Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820-1865

4. Secession, Merchant-Soldiers, and the Civil War, 1860–1863

121 4 Secession, Merchant-Soldiers, and the Civil War, 860–863 The election of 1860, secession, and the rise and fall of the Confederate States of America wreaked havoc upon the lives of thousands of southern merchants and their families. War changed business patterns, threatened the safety of homes, and called men away from their families to take up arms for their new nation. This turmoil left its mark on merchant culture. Many husbands and sons never returned home from the war. Wives and daughters exercised increased authority in homes and stores. Freed slaves left merchant families and began attempting to create new lives. The Civil War brought substantive and rapid change to the United States. Its signi ficance for the liberal capitalist culture of the southern merchant is less clear. Opportunities for trade, speculation, and investment expanded during the war, and in many ways the conflict rewarded the economic habits and values that merchants had long practiced. At the same time, as war spread misery across the South many people discussed the morality and cultural ambiguity of the mercantile trade with a contempt and anger that was absent from prewar debates. Southerners protested the outsider status of its merchant classes with renewed vigor. Rather than transforming antebellum merchant culture, war intensified tensions and habits that had long characterized the lives of southern merchants and their families. The election of the Republican Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860 precipitated the initial wave of southern state secessions. For the first time in the young country’s history a sectional party, committed to at least the gradual expunging of slavery, had won the presidency. The most serious in a chain of political crises that divided southern and northern sympathies during the 1850s, Lincoln’s election gave defenders of the South’s “peculiar institution” sufficient cause to demand secession. South Carolina, long the most radical southern state, led the secession 122 Becoming Bourgeois movement when a special convention took the state out of the Union on December 20, 1860. Six other Deep South states quickly followed suit. Representatives from the secessionist states soon met in Montgomery, Alabama, and formed the Confederate States of America. Of course not all Southerners supported the secession movement. Divisions existed between slaveholders and nonslaveholders, rich and poor, urban and rural, those advocating immediate secession, cooperationists, and those claiming the mere election of a Republican president to be insufficient cause for secession, and finally Unionists who opposed secession on patriotic and constitutional principles. Yet the rivalry of various political and economic factions notwithstanding, a widespread commitment to slavery, white supremacy, and mutual defense against a seemingly hostile antislavery majority united most white Southerners behind secession. During this tumultuous period even merchants, by now mainly ex-Whigs and often political moderates, could agree with the southern nationalist James D. B. De Bow when he declared the Republican Party to be “an active, powerful, unscrupulous organization.” The more significant question for fire-eating leaders and their followers across the South was whether the region’s commercial classes would take the personal economic risks and support secession despite the distinct possibility of violent conflict over seemingly abstract constitutional principles.1 The southern merchant community did not have a single unified position on the question of secession. This is hardly surprising when one considers the financial, geographic, and social divides among storekeepers, larger wholesalers, and regional cotton factors. Those with close ties to the region’s political and cultural elite tended to embrace the secessionist cause with passion. Merchants who originally hailed from the North and still had family there generally opposed secession. The bulk of the merchant community rested somewhere between these two extremes, resisting hasty action and believing that those most responsible for the current political crisis could be found in the fanatical ranks of both the northern abolitionists and the southern fire-eaters. The political and social journey these merchants followed during the secession crisis and the early years of the Civil War, from initial ambivalence to conditional support for the Confederate cause, further demonstrates their ambiguous southern identity. Merchants large and small privately questioned the merits of secession during the last two months of 1860. The North Carolina dry-goods merchant Jonathan Worth, a Unionist and old Whig, grew despondent Secession, Merchant-Soldiers, and the Civil War 123 witnessing the secession of the Deep South. He blamed zealous abolitionists...