Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2015 To Begin Anew: Federalism and Power in the Confederate States of America Geoffrey D. Cunningham Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Cunningham, Geoffrey D., "To Begin Anew: Federalism and Power in the Confederate States of America" (2015). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 1706. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/1706 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. TO BEGIN ANEW: FEDERALISM AND POWER IN THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of History by Geoffrey David Cunningham B.A., The Evergreen State College, 2007 M.A., Louisiana State University, 2010 August 2015 For Jaina ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Louisiana State University has proved a superb graduate school environment. I wish to thank the Department of History as well as the Graduate School for its many years of support as a teaching assistant. In particular, the faculty has given generously and unceasingly, and I cannot imagine working with a more ideal group of mentors and scholars. In particular, I wish to thank Victor Stater, Sue Marchand, Alecia P. Long, Andrew Burstein, and Nancy Isenberg. Similarly, my colleagues enriched the experience beyond expression. I cannot thank Andrew Wegmann and Terry Wagner enough. My dissertation committee provided sound, critical, and beneficial advice. Gaines M. Foster, as usual, proved generous with his time and thoughts and proved a meticulous and superb editor. William J. Cooper provided oversight of the initial project and demanded precision in its final form. His feedback has improved this dissertation and my scholarship. Although Charles Royster retired before I finished the project, my many years as his teaching assistant and co- instructor proved edifying in numerous ways. His influence has been lasting and fundamental. I owe my greatest professional debt to Aaron Sheehan-Dean, who guided this project to completion. Professor Sheehan-Dean unstintingly gave his time and counsel. He also provided generous research funds allowing me to expand the scope of my scholarship and the project. He is the ideal editor, mentor, and advisor. It is not possible to express the full extent of my gratitude to all those who have supported my work. To Tom Rainey and Thomas Grissom at The Evergreen State College much is owed. I owe a lasting debt of gratitude to my family. Lastly, iii to my wonderful wife Jaina, this would not have been possible without your love and support. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………………………….iii ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………………………...vi INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………………..….1 CHAPTER ONE. CONSERVING LIBERTY………………………….…..…….………..………....14 TWO. “WE HAVE A LIGHT”...………………………………………..…………………52 THREE. THE GOVERNING RACE AT WAR..……………..……….………..…..90 FOUR. “JUDGES BEFORE KINGS”………..………………………………………..127 FIVE.“CONSOLATION”…………………………………………………………………..161 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………………204 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………...……………………………………….…………..210 VITA…………………………………………………………………………………………..……..…….219 v ABSTRACT The leaders of the Confederate States of America proved eager and desirous of the power of the federal government. Rather than constituting an anomalous, ironical, or revolutionary episode in American political history, the Confederacy sought to conserve their definition of American liberty and democracy, with its racial grants, privileges, and sanction of slavery, through the power of government. The embrace of federal power was an intentional, central, and desirable feature of government, and one that Confederates embraced in order to sustain and project their nation and its vision of American democracy. vi INTRODUCTION At a reunion of the Stonewall Brigade in 1892 former commanding General James Walker looked back and observed, “In fact if you take out of the Confederate history the deeds of her armies and the devotion and the sacrifices of the Southern women there is nothing left.”1 Walker’s comment usefully illustrates the overwhelming degree of attention afforded to the battlefield, with its seemingly innate allure attested to by the unrelenting legion of volumes published on the Civil War. Walker’s observance also highlights the vital contributions and varying roles of women in the Civil War. There is, however, a notable omission in Walker’s preferred rendering of the Confederate past - the complete absence of politics. In memoriam Walker renders the memory of the Confederate government invisible. Walker’s quote also usefully highlights the degree to which Confederate nostalgia has influenced scholarly interest. Modern scholarship continues to enrich our understanding of the Civil War, with ongoing inquiry resulting in the field’s remarkable and vital diversification. From medicine and death to gender, destruction, and environment, scholarship on the Civil War has never been more exciting and dynamic.2 Despite scholars’ rich historical explorations, the question 1 South Branch Intelligencer (Romney, W.V.) September 9, 1892 quoted in 2 Kathryn Shively Meier, Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011); Jim Downs, Sick From Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); George Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Champaign: University 1 of how the Confederate government functioned remains misunderstood. While scholars have broadened our understanding of the Confederacy, most works that discuss politics explain why the Confederate government failed rather than how it functioned. As a result there is a tendency to approach Confederate federalism and central state organization as evidence of a venture gone wrong. According to scholars’ varying conclusions, the betrayal results from either the failure of leadership, the shortcomings of political culture, the general depravity of planter’s parochial worldview, an insistence on state’s rights, or merely the irony of unintended consequence. Shifting the analytical approach away from culpability yields important insights. Confederate leaders embraced federal power and government, viewing its control essential to protect and advance the grants of American liberty as defined by the Constitution. By asserting that eighteenth-century definitions of political liberty were essential to American democracy, Confederates claimed to preserve constitutional liberty and to affix its definitions for all time. Linking racial hierarchy, economic prosperity, and political power through the auspices of federal power constituted the central thrust of Confederate desire. They desired federal control to affix the Constitution’s sanction of slavery in order to of Illinois Press, 1989) Drew Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Anne Sarah Rubin A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Leeann Whites and Alecia P. Long eds., Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009); Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Nina Silber, Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 2 perpetuate and project their vision of the nation across the continent and into the future. They did not desire to revolutionize, reject, or transform the government or the political culture of the American state, but to embrace its powers and cement slavery’s status as a vital elucidation of white liberty. They sought to conserve and control rather than to transform or revolutionize. The Constitution’s political grants of liberty, according to the breakaway Southerners, were rooted in racial division, which defined the body politic according to race and afforded white citizens the privilege to own slaves and command black labor. Indeed, Confederates argued, this makeup was necessary and essential to creating unity and the model of classical republican virtue set forth by the Founding generation. As Alexander Stephens explained in his vast apologia, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, what some viewed as farce, a definition of liberty that rested upon slavery, instead constituted an essential component of the white South’s understanding of liberty. Judge Bynum, Stephens’ synthetic Republican, interrupted the Sage of Liberty Hall in his fictional salon as he recalled a speech spelling forth