Marshall L. Derosa - The Politics of Dissolution: Quest for a National Identity and the American Civil War

First published 1998 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711

Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 97-29445

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

DeRosa, Marshall L., 1955

The politics of dissolution : the quest for a national identity and the American Civil War / Marshall L. DeRosa, editor,

p. cm.

ISBN: 1-56000-349-9

1. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 1861-1965CausesSources. 2. United StatesPolitics and government1857-1861Sources. 3. United StatesPolitics and government1861-1865Sources. 4. Secession Southern StatesSources. 5. RhetoricPolitical aspectsUnited States History19th century. I. DeRosa, Marshall L., 1955

E459.D37 1997

937.711-dc21

97-29445

CIP

ISBN 13: 978-1-56000-349-6 (hbk)

Several colleagues stand out as facilitating the final product you have before you. Political Scientist Ross M. Lence (University of Houston) and historians Clyde Wilson (University of South Carolina), Stephen D. Engel (Florida Atlantic University), and Richard Gamble (Palm Beach Atlantic College).

My wife Mary and our three children Elijah, Isabella, and Abigail, also deserve credit for patiently yielding to me the time and support requisite to what proved to be a six year project. My earnest thanks to them.

Several factors have led to the compilation of the following antebellum U. S. Senate speeches. They include: First, an appreciation that the union of States organized under the Articles of Confederation was incompletely supplanted in 1789 with the adoption of the Constitution; specifically, the extent to which the U.S. Constitution altered national and state relations was significantly ambiguous. As the union matured much of the ambiguity attendant on the drafting and ratification processes was incrementally addressed, but time also exacerbated the difficulties attendant on two governments exercising concurrent jurisdiction within the same territorial limits. and, in this particular instance, the use of national coercion as a means to maintaining the Union vis--vis a States liberty to exercise the right of self-determination.

Second, the assertion that the southern states stumbled headlong into secession with such rapidity and passion that they knew not what they were doing is simply wrong. Many Senators in the South and North were very much concerned with the intensity and duration of an impending civil war between the States; nevertheless, the exit of southern States from the Union was deliberative and, from the southern perspective, constitutional. Regardless, conventional scholarship portrays a distorted account of events. For example, in a chapter titled The Counterrevolution of 1861, Professor James McPherson cites eighty-six sources, mostly from antebellum newspapers and recent studies. Of the eighty-six citations there is only one substantive reference to speeches made in the thirty-sixth Congress. Certainly one should expect a wide range of opinions and motives coming to the fore at such a momentous constitutional and political crisis, especially in openly partisan publications such as newspapers and pamphlets; but characterizations such as the enmity of the Southerner for the Northerner surpassed that of the Greek for the Turk or that the southern view was that a Ladys thimble will hold all the blood that will be shed are distortions. Eminent contemporary scholars should be wary of placing undue emphasis on the views of antebellum writers who had little or no accountability to an electoral base, as was not the case with Senators from the southern States. The speeches delivered on the floor of the Senate manifest a very different mood than that of enmity, as would be expected when intelligent and patriotic men, North, South, and West, accountable to their constituenciestheir respective States and political partiesembarked on uncharted political waters. Moreover, this collection of U.S. Senate speeches raises, at a minimum, substantial objections to claims that the secession movement was non-deliberative, irrational, and unconstitutional. Secession was not only extensively analyzed, but also considered by many Senators as a necessary step towards peaceful reconstruction of the Union.

Third, because these pre-Seventeenth Amendment Senators were accountable to the prevailing political sentiments of their respective state constituencies through their respective state legislaturesa political reality reiterated time and again in the course of their speechesmy editorial decision to include in this collection only Senate speeches, without House speeches, was made. This does not mean that the speeches made in the U.S. House of Representatives were neither insightful nor influential. Neither is it meant to imply that the Senate speeches excluded lacked those two qualities. What it does mean is that the speeches included are representative of official policies and public sentiments, without being redundant.

Fourth, the superb oratory of the period needs to be recovered and made readily available. The speeches are both eloquent and learned, not to mention high political drama. These speeches are not standard special interest advocacy; rather, they emanated from an appreciation of history classical and contemporaryand civic republicanism to such an extent that they are informative about the fundamental principles of American constitutionalism. This too was intentional as the Senators engaged in determined efforts to explicate the foundations of the American republican regime for their contemporaries and posterity.