Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Alabama in the Civil War

2. The Cradle of the Confederacy

Chapter  On  January , Alabama seceded from the Union and shortly thereafter hosted the newly formed Confederacy’s first capital in Montgomery. For Alabamians, secession was the climax to a decades-long power struggle between the North and the South over the political and economic direction of the country.Serious constitutional disagreements over the relationship between federal and state government certainly contributed to the sectional conflict, but the most “vexatious” issue was slavery—the South’s “peculiar institution.” To more and more Northerners, slavery was not simply immoral but altogether incongruous with the democratic principles of a republic. To more and more Southerners, slavery was a vital component of both their region’s agrarian prosperity and its highly structured social order. Alabama’s journey toward secession began in . At the Democratic national convention in Baltimore that year, William L. Yancey of Montgomery presented his Alabama Platform, a radical manifesto that urged the party to make protection of slavery the central feature of its political campaign. The United States had just concluded its successful war with Mexico (–),but that con- flict ignited debates over the extension of slavery into the newly acquired territories of California and New Mexico. Northern politicians’ bipartisan endorsement of the Wilmot Proviso, a piece of legislation that sought to ban the institution in the Southwest, infuriated the entire Southern delegation in Congress. Though the letter of the proviso died on the floor of the U.S.Senate,its spirit elicited a pronounced antislavery sentiment throughout Northern society. To Yancey, the only antidote for this abolitionist fever was a bold defense of slavery by a national party through states’ rights. While many Southerners sympathized with Yancey’s concerns about the South’s future in the Union, few at the time displayed the Alabamian’s fierce political views.When the convention rejected the Alabama Platform, Yancey stormed out in protest only to discover that he was a minority voice even in his home state. His political rival John Winston persuaded the remaining Alabama delegates to stand with the Democratic majority, while  The Cradle of the Confederacy his longtime mentor and states’ rights advocate Dixon Hall Lewis tried to comfort him with assurances that party solidarity offered the best guarantee for slavery’s perpetuation. Yancey felt betrayed. Going into the s, Alabama may have been solidly in the Union, but it was a state divided by race, geography, and politics. The racial divide was obvious: by  , whites resided there along with , blacks, all but some , of whom were slaves.1 These slaves typically labored in the cotton fields of the fertile“black belt”running through the central portion of the state or on the plush farms of the Tennessee River valley. Nonslaveholding subsistence farmers—the famed Southern yeomanry— predominated the hill counties in the northern half of the state or resided in the wiregrass region along the border with Florida.Despite these varied demographics ,Alabama was generally split between nonslaveholders in the northern half and slaveholders in the southern half. This difference affected state politics throughout the Civil War era. Like the rest of the nation,Alabama participated in a two-party political system that pitted theWhigs against the Democrats. Generally speaking, the Whig Party, which promoted active government involvement in economic growth, appealed to Alabama’s urban middle class and those slaveholders ,usually the older,more established planters,who understood that their cash-crop livelihood was tied closely to the national marketplace.The Democratic Party in the state reflected two strains: a Jacksonian tradition of defending common Americans from exploitation by so-called special interests and a Calhounite wing that emphasized state sovereignty. Upstate yeoman embraced the individualism of the former, while a sizeable number of younger slaveholders espoused the latter. This last group comprised ambitious,professional men,such asWilliam Yancey, who coveted the power and status of the planter class,which in turn led them to regard states’ rights as an indispensable safeguard to slavery. Given this diverse political outlook, it appeared unlikely that Alabamians could ever unite around the explosive issue of secession.The state’s role in the Compromise of  only reinforced this impression . With tensions running high once again over slavery in the territories, the compromise theoretically offered something for everyone: it admitted California as a free state; it banned the slave trade in Washington, D.C.; it left the matter of slavery in New Mexico Territory to the vagaries of popular...