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Jefferson Davis And The Southern Defence
Of The Constitutional Union 1845-61 Dr. John M. Phillips M.A. League of the South Papers No. 11 In the aftermath of the passage of the Great Compromise of 1850 Jefferson Davis, Senator from Mississippi, rose to refute the allegations and insinuations of his opponents that his object in the recent crisis, and that of many Southern Democrats, had been the dissolution of the Union of the States created by the Constitution of 1789. "Lightly and loosely," he observed, "representatives of the Southern people have been denounced as disunionists by that portion of the Northern press which most disturbs the harmony and endangers the perpetuity of the Union. Such, even, has been my case, though a man does not breathe at whose door the charge of disunion might not as well be laid as at mine. The son of a revolutionary soldier, attachment to the Union was among the first lessons of my childhood; bred to the service of my country, from boyhood to mature age I wore its uniform. Through the brightest portion of my life, I was accustomed to see our flag, historic emblem of the Union, rise with the rising and fall with the setting sun. I look upon it now with the affection of early love, and seek to preserve it by a strict adherence to the Constitution, from which it had its birth, and by the nurture of which its stars have come so much to outnumber its original stripes." With these words the hero of Buena Vista dismissed his critics and looked to posterity for his vindication. Regrettably the majority of recent historians have given such statements little regard, and instead accepted the polemical slanders of the Northern popular press, and Davis' political opponents, as evidence of the revolutionary intentions of Southern political leaders in the years immediately preceding the War For Southern Independence. Today it is widely believed, and more widely taught, that the impetus to secession in 1860 came from an unrepresentative Southern political class which, having failed in its attempt to force its doctrines upon the nation as a whole, resolved to perpetuate its power by the disruption of the Union and repudiation of the Constitution. Unhappily this analysis is utterly faulty. It is my intention to demonstrate that over the course of the troubled decade between the Great Compromise and the Secession Ordinances Davis and other Southern leaders exerted every effort to preserve the Constitutional Union of the Founding Fathers, and that the ultimate responsibility for the dissolution of the Union must rest with a political faction who would not scruple later to pose as its defenders. Tensions resulting from the divergent interests of the several sections had several times brought the Union into crisis. During the War of 1812 the New England States had refused to lend their assistance to the projects of conquest contemplated by a Federal Government dominated by Western and Southern Statesmen, and in 1814 a Convention had met at Hartford Connecticut to consider the possibility of secession. Only the unexpected receipt of news of an armistice, and the pusillanimity of the Convention's leaders, had averted the dissolution of the Union. However, the most enduring source of sectional discord was the "American System" of protective tariffs, export bounties and internal improvements, designed by Henry Clay of Kentucky to foster American economic development in the aftermath of the second war against Great Britain. Clay's system was deeply injurious to Southern interests. For, whereas the States of the North were progressing towards a state of economic autarchy, the Southern economy was based upon the exchange of a large surplus of raw materials, most importantly cotton, for European manufactured goods. The imposition of protective tariffs artificially raised prices to the Southern consumer by up to 40% ad valorem and therefore decreased the value of cotton exported relative to goods produced for domestic consumption. Robert Barnwell Rhett, sometime Senator from South Carolina, assembled statistics which showed that in the years between 1791 and 1845, the Federal Government collected roughly $927,050,097 in customs duties, whereof $711,200,000 were collected in the Southern States and just $215,850,097 in the more populous North. Moreover, of $102,000,000 expended upon "internal improvements" only $37,000,000 were devoted to projects south of the Mason-Dixon line. In short, the Southern States were disproportionately taxed by the "American System", yet, possessing few domestic manufacturing establishments, benefited little from the direct effect of the protective tariff, and received only a small share of the Federal largesse. The damaging effects of the "American System" were made no easier to bear by the dubious constitutional basis of the tariff laws. The Federal Government was empowered by the Constitution to lay duties upon imports solely in order "to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States". Since the Union enjoyed a substantial budget surplus during most of the period between 1830 and 1860, and the national debt was all but extinguished by 1840, the heavy tariffs imposed by Congress could hardly be justified upon either of the first two grounds. Nor is it easy to see how a measure which so manifestly rebounded to the serious disadvantage of one particular section could be considered a provision for the "general welfare of the United States". The tariff issue culminated, after the passage by Congress of the notorious 1828 "Tariff of Abominations" , in the adoption of "Nullification Ordinances" by the State of South Carolina. Whilst the strict doctrine, espoused by Calhoun and other Carolinian leaders, that a State might "nullify" measures it judged to