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Eight State Rights in the Confederacy The critical study of Confederate history began only in 1925 with Frank L. Owsley’s State Rights in the Confederacy. Up to that time a nostalgic celebration of Confederate nationalism reigned in the South in the form of the Lost Cause myth. Owsley found fault with the myth, especially in its affirmation of unity among whites behind the Confederate cause from 1861 to 1865. In the preface to his groundbreaking study, he said: For sixty years the student and casual reader of Civil War history have labored under the impression that the South was “overpowered by superior numbers.” This volume attempts to present a different point of view, namely that the Confederacy failed from internal, political causes, mainly state rights. Having lectured on this theme before southern audiences, I know that this new aspect of the question, as I present it, is sometimes misunderstood as being an unfriendly attack upon the people who fought for the idea of state rights. To those who are inclined to feel that I am making such an attack, I wish to say that, by way of explanation, this is largely because I do not dwell upon the heroism and unselfishness in the Confederacy which has been the theme of countless volumes and is, therefore, common knowledge. I assume that knowledge and hasten on to take up certain political phases which may well be called “the seamy side” of Confederate history.1 Owsley found fatal disunity where the Lost Cause myth had found romantic unity. The internal conflict, Owsley said, was rooted in the constitutional ideology that underwrote secession in the first place: state rights. It apparently did not occur to Owsley to investigate the view of the Confederate Constitution that underlay his argument. So that myth3—3of ob- 310 The Confederacy and Its Constitution durate Confederate constitutionalism3—3survived. Or to put it another way, Owsley failed to realize that the idea of fixed constitutionalism was as much a part of the Lost Cause myth as were white unity, the loyal slave, and the loss of the war to superior numbers and resources. As always, nation and constitution were intertwined though not identical. After Owsley, the dam of Confederate historiography broke, and the field was flooded with historians who pursued the theme of internal dissent and collapse. State rights faded as an organizing principle for studying the political and constitutional history of the Confederacy. Historians pointed out that Jefferson Davis’s central government in Richmond had trouble with only a couple of governors, and that in fact centralization to the point of state socialism was the most startling development in the Confederacy’s history. In general, those historians who pursued Owsley’s internal collapse theory now looked to class conflict rather than to state rights for an explanation.2 State rights was regarded as the merest rationalization ever after. Underlying social grievances might gain a voice under the rubric of state rights.3 State rights had its last stand, so to speak, in the 1986 book, Why the South Lost the Civil War. The authors3—3Herman Hattaway, Richard E. Beringer, William N. Still Jr., and Archer Jones3—3argued that state rights proved somewhat beneficial to the Confederate war effort as a substitute for twoparty competition in politics. Following the trail blazed by Paul Escott, these authors said: “Manifestations of opposition to the Confederacy on the grounds of violated state rights . . . constituted a safety valve for anger fed by resentment, discontent, and fear of ultimate failure by the government.”4 In other words, the authors of Why the South Lost assumed that two-party competition was helpful to a war effort, and the Confederacy, lacking political parties, needed some substitute for it3—3that is, state rights.5 The whole idea of state rights has all but disappeared from recent histories of the Confederacy. In Stephanie McCurry’s Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, “state rights” receives but one mention. Discussing the issue of impressment of slaves to work on Confederate fortifications , McCurry says: “What looked like a struggle between state and federal power was really a struggle over the right of the central state to abrogate the sovereign rights of slave holders.”6 What has been overlooked in historians’ flight from study of the doctrine of state rights is the possibility that state rights and nationalism could and did coexist in the Confederate nation. In other words, the Confederacy did not founder on state rights nor...

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