South Carolina Fire-Eater: The Life of Laurence Massillon Keitt, 1824-1864

Nine: “Fidelity to the Union is treason to the South”

nine “Fidelity to the Union is treason to the South” With the struggle for the speakership finally over, congressmen turned their attention to long-neglected business, none of it immediately related to slavery or secession. The Congress enacted a homestead bill, and Buchanan vetoed it. The House approved a slight upward revision of the tariff, but the Senate killed it. Neither house could agree on a route for a railroad to the Pacific coast.1 Keitt showed some interest in the tariff—he condemned the bill as unjust and unnecessary —but none at all in the other issues. In the course of the session, he defended the members’ franking privilege, arranged for the dedication of Clark Mills’s statue of George Washington, attacked a bill liberalizing divorce in the District of Columbia, and defended the administration of the federal armories against Republican charges of incompetence and corruption.2 He delivered his only extended speech during a debate on Utah territory, conceding that polygamy was a “high moral offense” but insisting that Congress did not have the power to declare it a crime in Utah or any other territory. It could not condemn the morals and manners or shape the social institutions of any community. And if it tried, it did not have the ability to enforce its edicts. Keitt’s real concern was, of course, the growing power of the federal government and the threat it posed to the interests of his state and section. He could hardly concede to the government the power to stamp out polygamy in a territory and then deny it the power to abolish slavery in a state. If the government recognized the legitimacy of polygamy in Utah, however unpopular the practice might be in the rest of the country, it could hardly deny the legitimacy of slavery in the South.3 Like everyone else in Washington, Keitt had his attention riveted on Charleston . There, for nine days in April, the Democratic Party struggled to nominate a president and draft a platform for the coming election. For Keitt hundreds of miles away and powerless to affect the result, it was an enormously frustrating south carolina fire-eater 134 time. Only once did he have any influence on the course of events. On April 26, when the delegates from South Carolina realized that the convention would not endorse a territorial slave code, they asked the state’s congressmen for advice.4 In a flurry of telegrams, Keitt and his colleagues urged the delegates to bolt the convention. Four days later, the South Carolinians joined the delegations from the other cotton states when they stalked out of the hall.5 It is impossible to know how many of the bolters anticipated the consequences of their actions. Perhaps most of them believed that, by putting pressure on free-state delegates, “The Seceding South Carolina Delegation.” From the cover of Harper’s Weekly, December 22, 1860. Courtesy of Thomas Cooper Library, Rare Books and Special Collections. 135 “Fidelity to the Union is treason to the South” by turning one more time to the tactic that had worked repeatedly in the past, they could force the party to endorse a territorial slave code or nominate a man more sympathetic to their interests than Douglas. Surely none of them imagined that they were bringing about the very catastrophe that some of them were trying to avoid—not only secession and war, but death, destruction, defeat, and the end of the peculiar institution.6 There was no presidential campaign in South Carolina. John C. Breckinridge , nominated in Baltimore by the southerners and “doughfaces” who bolted the Democratic convention a second time, ran unopposed. Few politicians conceded him even a slight chance to win the election or even to create a deadlock in the Electoral College and throw the decision to the House of Representatives. For Keitt and the radicals, that was unimportant. For them his candidacy was valuable because it promised to unite the South, make a Republican victory all but certain, and force even conservative southerners to think seriously about dissolving the old Union and creating a new one.7 Even before the disruption of the party at Charleston, radicals in Congress had assumed that defeat was inevitable and begun working to guarantee that, when it came, the South would be united in support of secession. In her memoirs , Mrs. Roger A. Pryor, the wife of a fire-eating...