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6. Our Cause is Just and We Need Not Fear Defeat: Floridians’ Rationales for Fighting the Civil War
- The University of Alabama Press
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6 our Cause is Just and We Need Not Fear Defeat Floridians’ rationales for Fighting the Civil War By late spring 1862, more than 10,000 Floridians had enlisted in the Confederate Army. each newly minted soldier had his own reasons for participating in a rebellion against the federal government. The historian Chandra manning has asserted that the war’s combatants were willing to fight because they “recognized slavery as the main reason for the war.” emboldened by their interpretations of the most crucial issue of their day, Northern and Southern boys surged forth to battle. Though less than 2 percent of 78,699 white Floridians owned slaves, these citizens and their non-slaveholding neighbors maintained a “conviction that survival —of themselves, their families, and the social order—depended on slavery’s continued existence.”1 Southern society was based on the bedrock of human bondage; simply stated, these Americans’ ultimate goal was to achieve and maintain slave-owner status. As a young lawyer in mississippi, Jesse J. Finley embodied these ambitions when he spoke of removing to Texas. “West of the Sabine,” the Tennessee native wrote, “they can make four thousand pounds of cotton to the acre.” The whole country, he believed, promised “individual prosperity.” Because of the black race’s degradation , even poor whites in the South were assured that they “could never fall into the lowest social stratum no matter how frequently they move, geographically or economically.” in the same vein, slavery ensured segregation, thus ensuring that blacks could never interact with the white race on the basis of equality. St. Augustine citizens railed against even this possibility in a manifesto published in December 1860. in part, east Floridians argued that “the Northern people under the influence of the evil spirit of Abolitionism, have resolved to emancipate our slaves, placing them upon equality with ourselves, our wives and our daughters.”2 The Florida press had, particularly since John Brown’s failed raid in october 1859, stressed the evils of the republican Party and their supposed designs to end slavery. With a republican triumph almost certain in the 1860 election, editors worked at a feverish pace to make Floridians aware of the danger the new party represented. Holmes Steele, the editor of the Jacksonville Standard, asserted that “a large majority of the people of the North are hostile to the institutions of the South, . . . in other words the South shall not expand in the territories, that 58 Chapter 6 [slavery] shall ultimately be destroyed in the States, that it is in their power to do it, that it must be done.” The week before the November election, the St. Augustine Examiner warned its readers of the forthcoming watershed vote: “The danger is imminent to our Southern institution. it is not to be disguised that the election of a Black republican Abolitionist President is a foregone conclusion.”3 Samuel Pasco, the massachusetts-raised schoolteacher, was obviously influenced by the periodicals and consequent debates. He held contempt for these “yankee hirelings who put themselves side by side with the African negro to put down free men.” Samuel Darwin mcConnell, who in 1860 gained acceptance to the Florida bar, wrote to his fiancée of the crisis: “i think the South has submitted to the North long enough, and if there is ever to be disunion, the time has come. i know it is a serious matter, but i am of the opinion that we of the South will be better off by it.”4 During November and December 1860, voters in communities across the peninsula convened meetings to endorse secession. The men, many of whom would soon shoulder arms against their former countrymen, placed their convictions in elaborately worded yet often fallacy-filled documents. These proclamations, which listed grievances against the republican Party and the North, essentially conveyed the ideals for which the Confederate soldiers fought. in Wakulla County, the citizen committee claimed they were “willing to remain in the Union so long as we can have our constitutional rights and our interests are protected, and the fugitive slave law strictly enforced in all the free States and agitation of the slavery question in Congress to cease.” The Southerners warned, “without this we are for immediate secession.” voters in Cedar Keys came to the consensus that Florida’s departure from the Union was necessary because that course of action exhibited “the only feasible method of resisting successfully the aggression of the North, upon our domestic institutions and sacred Constitutional rights.”5...