be unconstitutional was never to win official acceptance, South Carolina's bold stand forced Clay and his allies in the legislature to accept tariff reductions. However, the tariff remained a potential source of sectional discord until 1846 when the Democratic Congressional majority, with the support of President Polk, effectively put an end to the protective system and signaled its intention to commit the Union to free trade. The resolution of the stale tariff question can have given few Southern leaders cause for confidence that their rights within the Union would henceforth be respected. For, during the years after 1840 additional sectional grievances had accumulated. Hostility to the institution of slavery in the North, revealed during the Missouri Crisis of 1820, had become more pronounced in the ensuing decades. The most important result of this development was the increasing difficulty which Southern slaveholders encountered in seeking the restitution of runaway slaves. Initially juries refused to admit the identity of recaptured fugitives and by this device frustrated justice. However, by 1850 no fewer than fourteen Northern States had passed "Personal Liberty Laws" which forbade the officers of those State Government from rendering any assistance to the efforts of slaveholders to reclaim their property. Whilst the practical effect of these laws was injurious to many law abiding citizens of the Southern States, their passage was construed in the most serious light by Davis primarily because it revealed the flagrant disregard of many of the political leaders of the Northern States for their constitutional obligation to render up fugitive slaves to the authorities of the States from which they had escaped. The second manifestation of the growth of Northern Abolitionism was the circulation of anti-slavery propaganda within the Southern States through the medium of the national mail service. The horrible spectre of a slave revolt had long hung over the South, despite the apparent quiescence of the slave population, if only because any rising would certainly result in the gruesome massacre of isolated families before it could be suppressed by the assembly of the forces of order. Most planters depended for their personal security, and that of their family, upon the moral subordination of their slaves rather than upon physical force. Attempts to undermine this authority could only be construed in the most serious light, and Abolitionist pamphleteering made a very significant contribution to the alienation of the Southern population from the Union of the States. Nonetheless, sectional tensions did not dominate the national politics of the early 1840s. The Second Party System was founded upon the clash between the Democratic demand for territorial expansion, and the Whigs' championship of economic consolidation. Both parties were able to appeal to men of North and South, and the national basis of partisanship acted as a significant check to the development of sectional crises from which neither party could hope to benefit. However, by 1848 the coherence of both political parties had fallen into question. With the acquisition of Oregon and California the American Union appeared to have realised its "manifest destiny". Moreover, in an age when private capital was spanning the continent with railroads the necessity of Federal funding for "internal improvements" was not obvious. The issues which had most clearly set apart Democrats and Whigs had lost their relevance by the time of the election to the Presidency of General Zachary Taylor after a campaign singularly devoid of meaningful political debate but remarkable for the conspicuous consumption of cider. The bankruptcy of the Second Party System removed the barrier which had formerly restrained political leaders from seeking advantage in the exacerbation of sectional tensions. It was presumably in order to offset the adverse effect of the tariff reductions of 1846 upon his popularity in an industrial constituency, by currying the favour of anti-slavery elements, that David Wilmot, a Democratic Congressman from Pennsylvania, first moved a resolution in the House of Representatives to exclude the institution of slavery from any territory gained as a result of the war then being waged against Mexico. Wilmot's cynical political gambit was to have disastrous political consequences, for although the Proviso never gained the support of a majority of either branch of the legislature, it reopened the vexed question of the status of slave property in the territories. Davis and Calhoun had, with the support of other Southern leaders, willingly regarded the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as a permanent settlement of the "slave territory" question, though both privately believed the Compromise to be inherently unconstitutional since it did not secure to all men the right to go with their property of any sort into any part of the national domain. However, the Compromise had the merit that by the effective partition of the territory it guaranteed the maintenance of a sectional equilibrium in the Senate of the United States. The attempt to exclude slaveholders from the newly acquired lands of California, New Mexico and Arizona by the Wilmot Proviso was significant not merely because it exposed once more the hostility of many in the North to the "peculiar institution", but primarily because it represented an effort to destroy the political equipoise between North and South. Indeed, since it is impossible to construe the Wilmot Proviso as a humanitarian measure because, as Davis pointed out, the "extension" of slavery "does not, never did, and never could, imply the addition of a single slave to the number already existing", it cannot be doubted that "Free Soil" was not an end in itself, but the means to a greater end - the reformation of Southern society. Davis characterised the Proviso as "an invitation to still more intolerable exactions by an implacable and ever increasing sectional majority". The passions aroused by the Wilmot Proviso drew Daniel Webster and Henry
