“The Sport of Folly and the Prize of Treason”: Confederate Property Seizures and the Northern Home Front in the Secession Crisis

In the winter of 1860-61 a series of shocking events shook the Northern public. As each Southern state declared itself out of the Union, its government seized Federal properties located within its borders. From late December 1860 through May 1861, seceding states captured Federal forts, arsenals, customs houses, and dockyards. Worse, the rebels repudiated all debts they owed to Northern tradesmen and even launched privateers to prey against Yankee merchant ships. These actions enraged and frightened Northerners of all political persuasions, even many conservative Democrats who might otherwise have sympathized with their Southern brethren. Northern newspapers reported the rebels' aggressions on Federal and private property in indignant detail. Editorials, private letters to congressmen and senators, diary entries, sermons, and pamphlets seethed with the notion that the Southern states, as they seceded from the Union, were "stealing" themselves, along with valuable Federal and private property, from their former fellow citizens. ¹

The Northern public response to the property confiscation has received little attention in the narrative of the Civil War, perhaps because the seizures of forts, arsenals, and even private assets were later subsumed into the general turmoil of those troubled times. Most writers on the Civil War have focused on the political causes and aftermath of secession and have largely overlooked the Northern reaction to the rebels' capture of Federal and private property. The seizures have appeared, in hindsight, to be a logical outcome of the hostilities that had been developing between the two sections for the past forty years. As a result, historians have assumed that the Union home front focused its rhetoric primarily on the political act of disunion, and that like their president-elect Abraham Lincoln, Northerners interpreted secession as an attack on the Constitution and on the principles of democratic government. But a closer scrutiny of newspaper editorials, pamphlets, manuscript letters, diaries, and even sermons reveals that the main topic of conversation from January through late April 1861 was the rebels' attack on Union property.

Few Northerners had expected an assault on Federal and private property. Many of them had assumed, or hoped, that Southerners' threats of secession were mostly empty posturing, and that if some Southern states did secede, their departure would not affect Northern citizens in any material way. But the rebels' attack on Federal and private property during the secession crisis proved that disunion directly threatened Northern prosperity. The seizures, then, were of immense importance to citizens in the free states. Not only was their Union breaking apart, but also their personal well being was imperiled.

The rebels' aggressive actions early in the conflict now forced Northerners to think hard about the reciprocal rights and obligations between the states. Although the sectional conflict had been steadily worsening for some time, most Northerners had never fully articulated their relationship to the citizens of the Southern states. The public response to the property seizures reveals that Northerners had for some time thought of the union of the states as a kind of mutually beneficial partnership, bound together by a written agreement--the Constitution--but now threatened with destruction by one of the partners. Historians of the secession crisis have generally commented on the Northern public's outrage over secession, but they have explained this outburst of emotion as anger over the threat to the Union, and to democratic government. A careful study of the public's rhetoric during the first few months of the conflict, however, shows that Northerners were more immediately concerned about the safety of Federal and private property, and that in the early months of the crisis, they conceptualized the conflict in terms of contested property ownership. ²

Expressions of anger over the captured property could be heard among many segments of the Northern population--from New England Republicans to border-state Democrats...