University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository Graduate Studies The Vault: Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2013-01-08 Southern Pride and Yankee Presence: The Limits of Confederate Loyalty in Civil War Mississippi, 1860-1865 Ruminski, Jarret Ruminski, J. (2013). Southern Pride and Yankee Presence: The Limits of Confederate Loyalty in Civil War Mississippi, 1860-1865 (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27836 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/398 doctoral thesis University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission. Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY Southern Pride and Yankee Presence: The Limits of Confederate Loyalty in Civil War Mississippi, 1860-1865 by Jarret Ruminski A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY CALGARY, ALBERTA DECEMBER, 2012 © Jarret Ruminski 2012 Abstract This study uses Mississippi from 1860 to 1865 as a case-study of Confederate nationalism. It employs interdisciplinary literature on the concept of loyalty to explore how multiple allegiances influenced people during the Civil War. Historians have generally viewed Confederate nationalism as weak or strong, with white southerners either united or divided in their desire for Confederate independence. This study breaks this impasse by viewing Mississippians through the lens of different, co-existing loyalties that in specific circumstances indicated neither popular support for nor rejection of the Confederacy. It focuses on wartime activities like swearing the Federal oath, illicit trade with the Union army, and Confederate desertion to show how Mississippians acted on co-existent loyalty layers to self, family, and friend-networks that were distinct from national allegiances. Although the Confederate government espoused an all-consuming nationalism, the evidence presented in this study demonstrates the limited control that the Confederacy, the Union, and, by implication, most modern nation states, exerted over their subjects. This study also explores the relationship between race and loyalty. It demonstrates how an internal war between slaveholders, who expected slaves to only express servile loyalty to their masters, and slaves, who resisted white authority by acting on loyalties to self, family, neighborhood, and nation, revealed a struggle over the racial hierarchy that demonstrated continuity between the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras. ii Acknowledgements To say that completing this project was a trying task is the understatement to end all understatements. Nonetheless, it is finally finished and several individuals and organizations helped make its completion possible. First and foremost, thank you to Abbey, without whom I would never have reached this point. You are the embodiment of strength and perseverance in everything you do, and I only hope I can make it all worthwhile to you someday. Thanks to my advisor, Frank Towers, for doggedly providing the advice and assistance necessary to help me write a quality piece of scholarship and for making me a better historian, and thanks to Jewel Spangler for giving me the much-needed additional moral support. Brenda Oslawsky provided inestimable aid on all kinds of issues throughout my time in the History department, for which I am grateful. I am also much obliged to Marion McSheffrey and Lori Somner for helping me navigate through the various university programs and processes. Thanks to Hendrick Kraay for providing input on my work, which has improved my scholarship immensely, and thanks to all of the faculty members who aided me over the years of this process, including Faye Halpern, Elizabeth Jameson, Mark Konnert, Michael Tavel Clarke, and Maureen Hiebert. A big thank you to Victoria Bynum and Lynn Kennedy for providing invaluable commentary on the dissertation, which helped me turn it into an infinitely better end-product. Thanks to the Faculty of Graduate Studies, the Faculty of Social Sciences, the URGC, and the History Department for providing research and conference funding. Finally, a special thank you to my fellow graduate students for giving us such a warm welcome in Calgary and making our time there so memorable: you all know who you are, so this White Russian is for you. iii Table of Contents Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………………… ii Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………………. iii Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………...1 Chapter One - “It Seems to me a Contest of Passion, not Reason:” Secession, War and the Roots of Protective Nationalism ……………………………………………………………………….22 Chapter Two - “Well Calculated to Test the Loyalty of her Citizens:” Property, Principle, and the Oath of Allegiance …………………………………………………………………………….. 59 Chapter Three - “Tradyville:” The Contraband Trade and the Problem of Loyalty …………..114 Chapter Four - “This County is a Prey to Thieves and Robbers...:” Desertion, Exemption, and the Military’s Limited Nationalizing Power ……………………………………………………….167 Chapter Five – “I Believe that ‘the Institution’ is Extinct:” Notions of Loyalty among Slaves and Slaveholders …………………………………………………………………………………... 224 Epilogue - “Allegiance and Protection are and Must be Reciprocal:” The Aftermath of War in Mississippi ……………………………………………………………………………………. 280 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………..296 BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………………………………..312 APPENDIX A ………………………………………………………………………………….339 APPENDIX B ………………………………………………………………………………….349 iv Epigraph “Loyalty wants the cause in its unity; it seeks, therefore, something essentially superhuman.” Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty v Introduction At noon on December 26, 1862, an overflow crowd packed into the legislative house in downtown Jackson, Mississippi to hear a speech by native son Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America. Davis took the opportunity to assure the crowd that the recently enacted, and unpopular, Conscription and Exemption acts were both necessary to ensure the Confederacy’s survival against an unrelenting northern foe. Omitting mention of the May and October battles at Corinth, Davis stated that “you in Mississippi, have but little experienced as yet the horrors of the war. You have seen but little of the savage manner in which it is waged by your barbarous enemies.” He emphasized that “the great aim of the government is to make our struggle successful,” and then laid out the costs of Confederate defeat. “Will you be slaves; will you consent to be robbed of your property; to be reduced to provincial dependence; will you renounce the exercise of those rights with which you were born and which were transmitted to you by your fathers?” Davis asked. “I feel that in addressing Mississippians the answer will be that their interests, even life itself, should be willingly laid down on the altar of their country,” he concluded.1 As Davis earlier noted, Mississippi in general had yet to experience war’s worst hardships, but in suggesting that Mississippians should willingly sacrifice everything, even their lives, to the goal of Confederate independence, he fused their interests with those of the nation. In doing so, he tried to instill in them the devotion needed to ensure southern victory. How Mississippians responded to this exhortation is the subject of this study. It uses Mississippi from 1860 to 1865 as a case-study of Confederate loyalty during the Civil War. This Deep South state should have been rabidly pro-Confederate: in 1860 slaves represented fifty-five percent of its population, and their labor made it the country’s leading cotton exporter. It was 1 Jefferson Davis, Speech at Jackson, Mississippi, December 26, 1862, in Lynda Laswell Crist, Mary Seaton Dix, Kenneth H. Williams, eds., The Papers of Jefferson Davis, Vol. 8, 1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 565-579 (quotes on 567, 574). 1 also a hotbed of secession that became the second state to leave the Union.2 Yet, Mississippi was also an early militarily divided state that faced the Union army’s presence through most of the conflict, making it fertile ground for exploring the influence of different allegiances. Rather than trying to discern whether Mississippians’ allegiance to the Confederacy was weak or strong, this study enters the scholarly debate over the nature of Confederate nationalism by viewing Mississippians through the lens of different, co-existing loyalties that, according to circumstances, indicated neither popular support for, nor rejection of, the Confederacy. This approach suggests that the often contradictory evidence regarding Confederate allegiance in Mississippi can better explain the limitations of modern nationalism in terms of the state’s influence on its subjects. Take one example. Confederate nationalists labeled Mississippians who traded across Union lines, in defiance of Confederate law prohibiting such exchanges, as treasonous, claiming that trade fed cotton and other commodities to the Union war effort and undermined Confederate economic independence. Yet, many citizens stated that they traded to procure goods for themselves and their families