Clay back into the political fray. These titans of an earlier day put
forward a set of compromise proposals designed to defuse the crisis, which
formed the basis of the so-called Compromise of 1850. In return for a
new Fugitive Slave Law, Clay and Webster persuaded Southern Senators to
acquiesce in the admission of California as a "free" State and
the abolition of the slave trade within the District of Columbia, and
to accept an arrangement which vested the right to regulate slavery within
the territories in the legislatures of the territories themselves. "Popular
sovereignty" was the brainchild of a talented young Senator from
Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas, the agent of many a later disaster. The injustice of the Compromise of 1850 to Southern interests convinced several of the section's political leaders that the severance of the Union of the States was an immediate necessity. Senator Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina and William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama were the moving spirits behind a Convention of the representatives of the Southern States which met at Nashville in 1850 in order to consider the assertion of the right of secession. Davis held aloof from the Convention. Unlike Rhett and Yancey, he regarded secession as a desperate resort, and his close contact with leading adherents of the doctrine of States rights in the North, such as Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, led him to entertain the hope that Southern rights might yet be vindicated within the Union. Fortunately for the Unionist cause, Chief Justice Sharkey of Mississippi, a close political associate of Jefferson Davis, was elected Chairman of the Nashville Convention, and used his influence to prevent the approval of any of the more radical resolutions offered by Rhett and Yancey. Returning to Washington as Secretary of War in the cabinet of President Franklin Pierce, Davis, the staunchest opponent of the Compromise of 1850, was confronted with the disastrous results of Douglas' political expedient. The application of the doctrine of popular sovereignty in the territory of Kansas resulted in a bloody civil conflict between the proponents and opponents of slavery, exacerbated by the aid which the two sides received from sympathisers elsewhere in the Union. Heinous crimes were committed by both sides; most notable were the brutal murders of six unarmed pro-slavery men by the outlaw John Brown and his gang in the vicinity of Pottawattomie Creek. So serious were the disturbances that attempts to admit Kansas to the Union as a State were reduced to a grim farce. Antislavery men boycotted initial elections to a constitutional convention, with the result that a constitution comprehending the institution was put before the territory for ratification, and approved overwhelmingly when thousands of Missourians swarmed across the border in order to vote. Congress refused to accept the result of the plebiscite, though President Pierce advised that Kansas should be admitted as a State upon the basis of the "Lecompton Constitution". Consequently the spectacle of "bleeding Kansas" continued to excite the passions of the nation. In New York an "Emigrants Aid Society" was established in order to promote the settlement of "Free Soil" men in Kansas. The "Society" contributed to the escalation of the violence in the territory by endeavouring to equip each settler it "aided" with a modern breach-loading rifle. Pro-slavery men replied by raising subscriptions across the South in order to ensure that their partisans in Kansas were similarly armed. The spectacle of "bleeding Kansas" worsened tempers within the Congress. Edwin Sumner and several other Abolitionist Northern politicians made increasingly violent attacks upon the Southern "slaveocracy" which they held responsible for the ills of the western territories. Eventually Sumner went too far. In 1856 he delivered a vituperative and immoderate speech regarding the "Crime against Kansas" in which he cast scurrilous assertions upon the moral character of the absent Senator Butler of South Carolina. Representative Preston Brooks of that State, a kinsman of the wronged Senator, knowing Sumner to be a physical coward who would decline to meet his challenge, strode into the Senate Chamber the following day and beat Sumner into unconsciousness with his cane. In the North, where the slanderous content of Sumner's foregoing speech received little publicity, Brooks' physical assault upon the person of a leader of the anti-slavery movement was regarded as further evidence of the overbearing brutality of the "slave power" which Sumner and others claimed was seeking to acquire dominion over the Union. The chronic civil strife in Kansas gave the crucial impetus to the creation
of a purely sectional political party. On July 6th 1854 at Jackson Michigan,
ten thousand citizens, gathered together to protest against the application
of the Democratic doctrine of "popular sovereignty" in the territories
of Kansas and Nebraska, resolved themselves into a "Republican"
party. The principal objects of the new party were the complete exclusion
of slaveholders from the territories of the United States and the imposition
of heavy tariffs upon imported manufactured goods. "Republicanism"
was an alliance of convenience between impassioned abolitionists, self
interested industrialists and wage labourers hostile to the competition
of both their foreign rivals and the bonded labour of the Southern States.
