard-driving, tough-fibered man, untidy, often breezily profane, his candidacy perhaps weakened slightly by a rumor that he was drinking more than he should. He was needling Cobb mercilessly these days, and Stephens (with a slight trace of glee) wrote to a friend that Toombs “never lets Cobb pass without giving him a lick.” One evening, at a gathering that included Cobb and other delegates, Toombs announced that as Buchanan’s Secretary of the Treasury, Cobb had done more for the Confederacy than any other man alive—he had left the Northern government without any money in the till, “he did not even leave old ‘Buck’ two quarters to put on his eyes when he died.”9 It was a characteristic Toombs outburst. Intensely ambitious, Toombs wanted the presidency very much, and one of the South’s tragedies was the fact that it never quite found how to put his undeniable talents to work.
When the convention assembled on the morning of February 9 and prepared to elect a President, the Toombs balloon collapsed as soon as it became known that at least three of the state delegations were going to vote for Davis. The Georgians had committed themselves to Toombs in the belief that the field was open, and Toombs himself insisted that there must be no contest on the floor; unless all the other delegations were prepared to vote for him, he would not let his name be presented. There were last-minute scurryings-about; the desire for harmony won out, Toombs’s name was withdrawn, and all six delegations voted for Jefferson Davis. Then, in a move that was more than a little surprising, but that apparently involved an attempt to give Georgia proper recognition, the convention unanimously elected Stephens Vice-President.
By afternoon the business was settled. The Confederacy had a constitution, it had a President (who would be sworn in as soon as he could get to Montgomery), and it had a Vice-President, and until the permanent constitution went into effect a year later, the convention would act as a unicameral legislature. The new nation was in being.
Under the surface the harmony was not perfect. The Rhetts grumbled that Jefferson Davis had never been an all-out secessionist, and in the Georgia delegation there were raised eyebrows about Stephens’s election. Howell Cobb’s younger brother, Thomas R. R. Cobb, himself a Georgia delegate, wrote that Stephens’s victory was “a bitter pill to some of us but we have swallowed it with as good grace as we could.” It seemed to the younger Cobb outrageous that “the man who has fought against our rights and liberty is selected to wear the laurels of our victory,” and he concluded that it all stemmed from “a maudlin disposition to conciliate the Union men.” Darkly, he went on to say that many secessionists were troubled by rumors that Davis himself was “a reconstructionist,” and he believed that unless Davis thoroughly scotched such fears in his inaugural address, “we shall have an explosion here.”10
Cobb need not have worried, for few men in the South now were less inclined toward reconstruction than Davis. The delegates at Montgomery were in a hopeful mood, feeling that the North might soon consent to a peaceful separation, but Davis was not deluded; he believed that there was going to be war and that it would be long and costly, and his reluctance to accept the presidency came in large part from his conviction that there would be work for the armies. When a Mississippi friend protested that war ought not to follow the peaceable withdrawal of a sovereign state, Davis replied that “it was not my opinion that war should be occasioned by the exercise of that right, but that it would be.” (Even Stephens, as a matter of fact, saw things the same way. Not long after his election as Vice-President he wrote that he considered war certain. Every effort should be made to avoid it, he said, but “we are told by high authority that ‘offences must come’ and I think this is one of the occasions on which we may expect such a result.”) There would be times when Davis could fix his gaze so firmly on what he hoped for that he would blind himself to what was actually going on around him, but in the winter of 1861 he was a most clearsighted realist.11
His dismay at being made President was genuine. Varina Davis told how she and her husband were in the garden of Brierfield, their plantation home in Mississippi, making rose cuttings, when a messenger brought Davis the telegram announcing that he was to be President of the Confederacy. He read it with an expression that made her feel that some dreadful personal calamity had taken place, and when he told her what the message said, he spoke “as a man might speak of a sentence of death.” The news in truth came to Davis as no surprise, letters from the Mississippi delegates at Montgomery having kept him posted about the drift of things, and he felt that he had no option but to accept: “The trial was too great and the result too doubtful to justify one in declining any post to which he was assigned, and therefore I accepted.” It took one day to set his affairs in order, to say farewell to his slaves, and to take a last look at the plantation home which meant so much to him. Then Jefferson Davis left for Montgomery.12
The trip was all enthusiasm and cheers and music, with rear-platform speeches before jubilant crowds at way stations and more formal talks here and there in larger cities. When he talked, Davis did his best to warn his fellow citizens that a time of trial lay ahead. At Vicksburg he remarked that he had always been “attached to the Union of our fathers by every sentiment and feeling of my heart,” but that the separation had finally become inevitable; and although he hoped that the separation might be peaceable, “I am ready, as I always have been to redeem my pledges to you and the South by shedding every drop of my blood in your cause.” A correspondent for the New York Herald was deeply impressed by events of the journey, and wrote a warning dispatch for his Northern readers: “There are two things noticeable in connection with the president’s passage through the country—the unstudied, spontaneous, hearty enthusiasm with which he has been everywhere greeted, and the unanimous determination to stand by the new government. For whatever division there may have been before secession, there is now but one mind.”13
Davis reached Montgomery on February 16, to be met at the train by an official delegation to whose greeting Davis responded with words of grim determination, which must have removed Thomas Cobb’s last doubts.
