Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War
by D.J. McGuire
[Ed Note: This article originally appeared in print in Bearing Drift’s May 2011 issue. To subscribe, join our mailing list and get a first peek in print every month.]
One hundred and fifty years ago this month, the United States began a war with itself for its very survival – as did Virginia. The nation survived intact; the Commonwealth did not – losing a third of its territory to the new state of West Virginia. The attempt by several southern states, of which Virginia was supposedly one, to leave the Union has since been dubbed the Lost Cause. This is, in part, to reflect what now seems to be the inevitable advantages the Union had, and to add some romanticism to the Confederate effort. An examination of the events from 1861-65, however, give us another reason: for the sake of the nation, the Commonwealth, and the limited government philosophy on which both were founded, the Confederacy is cause that best not be “found.”
At first, the damage done to Virginia seems easy to determine. A third of the state was lost in the West Virginia formation of 1863; what remained was devastated by the war itself. No other state suffered the damage Virginia did. At the same time, however, many would say that the Confederates deserve, at most, half of the blame for that result – the “North” did decide to fight, after all.
As logical as that may sound, even logic must give way to history. The action that led the secessionists in Virginia to take the plunge into the Confederacy was Lincoln’s call for troops to repress the force in South Carolina that had seized Fort Sumter. To hear the defenders of Henry Wise (ex-Governor and leading secessionist) and John Letcher (current Governor in 1861) tell it, the alternatives were stark and clear – join the president’s attempt to suppress the rebellion or defend fellow southerners. That interpretation suffers greatly once one looks just next door to Kentucky, formerly a part of Virginia and facing its own political and regional divisions over the conflict. Kentuckians didn’t like fighting their fellow southerners either, but rather than throw in with the rebellion, they chose “neutrality” – and the Lincoln Administration accepted this. Rather than force Kentucky’s badly divided state government to fill its troop quota, Lincoln relied on local unionists to do the job while the politics in Frankfurt sorted itself out. In time, Unionism in Kentucky carried the day. North Carolina was given a similarly wide berth by Washington until it narrowly chose to secede – in part due to the hell-bent speed of Wise and Letcher to the north.
So a third alternative was open, even after Fort Sumter. The secessionists refused to consider it, instead pushing the convention for a vote to leave the Union (with an unauthorized seizure of
Harper’s Ferry by a Wise-backed militia presented to the conventioneers before the vote as the coup de grace) to be “ratified” by a popular referendum conducted as Confederate troops were already stationed in the Commonwealth. Adding insult to injuries, several Unionist counties in northwest Virginia were never included in the vote totals. That those counties became the launching pad of efforts to form West Virginia should surprise no one.
Confederate sympathizers may prefer to focus on federal heavy-handedness in Maryland (which also came after the Virginia secession, and thus was colored by it), but Lincoln’s light touch in Kentucky is a far better example of his Upper South policy. Clearly, Virginia could have bided her time for much of 1861. The Commonwealth’s secessionists had other ideas, and their determination to run roughshod of the rule of law – by even the standards of the Confederacy – drove the western Unionists to break away from Virginia and turned the rest of the state into an amalgamated killing field.
However, Virginia lost something else due to the war, something that has been forgotten over the generations: its voice.
Prior to 1861, Virginia was one of the most important states in the Union, and not just because of its history. Its unique mix of northern and southern, farming and mining, eastern and western, etc., gave it a national voice unmatched by any other state. Admittedly, the secessionists wanted no part of the Union anyway, but their decision – along with the subsequent loss of the resource-rich northwest – deprived Virginia of that national voice forever.
Occasionally, Virginia’s unique balance still shone through: the Readjuster period of the 1880s and Governor Linwood Holton’s dramatic reaction to court-ordered desegregation in 1970 (while he disapproved of the court’s decision, he personally walked his daughter to John F. Kennedy High School, even though his family was exempted from the order). However, they were no longer perceived as actions typical of a national leader, but rather outliers of a capital-s Southern state. The war turned Virginia from a nation leader to a sectional outlier.
Virginia wasn’t the only thing “regionalized” by the war. More ominously, the Jeffersonian philosophy of limited central government was dramatically reduced from a national concept to a regional, “southern” one.
Contrary to popular belief, “states’ rights” was not always a southern mantra. Northern and southern, states jealously guarded their powers against Washington’s encroachment in theantebellum era. In fact, some of the most powerful attempts to block the expansion of federal power came in the 1850s as northern states pushed back against the Fugitive Slave Law (much to southerners’ chagrin).
Northern concern over federal encroachment went as far back as New England’s ire at the 1807 Embargo (ironically proposed and viciously enforced by Jefferson himself). While much of the historiography of states’ rights is dominated by the 1832 South Carolina tariff nullification, Pennsylvania arguably threw a more dramatic gauntlet at Washington in 1826 when it effectively declared following the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act to be a state felony. Even the Supreme Court only partially overturnedthe Pennsylvania statute in Prigg v. Pennsylvania in 1842 (the decision still allowed northern states to ban government officials from helping to recover escaped slaves; and several northern states did so).
This was nothing compared to the northern reaction to the Compromise of 1850. In the tumult of that year, the central government refused statehood to a qualifying U.S. territory for the first andonly time in history (New Mexico, which then comprised of New Mexico and Arizona, and had asked for admission as a free state).
Yet even that was nothing compared to northern states’ anger to the new Fugitive Slave Law. Vermont ordered its judges to openly defy the law and assist escaped slaves. Several other New England states (plus Michigan and Wisconsin) passed similar personal liberty laws designed specifically to block enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court went so far as to declare thelaw unconstitutional.
Southern reaction to this exercise of states’ rights was almost uniformly negative. Politicians who in the 1860s were citing South Carolina’s 1832 tariff nullification with glowing approval spent the 1850s railing against northern states challenging the Fugitive Slave Law as dangerous anarchists. In short, a strong federal government was just fine with southern voters and officials – as long as those sympathetic to southerners were running Washington. Only when they lost control of the executive branch (in 1860) did southern states choose to secede. The Confederate states didn’t exemplify the states’ rights cause; they hijacked it.
By the time the war that secession would start had ended, the notion of “states rights” was so damaged that it has taken over a century to recover (and in many parts of the nation, it still hasn’t). The northern states’ anger at the Fugitive Slave Law was forgotten; southerners desperate to change the subject from slavery clung to “states’ rights” – smearing it with every full-throated defense.
Had Virginia’s leaders exercise more caution (as Kentucky’s did), the Commonwealth would have been well positioned to preserve the prerogative of the states in reaction to federal encroachment after the war, to say nothing of being spread the loss of the northwest and the destruction to rest of the state due to the war. Instead, Virginia was practically ripped in half geographically, flattened economically, and pigeonholed politically, all for the Lost Cause.
The overwhelming majority of Virginians who fought for blue or gray (and yes, thousands of1861 Virginians fought for the Union, including the Rock of Chickamauga, General George Thomas) did so for what they thought was right. However, with what is now a century and a half of hindsight, we can examine the events of that time and recognize that those who rose up against the Union made a mistake – and the mistake was far more than just the assumption that a person can own another or the notion that African descendants are inferior to Caucasian ones. In reality, those who tried to lead Virginia out of the Union did incalculable and ongoing damage to the very things they sought to defend and extol: the rights of states to resist federal encroachment and the Commonwealth of Virginia.
