A Long Farewell: The Southern Valedictories of 1860-1861

 

This essay was originally published in Southern Partisan Magazine, 1989.

As we conclude bicentennial celebration of the drafting and adoption of the Constitution of the United States, it may be hoped that we have finally arrived at the proper moment for looking back and ap­preciating the importance of those even more heated discussions of the document which occurred in the nation’s capital during what Henry Adams called the “great secession winter” of 1860-1861.

Those exchanges took place in an atmosphere dramatically colored by contemporary disputes concerning the origins, true meaning and continuing authority of that fundamental law as do the equivalent conversations of our day. For the relation between current argu­ments and those of one hundred twenty-eight years ago is direct and unmistakable. The connection is one which reminds this generation of the special status of the Constitution as symbol and sovereign au­thority over us: as the structure/process/compact to which all Ameri­cans swear allegiance in place of king or people.

 For Southerners the moment for this retrospection is even more propitious in that many of our countrymen are now, as never before, prepared to penetrate the curtains of their own inherited mythology, and discover in the process how prescient our Southern forefathers were in predicting what would happen once they gave up on “the Union as it was, the Constitution as it is.” The paradox which I here explore—as signifi­cant now as it was when South Carolina seceded in December of 1860—is the one defined in March of that year by Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia when he asserted to his fellow senators that it would be “treason to the Constitution” to “maintain a political con­nection between the sections” once the predicate for that connection had been “annulled” or “overthrown.” What, we must ask, are the present implications of this position vis a vis the Constitution which the South, through the official statements of its emissaries to the United States Senate, assumed in the very act of separating itself from its sister commonwealths above the Old Surveyors’ Line?

 For, contrary to what we are taught by the most recent generation of rad­ical historians, secession was about the Constitution, a positive com­mentary or reading. And. as Southerners took pains to specify, not a rejection of it.

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