Secession Revisited: The Texas Experience

SECESSION REVISITED: THE TEXAS EXPERIENCE Walter L. Buenger It is past time for a new general study of secession. In the last twenty years numerous studies of various states have appeared, but no one has attempted to synthesize these works and write a history of secession for the entire South.1 Because Texas was the last state to secede before the firing at Fort Sumter changed the nature of secession, the path of Texas out of the Union offers a vantage point midway through the entire secession process from which to begin thinking about this much-needed new 1 Dwight L. Dumond, The Secession Movement, 1860-1861 (New York: MacMillan, 1931) is the last general study of secession. Since 1961 and the beginning of the Civil War Centennial, however, many works on various aspects of secession have appeared. Ralph A. Wooster, The Secession Conventions of the South (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1962), deals with the entire South, but on a stateby statebasis. Also see Ralph A. Wooster, "The Secession of the Lower South: An Examination of Changing Interpretations," Civil WarHistoryl (June 1961): 117-27. Since Wooster's 1961 historiographie article a host of stillnewer interpretations have been offered. While the Lower South has received the most attention, the Upper South has not been ignored. In that same year appeared Mary E. Campbell, TheAttitudes of Tennesseans Towards the Union, 1847-1861 (New York: Vantage Press, 1961). Morerecent works on the Upper South are William J. Evitts, A Matterof Allegiances: Maryland, 1850-1861 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974); James M. Woods, "Rebellion and Realignment: Arkansas's Road to Secession" (Ph.D. dissertation, Tulane University, 1983); Marc W. Kruman, Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 1846-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1983). Among the works on the Lower South are Steven A. Channing, Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970); Charles B. Dew, "Who Won the Secession Election in Louisiana?" Joumalof SouthernHistory [JSH) 36 (February 1970): 18-32; BiIIyD. Ledbetter , "Slavery, Fear and Disunion in the Lone Star State: Texans' Attitudes Toward Secession and the Union, 1846-1861" (Ph.D. dissertation, North Texas State University, 1972); William L. Barney, The SecessionistImpube:AlabamaandMississippiin I860 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974); MichaelJohnson, Towarda PatriarchialRepublic: Secession in Georgia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1976); Peyton McCrary, Clark Miller, and Dale Baum, "Class and Party in the Secession Crisis: Voting Behavior in the Deep South, 1856-1861," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (Winter 1978): 428-57; Walter L. Buenger, Secession and the Union in Texas (Austin: Univ. ofTexas Press, 1984). A preliminary attempt at synthesizing these new state studies has been made in Peyton McCrary, "The Civil War Party System, 1854-1876: Toward a New Behavioral Synthesis ?" a paper delivered before the Southern Historical Association convention, Atlanta, November 11, 1976. Another possible starting point for a new general study of secession is William J. Cooper, Jr., "The South and the Secession Crisis: The Politics of Slavery Affirmed ," in Walter J. Fraser and Winfred B. Moore, eds., The Southern Enigma: Essays in Race, Class and Folk Culture (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 199-215. 294CIVIL WAR HISTORY synthesis. The state's history as an independent republic and its extendedwestern frontier certainly were atypical of southern states, but by 1860 Texas was becoming like the Lower South in that cotton and slavery increasingly dominated the Texas economy. Yet in 1860 significant portions of the state more closely resembled wheat growing regions of the Upper South or frontier regions in the West than they did the Lower South. A unique history, a more varied environment, and a less developed economy made the approach of Texas to secession different from other southern states, but such differences should not be exaggerated. Texas was enough like the Lower South to follow South Carolina, Georgia , Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana out of the Union in advance of North Carolina, Arkansas, Virginia, and Tennessee. Starting with Texas in the middle of the secession process, then, reminds us that the nature of secession changed from state to state and that there were major differences as well as common threads between secession in the Upper and Lower South...