These disparate groups were rendered a coherent party only by their common
enmity to the interests of the South. Yet in reality there was no "slave power" bent upon sectional dominion as Lincoln and Seward pretended. At no time did any Southern leader seek to challenge the right of the Northern States to prohibit slavery within their own limits or attempt to exclude any citizen of those States from any part of the common territories. "Sir, we are arraigned day after day as the aggressive power", Jefferson Davis complained in the Senate in February 1858. Seeking the basis for such a charge he demanded to know of his opponents, "What Southern Senator, during the whole session, has attacked any portion, or any interest of the North? In what have we now, or ever, back to the earliest period of our history, sought to deprive the North of any advantage it possessed?" No Republican Senator was able to offer an adequate answer. Sectional conflict was not "irrepressible", it was the consequence of Northern aggression. The Republican party was not merely inimical to the spirit of fraternal Union, its leaders also manifested an arrogant disdain for the provisions of the Constitution. On Independence Day 1854 William Lloyd Garrison publicly burned a copy of the document upon which American liberty is founded, damning it for "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell". William Seward, who had advocated the enactment of "Personal Liberty Laws" by the Northern States in order to frustrate the operation of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, publicly contended that, "There is a higher law than the Constitution." In an extempore public speech at Palace Garden in New York City Davis turned upon Seward with unaccustomed ferocity. "You have among you politicians of a philosophic turn," he told his audience, "who preach a high morality; a system of which they are the discoverers… They say, 'It is true the Constitution dictates this, and the Bible inculcates that, but there is a higher law than these; and they call upon you to obey that higher law of which they are the inspired givers. Men who are traitors to the compact of their fathers - men who have perjured the oaths they have themselves taken - they who wish to steep their hands in the blood of their brothers; these are the moral law-givers who proclaim a higher law than the Bible, the Constitution, and the laws of the land." Davis warned his listeners that their acceptance of the "higher law" doctrine would be attended only by evil consequences. "What security have you for your own safety," he demanded to know, "if every man of vile temper, of low instincts, of base purpose, can find in his heart a law higher than that which is the rule of society, the Constitution and the Bible?" Davis protested in vain. The assumption of the existence of a "higher law" than the Constitution was essential to the coherence of Republican ideology. For nearly every object of the party's political program was contrary to the letter or inimical to the spirit of the compact of 1789. The Supreme Court had pronounced in 1857 that the exclusion of slaveholders from the territories by the Congress would represent the illegal assumption of an undelegated power contrary to the provisions of the Tenth Amendment. The constitutionality of protective tariffs was also a matter of question. Yet no recognition of the limits of the authority vested in the Federal Government dimmed the zeal of the Republican party for these measures. During the 1850s the party had deliberately conspired to obstruct the operation of the Fugitive Slave Law, in violation of the obligation placed upon the States to return runaways. Moral fervour, and material interest, had led the Republican State Governments to act with a reckless disregard for the Constitution in the past and Southern statesmen could therefore entertain no expectation that a Republican Federal Administration would show more restraint. A bloody incident in October 1859 reinforced the conviction of the Southern people that the Northern party aimed at the destruction of their rights. Since his murderous escapades in Kansas the outlaw John Brown had toured the Northern States and associated with many of the leaders of the Abolitionist movement. He used money raised from Northern donors, including the Republican Senators Seward and Trumbull, to purchase a large number of rifles and pikes and on October 16th 1859 led a small band of followers into the State of Virginia, where they seized the arsenal at Harper's Ferry. Brown hoped that news of his raid would induce the slaves of the area to rise. By arming these men with the pikes he had brought, and the weapons plundered from the arsenal, he intended to create an army with which he might drive the institution of slavery from the American continent. The raid was a bloody fiasco. No slaves rose. In the confusion of the early morning Brown's men shot dead the village postmaster, a free black, when he attempted to raise the alarm and seized several hostages, a number of whom, including the Mayor of the town, they subsequently murdered. Eventually they were surrounded by a force of militia and marines and surrendered. The surviving conspirators were subsequently tried for treason and sentenced to death. "It was the enthusiastic and permanent approbation of the object of his [Brown's] expedition by