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Ill / Southern Realism and Southern Honor: The Limits ofSelf-Reconstruction Ir T WAS a subdued group of Mississippians who gathered in Jackson in mid-August of 1865 as delegates to their state's postwar constitutional convention. Four and a half yearsearlier, members ofthe secession convention had met in the same building, amid a carnival atmosphere of marching bands, torchlight parades, and nightly serenades, to dissolve the bonds between Mississippi and the United States of America. Even before that earlier convention had signed the proclamation of January 15, 1861, the jubilant population had begun a week-long celebration. "Bring out the cannon," one editor had written enthusiastically,"and let it roar out itsloud reverberating approbation." With the exception of a handful of dispirited cooperationists, most delegates had seemed disturbed only by the tardiness that had made the Mississippi ordinance second to that of South Carolina.1 In 1865 there were no bands and parades, no "fair hands and lovely forms" to applaud the creation of a new Mississippi, and most Mississippians had heard enough cannon fire to last a lifetime. What fools they had been, one Confederate veteran and delegate recalled as the convention opened. The secessionists had expected a "holiday march," but when they found instead gunpowder and lead, with death everywhere, the "sport was lost." "I am sick of war," declared William Martin of Natchez, "tired of i. Percy Lee Rainwater, Mississippi, Storm Center of Secession, 1856-1861 (Baton Rouge, 1938), 815; Robert W. DuBay, John Jones Pettus, Mississippi Fire-Eater: His Life and Times, 1813- /S6"7(Jackson, Miss., 1975), 84; Thomas H. Woods, "A Sketch ofthe Mississippi Secession Conventionof 1861—Its Membership and Work," PMHS, VI (1909), 91-104. 61 62 / Whenthe War Was Over fighting the battles of those who enticed me and others with speeches and when the day of our calamity came, deserted us to our fate."8 Few moments more aptly captured this combinationof common sense and frank acceptance of southern defeat than the emotional speech offormer Confederate general Samuel McGowan on the second day ofthe South Carolina constitutional convention. During the morning session, delegate A. P. Aldrich, leader ofa handful of irreconcilableopponents ofany concessions to the North, offered a resolution to recess the convention without taking any action,on the grounds that it was better to "endure patiently the evils which we cannot avert or correct and to await calmly the time and opportunity to affect our delivery from unconstitutionalrule." Aldrich had not taken his seat before McGowan was on his feet in rebuttal. The Abbeville planter, wounded at Cold Harbor and Second Manassas, had returned to the war as a brigade commander in 1863. At Chancellorsville he was wounded for a third time. Despite his injuries,he had rejoined his regiment and was at Appomattox when Lee surrendered. McGowan would have no part of Aldrich's resolution, he told his fellow delegates, for it implied duplicity on the part of the South. "It is not true that South Carolina carries a dagger underneath her vestments; not true that she stands with obedient words on her lips and disloyal spirit in her heart," he declared. The state had been the first to secede, and its citizens had waged war with all their energies and material resources. But "whatever may have been charged against her,no one has ever dared charge her with double dealing." The state was now so poor that it was "no figure of speech to say she has lost everything but honor." To pass Aldrich's resolution, McGowan declared, would "bow in the dust the head of every one ofher true sons." Thumping his desk for emphasis, the general angrily concluded: "She has seen enough of war; in God's name I demand that she shall not be made to appear as if she still coveted fire and sword." A roar of applause from the gallery seconded McGowan's impassioned plea, and the Aldrich resolution was tabled by an overwhelming majority.3 The task seemed clear-cut as the constitutionalgatherings convened in a. CincinnatiCommercial, September 13, 1865. 3. Sidney Andrews, The South Since the War as Shown by Fourteen Weeks of Travel and Observation in Georgia and theCarolina! (Boston, 1866), 43-44; UlyssesRobert Brooks, South Carolina Bench andBar, 1846—1947 (Columbia,S.C.,1908), lai;Jon L. Wakelyn(ed.)>Biographical Dictionary of the Confederacy (Westport, Conn., 1977), 397-98. The AldrichMcGowan exchange is also compelling evidence that, just as southerners misunderstood and misrepresented northern publicopinion, northerners were likely to...

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