The Mississippi Secession Convention: Delegates and Deliberations in Politics and War, 1861–1865 by Timothy B. Smith (review)

In recent years, Timothy B. Smith has churned out a number of high-quality studies on the Civil War in Mississippi. These include the excellent Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front (Jackson, Miss., 2010) and a biography, James Z. George: Mississippi’s Great Commoner (Jackson, Miss., 2012). With his most recent book, Smith fills a void left by historians who have viewed the Mississippi secession convention as little more than a nondeliberative “capstone” to the more important sectional agitation of 1860 (p. xii). By contrast, Smith argues that the convention “was a deliberative body” that “hammer[ed] out compromises” on multiple issues (p. xi, emphasis in original). More important, the convention was also “a microcosm of the people themselves” that signaled “the birth of another era of Mississippi politics” (pp. xi–xii, xi).

Smith places utmost importance on the convention’s deliberation over “federalism versus centralism,” an issue that “would actually shake the Confederacy to its core” and mold Mississippi’s postwar politics (p. xii). Understanding the secession convention, however, requires understanding the men who ran it. Much to his credit, Smith takes what could easily be a tedious dirge through legislative squabbling and instead brings the proceedings to life by framing his study around a colorful rogues’ gallery of key Magnolia State politicos. He follows the weekly convention proceedings through the actions of raging fire-eaters like Governor John J. Pettus, as well as “cooperationists” like the unabashedly self-interested planter James L. Alcorn and the bombastic John W. Wood, whose apocalyptic warnings about southern destruction in the event of secession proved prophetic (p. 8).

Even before the convention began, ideological battle lines hardened between those who favored immediate secession and those who advocated cooperation with the other slave states. Smith examines the secessionists’ demographics and concludes that they were mostly young lawyers or farmers who owned a few slaves, jumped headfirst into politics, and sought membership in the South’s elite class. This conclusion comports with scholarship by Bradley G. Bond, Frank Towers, Jonathan Daniel Wells, and others who suggest that the most ardent secessionists were middle-class men on the make, rather than old-line planters. The secessionists ruled the day at the convention, but Smith argues that the smaller cooperationist faction played an influential, postsecession role when the delegates turned to the work of legislating during the convention’s “second phase” (p. 81).

Smith likens this second phase to the early republic, when Hamiltonian centralism and Jeffersonian federalism vied for political dominance. Similarly, the Mississippi secession convention hosted debates over the competing issues of “state sovereignty or central governance” (p. 99). Former secessionists and cooperationists formed opposing coalitions that wrangled over issues such as political representation, the raising of funds via direct taxation, the definition of citizenship, reopening the transatlantic slave trade, and joining the Confederacy. Moreover, Mississippi convention delegates suggested forming a provisional Confederate government based on the U.S. Constitution—but with extra protection for slavery.

Smith makes good use of a limited number of sources, especially newspapers and J. L. Power’s Proceedings of the Mississippi State Convention (1861), and he constructs a compelling narrative rich with detail and personality. He makes a convincing case that the convention was a deliberative body, but his assertion that it was “a microcosm of the people themselves” is questionable. Smith is too quick to dismiss the role that coercion played in swaying the vote in the secessionists’ favor. This is an especially key point given the demagogic traditions in southern politics when it came to slavery, and the fact that far fewer voters participated in the secession vote than voted in the 1860 presidential election. These points aside, however, Smith’s book is an important addition to Civil War scholarship that augments his already impressive contributions to the field.