the abolitionists of the North," wrote President Buchanan in his memoirs, "which spread doom and approbation throughout the South." Ralph Waldo Emerson, the sage of Concord, became blasphemously foolish by comparing Brown's "glorious scaffold" to the cross of Calvary. Wendell Phillips described Brown as "the impersonation of God's order and God's law". Across the North churches were draped in black crape after his execution. Several wise Northern leaders, including Buchanan and former President Pierce, publicly condemned Brown. However the outpouring of grief across the Northern States at the demise of a murderer and rebel who had sought to visit upon their Southern neighbours the horror of a slave revolt left a deep impression upon Southern minds. In a lecture before the New York Historical Society in 1839 former President John Quincy Adams declared that, "the indissoluble link of union between the people of the several States of this confederated nation is… in the heart. If the day should ever come (may Heaven avert it) when the affections of the people of these States shall be alienated from each other, when the fraternal spirit shall give way to cold indifference, or collision of interests shall fester into hatred, the bonds of political association will not long hold together parties no longer attracted by the magnetism of conciliated interests and kindly sympathies; and far better will it be for the people of the disunited States to part in friendship with each other than to be held together by constraint." The Northern reaction to Brown's raid revealed that the bonds of amity between the States which Adams considered the cement of the Union had crumbled beyond repair. In 1860 Davis delivered a speech to the Democratic Convention at Jackson Mississippi. He warned his listeners that, "A party too powerful to be unheeded, and marked, as nations are distinguished, by territorial limits, is now organised for the destruction of the labor system of the South, and seeks to obtain possession of the General Government, that its machinery may be used in aid of their war upon our existence as a sovereign States." The political agenda of the Republican party did not manifest "the political division of a people because of different opinions upon matters of joint interest; but it is in the nature of foreign war waged for conquest and dominion…" Thus he concluded that the great question at stake in the presidential election of 1860 was "whether the Federal Government should be a Government of the whole for the benefit of all its equal members, or (if it should continue to exist at all) a sectional Government for the benefit of a part…" To Davis' dismay the unity of the Democratic party, upon which he believed the future of the Union to depend, collapsed in 1860. Southern representatives at the national party Convention in Charleston demanded that the party "platform" include guarantees of the rights of slaveholders. Stephen A. Douglas refused to accept the candidacy on such terms, whereupon Robert Barnwell Rhett and William Lowndes Yancey induced the deputation of the State of Alabama precipitately to withdraw from the Convention. There can be little doubt that their object was to prevent any compromise in order to advance the cause of secession. The result of their action was a schism within the party, and the nomination of two Democratic candidates for the presidency, John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky and Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. Worse was to follow. Remnants of the old Whig party in the Cotton States joined with Democrats in the border States of Tennessee, Missouri and Kentucky in order to nominate John Bell for the presidency upon a platform of "Constitutional Union". Davis realised that these developments robbed the Democratic party of any prospect of victory in the election. Consequently he corresponded privately with Bell, Breckinridge and Douglas, seeking to persuade them to withdraw in favour of a compromise candidate. Bell and Breckinridge responded positively, but Douglas declined to entertain any such arrangement. Had he stepped aside the result of the election would probably have been little affected. For Lincoln carried nearly every Northern State by a small minority, accumulating enough votes in the electoral college to guarantee his election though he received less than one percent of Southern votes, and significantly fewer votes than the total of his opponents. Professor Randall, Lincoln's biographer, admits that he won the election of 1860 "not because of a lack of union among his rivals, but because of an advantageous distribution of his votes among populous States." Nonetheless, this should not obscure the simple fact that Davis had struggled to avert the split within the Democratic party, and was no party to the schismatic designs of Yancey and Rhett. Despite the election of Lincoln, Davis did not turn at once to secession as a remedy for the ills of the South. Speaking in the Senate in 1860, he protested that, "This Union is dear to me as a Union of fraternal States… I would be happy to know that every State now felt the fraternity which made this Union possible; and if that evidence could go out, if evidence satisfactory to the people of the South could be given that that feeling existed in the hearts of the Northern people, you might burn your