“The time for compromise has now passed,” said Davis, “and the South is determined to maintain her position and make all who oppose her smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel if coercion is persisted in.” That evening, at the Exchange Hotel, Davis appeared on a balcony with Yancey to respond to the cheers of an expectant crowd with words of hope and flame.
“It may be,” cried the new President, “that our career will be ushered in in the midst of a storm; it may be that as this morning opened with clouds, rain and mist, we shall have to encounter inconveniences at the beginning; but as the sun rose and lifted the mist it dispersed the clouds and left us the pure sunshine of heaven. So will progress the Southern Confederacy, and carry us safe into the harbor of constitutional liberty and political equality. We fear nothing … because, if war should come, if we must again baptize in blood the principles for which our fathers bled in the Revolution, we shall show that we are not degenerate sons, but will redeem the pledges they gave, preserve the rights they transmitted to us, and prove that Southern valor still shines as bright as in 1776.… I will devote to the duties of the high office to which I have been called all that I have of heart, of head, of hand.”
Then, thinking of the armies that would march, and responding to his own inner longing, Davis added: “If, in the progress of events, it shall become necessary that my services be needed in another position—if, to be plain, necessity require that I shall again enter the ranks
of soldiers—I hope you will welcome me there.”
The crowd cheered mightily; then Yancey stepped forward, to pay his own tribute to “the distinguished gentleman who has just addressed you.” In Davis, said Yancey, the South had found “the statesman, the soldier and the patriot,” and the South was thrice fortunate: “The man and the hour have met.”14
It was Yancey’s odd fate that he would be remembered by remote generations chiefly for that one remark: “The man and the hour have met.” He was a passionate, intense person who had labored for years to create this new nation, one of the principal authors of a great drama which other men would enact; and he would go on into the shadows leaving little enduring trace of his own taut humanity except that on the balcony of a hotel in a little Southern city he had found the words to sum up, perfectly, the nobility and the tragedy of the Southern Confederacy and Jefferson Davis.
The man and the hour had been approaching each other by unlikely channels. The hour grew out of everything that a proud, self-centered, insecure society had been striving for in its attempt to ward off unwelcome change. The long argument over slavery in the territories, the resentment aroused by abolitionist taunts and by Northern aid for fugitive slaves, the fear and fury stirred by John Brown’s raid and by the realization that many folk in the free states looked on Brown as a saintly martyr, the desperate attempt to preserve a pastoral society intact in a land being transformed by the Industrial Revolution—all of these had led to this hour in Montgomery, with banners waving and words of brave defiance shouted into the winter air. And the man who was meeting the hour, tense and erect, lonely and dedicated, looking without fear into a clouded future, was perhaps greater than the cause he embraced. He came from the Ohio Valley, cradle of a leveling democracy, born within a few months and a few miles of another Kentuckian, Abraham Lincoln, coming to manhood by a different course. He was a Mississippi planter at a time when the Mississippi planter was a hard man on the make rather than the exemplar of a cultivated pillared aristocracy, and yet somehow he transcended the limitations of his background and represented, once and for all, the nobility of the dream that his fellows believed themselves to be living by. Of all the men the Confederacy might have summoned, he was the man for this hour and for the hours that would follow.
