All The President's Governors

The Civil War was about states' rights. Really.

I don't mean by that, the fantasy which denies that the Confederacy was established to protect and extend chattel slavery. The irony of the conventional the-Civil-War-was-about-states'-rights declamations (one can scarcely dignify them as arguments) is that the slave South never really was the champion of states' rights in the first place. The disruptions of the republic's peace, which culminated in the Civil War, were all the result of aggressive attempts by slavery's partisans to use the power of the federal government nationalize slavery, first by insisting on a due-process right for slave-owning in the western territories, then for federal interventions to recapture fugitive slaves, followed by nationally funded expansions of slavery's domain in the Caribbean and Central America, and finally demands for the nationalization of legalized slavery everywhere in the United States.¹ Abraham Lincoln was not exaggerating when he warned in 1858 that the most fearful aspect of Dred Scott was the implication that "what Dred Scott's master might lawfully do with Dred Scott, in the free State of Illinois, every other master may lawfully do with any other one, or one thousand slaves, in Illinois, or in any other free State." It would only be a short while, he predicted, before "we may… see … another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a state to exclude slavery from its limits."² Robert Toombs always insisted that he never said it, but the incendiary promise often attributed to him—that he would live to "call the roll of his slaves on Bunker Hill"—echoed horribly in Northern ears precisely because slaveowners had every expectation of using federal power to overcome state prohibitions on slavery.³

The same irony over states' rights played out during the Civil War and in the decades afterward. What the Civil War accomplished was not the imposition of some mammoth "central power," but a re-balancing of federal and state jurisdictions which nullification and secession had threatened to overturn. The decades after the war became something of a golden era of state rights: it was the states, not the federal government, which reformed and regulated municipal governments, created state-funded public education systems, and made the first experiments in extending the franchise to women. It was, unhappily, the states that also created Jim Crow under the same umbrella; but only with the sanction given by the federal courts, from Slaughterhouse Cases to Plessy v. Ferguson.

It is a testimony to the power of the Lost Cause narrative of Yankee centralization and Confederate localism that the actual mechanics of the state-federal systems of the Union and the Confederacy have been so infrequently studied, and especially through the lives of the states' governors. No book-length study of the Confederacy's Civil War governors has ever been published; the long-dominant account of the Northern governors, William B. Hesseltine's Lincoln and the War Governors (1948), frankly announced on its opening page that "the Southern Confederacy symbolized the particularist principles of states' rights, and the United States embodied the national creed."⁵ Even as individuals, the Northern governors have passed into oblivion. The last biography of Massachusetts stalwart John Albion Andrew, who forever stood in the forefront of emancipation and the recruitment of black soldiers, was published in 1904. Pennsylvania's Andrew Curtin was last memorialized—and inadequately—in 1896. The major exception to this neglect has been William C. Harris's outstanding Lincoln and the Union Governors (2013), which rebuffed the notion that Lincoln sought "the establishment of a 'consolidated government' in Washington at the expense of state authority."⁶ But at only 126 pages, Harris's Union Governors is a short volume in a series of brief Lincoln studies (Southern Illinois University Press's admirable Concise Lincoln Library). The way has remained clear for...