Federalism in the Southern Confederacy (review)

BOOK REVIEWS77 Yet the Conscience Whigs despised the Garrisonian abolitionists because of die latter group's radical ideas about die Constitution and property rights and dieir not infrequendy repeated demands for die secession of Massachusetts from die Union if harsh measures were not adopted against slaveowners . Thoroughly researched in manuscript materials and lucidly written, tiiis is an excellent short work about an important and long-neglected topic. Norman B. Ferris Middle Tennessee State University Federalism in the Southern Confederacy. By Curtis Arthur Amlund. (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1966. Pp. vi, 140. $4.50.) This is a book not about Unionist sentiment, but about government in the Confederacy. The author, who teaches government at North Dakota State University, asks two major questions: first, how did the Confederacy differ in dieory from die Union? Second, was die practice of die Confederacy consistent widi its dieory? To answer these questions, the author begins with a conventional summary of the celebrated controversy that developed in the United States between 1789 and 1860 over the issue of whether the Constitution was a compact among the states or whether, as John Marshall held, the United States government emanated directly from the people and owed its powers "emphatically and truly" to them only. Next, Professor Amlund adds a chapter giving a paragraph-by-paragraph resumé of the Confederate Constitution . His not very surprising conclusion is that the Confederacy was intended to be a "federal government" (after all, that was the phrase used in the preamble of the Confederate Constitution itself), and that its powers were derived, not from the people, but from the sovereign states that created it. Yet the author then insists that the framers of the Confederate Constitution, in borrowing most of the provisions of the United States Constitution, were committing the new nation to a course that was bound absolutely and inevitably to undermine state sovereignty. This conclusion does not follow from the argument at all. It is simply not possible to prove by logic what the subsequent course of the Confederacy would have been if it had been allowed to go its way in peace in 1861 or if it had survived the war. It is useless to argue that the framers of the Confederate Constitution knew that war was coming, and that they ought therefore to have foreseen the land of centralization that has accompanied all major wars. Of course, they knew war was coming; but almost none expected it to be long, costly, or desperate. It is one of the truisms of history that the nature and the spirit of the laws of a state are determined by the will and intentions of the men who govern it. It is impossible to say what classes or what men would have controlled the Confederacy if it had survived beyond the generation of 1861-1865. Yet, as long as that generation remained in control, government in the South would have reflected the wishes of agri- 78CIVIL WAR HISTORY culturists; and their wishes would almost certainly have kept the Confederacy on a straight and narrow path that respected state sovereignty. Naturally, change was bound to come in the South if the power of the agriculturists should ever wane. Yet, even this admission does not necessarily mean that state sovereignty would have been undermined and overthrown , as Professor Amlund thinks. His method is deliberately tailored to prove his point. In six short chapters , he describes the actions of the Confederate executive, the Congress, and the judiciary, as well as the chief episodes in Confederate-state relationsall for the purpose of showing how rapidly (and presumably how inevitably ) power was becoming centralized in the Confederate government. The only thing inevitable about all this was that, when the war proved to be long and bitter, the Confederacy had to make its choice of two alternatives —centralization or surrender. The system itself did not demand centralization; only the war did. It was against this pronounced trend towards centralization that the staterights doctrinaires (especially in Georgia and North Carolina) raised loud howls of protest, and took the damaging obstructive actions that the late Frank Owsley described in State Rights in the Confederacy (1926). Professor Amlund thinks that Dr. Owsley...