The Lost Cause

As the first salvo in the Sumter discussion here is a book review I wrote about 20 years ago. At the meeting be prepared to discuss why it was critically important to “Lost Cause” adherents that the south not be blamed for starting the war by firing on Fort Sumter. And why they attempted to shift all of the responsibility for this to Lincoln.

And bear in mind that when ex-president Tyler from Virginia was appointed to head the Peace Commission he found that Buchanan had become remarkably stubborn regarding Sumter. Buchanan refused to withdraw the garrison and refused to make any pledge that Anderson would not be reinforced. Buchanan wished Tyler well and hoped he could create a truce between the administration and South Carolina. But Anderson would stay because the garrison in Sumter had become Buchanan’s visible protest against the illegality of unilateral secession and the continuing seizures of federal property in the South; Sumter was his symbol that he still considered the Union intact.

John Shipley Tilley, was a lawyer in Montgomery, Alabama who got inspired in the 1940's to make a case for the south having being a victim of clever Yankee manipulation in the months just before the Civil War and of a distorted image by northern sympathizing historians after the war. His 1941 book "Lincoln Takes Command" was his first of several attempts at recasting the South's position before, during, and after the war.

The central thesis of this book being that Lincoln tricked the South into firing the first shots of the war (if one ignores the shots that were fired at the "Star of the West" expedition in relief of Fort Sumter two months before Lincoln took office). Tilley laments that the South has traditionally been blamed for the war; attempts to show that war was Lincoln's real agenda, and asserts that this possibility has not been adequately examined because the less than impartial victors wrote the traditional history of the conflict.

Nothing much is made of the three months of northern inactivity after Fort Sumter, where Mr. Lincoln's only significant military action was the repulse of the South's invasion of still loyal western Virginia. From which one can reasonably conclude that even if Lincoln wanted war he did not want it starting in April 1861.

Indeed, Tilley's entire focus is to blame Lincoln for the war. And to do so he must totally ignore that it was in fact Buchanan (a southern sympathizing Democrat) who drew the line in the sand that would lead to war. In his last annual message Buchanan stated that secession was unequivocally unconstitutional and that exclusive control over forts and other federal properties in any given state belonged to the national government. Weak and vacillating as Buchanan was, he found a line from which at his weakest and most timid he would not retreat. Thus bequeathing to Lincoln (who given the circumstances of his election could hardly retreat further) the firm policy that would ultimately force the South to abandon unilateral secession or make war.

Tilley's case is that had Lincoln made sufficient conciliatory gestures toward the south immediately following his election (Tilley neglects to mention that Lincoln publicly supported a Constitutional Amendment protecting slavery in the states where it still existed), the war could have been averted.

It is certainly reasonable to believe that had the south been guaranteed everything they wanted and all their concerns about future threats to the Southern institution of slavery properly addressed (they wanted slave codes-legal slavery on some scale in all states and territories - Dred Scott - and guarantees that abolishing slavery would no longer be open to discussion), the southern states (except perhaps South Carolina) would have opted to remain in the union. And that Sumter would not have been fired on had a union garrison not been present in the fort on the day it was attacked. And had the North simply rolled over and permitted states wishing to unilaterally withdraw from the union to do so, there would have been no war. There is nothing new here, what is new is that Tilley takes it a bit further by arguing that Lincoln had a long-range master plan to goad the South into starting a shooting war. Tilley believes that Lincoln's refusal to withdraw from Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens can only be explained as a means to implement his master plan. Thereby insuring that the northern public would be united behind the war effort and tipping the balance in the essential border states (Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland) toward remaining in the Union.

Of course, if one wants to keep playing the conspiracy theory game, the same logic can be extended to a claim that Lincoln was cleverly duped by the fire-eater Southerners, who fired on Ft. Sumter to trick him into responding with a call for volunteers to invade the South; thereby swaying reluctant Southerners to enthusiastically support a fight for independence and tipping neutral Virginia and North Carolina into secession. In fact, at the time the newspapers in Charleston were advocating this action for exactly that purpose.

Bruce Catton concisely summed it all up in "Two Roads to Sumter", stating that neither Davis nor Lincoln could possibly grant what the other asked. "American society's tragic, compounded, centuries-old debt to the Negro bondsman was coming due at last, and the hardened, resolute attitudes expressed by American's foremost leaders in 1860 were ample guarantee that it would be paid in full, every drop of blood drawn with the lash paid for by another drawn with the sword".

Unfortunately, in his eagerness to state his case in the most convincing manner, Tilley undermines his credibility with the same lack of impartiality that he complains about when discussing traditional historical interpretations of the period. It was not Lincoln "the man" that pro-slavery forces objected to, but the insult and humiliation of being governed by the repellent Black Republicans who had put Lincoln in office. And in practical terms the end of decades of pro-slavery control over presidential patronage and judicial appointments. The South had seen the handwriting on the wall four years earlier when Buchanan won only because he had barely carried his own home state (Pennsylvania) and four other northern states. The changing demographics of the country did not favor the Southern cause, Lincoln had won the election without a single electoral vote from a slave state.

Tilley's most deliberate omissions are the decades of bias "toward" the south by popular historians "throughout" the country. At the time of his writings they had carefully crafted a revisionist theme, the "Gone With The Wind" romanticized "Lost Cause" myth, which had obtained a firm grip on popular imagination in both the North and the South. Southerners liked to think that the Civil War South had been united and Northerners liked to think that they had beaten a united South. Historians obliged and the "rich man's war, poor man's fight" theme was removed from the table; a far greater distortion of reality than anything cited in Tilley's discussions.

Also off-the-table with most everyone was the crusade against slavery, as those of Tilley's world view cited northern aggression and southern victimization while ignoring the cause of what was essentially a second American Revolution. As the revolutionary anti-slavery movement pressed for social change and the pro-slavery faction reacted with a series of increasingly counterproductive measures and simplistic miscalculations.

During these months there was so much completely unnecessary treason by southerners in federal positions (and still under their original oaths of office) that even the southern sympathizing Buchanan was ready to inflict reprisals.

Also curious is Tilley's failure to examine the case for and against secession being made in Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri during the initial months of the Lincoln presidency; given that the central point of his conspiracy theory is that these border states remained in the union because Lincoln tricked the south into firing the first shots of the war. These states had far more to lose from a repeal or lax enforcement of Federal fugitive slave measures (the only remotely radical action Lincoln contemplated at the time he took office) than states deeper in the South, as the border states accounted for a hugely disproportionate share of the fugitive slaves. But because of their location, they had been less successful (than other southern states) suppressing anti-slavery literature and opinion. There was no Fourteenth Amendment until 1868, so the "Bill of Rights" was not yet applicable to the states and the Buchanan administration could not protect freedom of speech and press. But the geographical location of these three states (and to a lesser extent Virginia and Tennessee) made it more difficult to end these freedoms entirely as had been done in the other southern states.

The book's simplistic analysis dodges the simple fact that each Southern state was full of United States citizens who suddenly found themselves at the mercy of the powerful planter class. Whether a reluctant majority or a small minority of each state's population, they had not waived their United States citizenship; and the federal authorities were duty bound to protect them. Particularly since they now found themselves subject to a new Constitution that was the antithesis of the one they had been living under; in a new nation conceived in slavery and “specifically” dedicated to the proposition that all “men” were not created equal.

Tilley's complete glossing over of critical details like these relegates his book to curiosity status; mainly of interest for its insights about the victimization mentality during the Jim Crow days.