statute-books and we would cling to this Union still." However, he warned the Senate that he believed "a sectional hostility has been substituted for a general fraternity, and thus the Government rendered powerless for the ends for which it was instituted. The hearts of a portion of the people have been perverted by that hostility, so that the powers delegated by the compact of Union are regarded not as means to secure the welfare of all, but as instruments for the destruction of a part - the minority section." Nonetheless, Davis agreed to serve upon a Congressional Committee entrusted with the arrangement of an amicable settlement after the secession of South Carolina. Regrettably the Republican members of the Committee refused to consider any of the compromise proposals, guaranteeing the rights of the Southern States, put forward by the Whig Senator Crittenden of Kentucky and the Northern Democrats. President-elect Lincoln had secretly instructed Congressman Washburne and others to, "Hold firm, as with a chain of steel", thereby sabotaging the proceeding from the beginning. When the Committee reconvened after Christmas 1860 Stephen A. Douglas, all of whose proposals had been rejected, demanded of the Republicans, "Tell us what you want, what you will do." He was met with silence. The failure of the "Committee of Thirteen" to agree upon any compromise precipitated the secession of the States of Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. In the Senate Davis angrily demanded of the Northern Democrats who urged caution, "Shall we cling to the mere forms or idolize the name of Union when its blessings are lost, after its spirit has fled? Who would keep a flower, which had lost its beauty and its fragrance, and in their stead had formed a seed-vessel containing the deadliest poison? Or, to drop the figure, who would consent to remain in alliance with States which used the power thus acquired to invade his tranquillity, to impair his defence, to destroy his peace and security?" Upon the receipt of news that the Convention of his own State had passed an Ordinance of Secession Davis went at once to the Senate and delivered some of the most stirring words of his political career. "Senators," he began, "we recur to the principles upon which our Government was founded; and when you deny to us the right to withdraw from a Government which, thus perverted, threatens to be destructive of our rights, we but tread in the path of our fathers when we proclaim our independence and take the hazard. This is done, not in hostility to others, not to injure any section of the country, not even for our own pecuniary benefit, but from the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited, and which it is our duty to transmit unshorn to our children." The American Union created by the Constitution of 1789 was a voluntary association of sovereign States, as the manner of its ratification evinced. The object of the Union was to promote the welfare of each State by collective action in matters of mutual interest. The Constitution neither declared the Union perpetual, nor entrusted the Federal Government with any power to prevent member States from asserting their independence. In the years before 1850 few constitutional lawyers would have dared to dispute the opinion that the provisions of the Tenth Amendment therefore reserved to the people of the several States the right to secede from the Union. In reality the Union derived its strength from the weakness of the central authority. The strict observance of the rights of the States, and of the limits of Federal authority, was the only sound basis for the peaceful and voluntary cooperation of disparate States, as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had perceived. Jefferson Davis never swerved from this belief, and throughout the 1850s the future Confederate President struggled to uphold the constitutional principles which guaranteed the preservation of the Union against the attacks of a party animated by a spirit of sectional aggrandizement. In the year of the Great Compromise he told the Senate that if "this Union, replete with blessings to its own citizens, and diffusive of hope to the rest of mankind, should fall a victim to a selfish aggrandizement and a pseudo-philanthropy, prompting one portion of the Union to war upon the domestic rights and peace of another, [it] would be a deep reflection on the good sense and patriotism of our day and our generation." His failure to avert such a catastrophe was to him a source of profound regret. By 1860, as the Marquess of Lothian wrote, the South "had suffered
enough from the Union to have learned, that whatever its advantages might
be for the North, it was of no advantage to her; and every session proved
that the chance of equal legislation was growing less and less, for the
majority had neither mercy nor good faith." In 1850 Jefferson Davis
told the Mississippi Free Trader that he would support the secession of
his State only if he believed it to be necessary "to go out of the
Union with the Constitution, rather than abandon the Constitution, to
remain in an Union." The refusal of the Republican party to offer
any guarantees of the rights of the Southern States in the aftermath of
the election of its candidate to the presidency convinced Davis that that
time had come.
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