Secession as an International Phenomenon: From America?s Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements

“‘How a Free People Conduct a Long War’: Sustaining Opposition to Secession in the American Civil War”

SUSAN-MARY GRANT How a Free People Conduct a Long War” Sustaining Opposition to Secession in the American Civil War The right of revolution does not exist in all cases where the power of revolution is found. Joel Parker, The Right of Secession, 1861 One of the most widely distributed Union propagandist pamphlets of the American Civil War was Charles Janeway Stillé’s How a Free People Conduct a Long War: A Chapter from English History. Stillé was born in Philadelphia in 1819; a lawyer before the Civil War, he joined the U.S. Sanitary Commission when war broke out and later published an official account of that body. Following Union general George B. McClellan’s costly but indecisive Peninsula Campaign of 1862, Stillé sought to boost flagging Union morale with the publication of a pamphlet that highlighted for the northern public the comparisons between the recent abortive attempt to seize Richmond via the James Peninsula and events on a rather different peninsula, the Iberian, on which the British under Wellington faced Napoleon in a protracted campaign lasting from 1808 to 1814. Disseminated by the Sanitary Commission in 1862 and republished the following year by the Loyal Publication Society of New York and the Union League of Philadelphia, the pamphlet eventually came to have some five hundred thousand copies in print. Stillé was concerned, as Frank Freidel noted, “with the volatile nature of public opinion in such nations as the United States and Great Britain—overenthusiastic at the beginning of a war, certain of spectacular victory, then over- “How a Free People Conduct a Long War” [133] pessimistic when adversity instead ensued.” This was an especially acute problem in a war fought, as the American Civil War was, mainly by volunteer troops. The Civil War was, in several senses, a “people’s contest,” as Abraham Lincoln famously called it, but for the Union this meant persuading the people to keep fighting; it meant convincing them that the nation as a single nation was worth the sacrifice and that secession was, as Lincoln saw it, not a constitutional right but “the essence of anarchy.” Once the Union realized that the battle to bring the South back into the nation would be neither quick nor painless, it became a matter of urgency that the North work out, and fast, just how a free people might conduct a long war. The northern response to this challenge has frequently taken second place in the literature to an interest in the development of southern, or Confederate , nationalism; historians have been far more interested in why the South seceded and whether by that process a separate nation was created than in why the North sought to prevent secession and how by that process a single nation was sustained. Hindsight is part of the problem here, but historians’ fascination with the perceived underdog, the lack of appreciation of the development of a specifically northern nationalism against which southern nationalism developed in the first place, and the sense of the South as a region persistently different from if not at odds with the rest of the United States have all contributed to a large literature on the subject of white southern support for secession and a concomitant dearth of material on northern opposition to it. The American Civil War was a war of state formation, yet when the war came many of the most influential bodies with respect to propaganda and support were private concerns, not state ones. Northern elite organizations such as the Loyal Publication Society of New York had the self-appointed task of both promulgating their own perspective on American nationalism and interpreting and disseminating the Lincoln administration’s position on secession in support of that nationalism: in the denial of secession a nation was finally conceived but not yet born. It would take a military victory to confirm America’s “new birth of freedom,” and for that, the morale of the people was a crucial component. In successfully meeting the challenge of how to conduct, and win, a long war, the people established beyond doubt the legitimacy of the American federal system as a constitutionally validated perpetual union. When Kenneth Stampp revisited the concept of a perpetual union nearly thirty years ago, he observed that the debate over secession lacked “the urgency of a still relevant political issue.” This volume is a testimony to the revived sense [134] Susan-Mary Grant of...