Mississippi by John Ray Skates

Author:John Ray Skates
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393348552
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

While a great many Mississippians looked upon the rantings of the Secessionists as pure demagoguery, those who opposed secession differed hardly at all with their opponents on questions of white supremacy and the need for territorial expansion. They did differ on the best method of preserving and protecting the institution. They noted the Free-Soilers’ promise not to molest slavery in those states where it already existed. They maintained further that slavery could be best protected within the Union by the shield of the constitution. By inviting war and destruction, Unionists argued, secession would almost certainly prove to be counterproductive and result in the ruin of the very institution the Secessionists were trying to save. Those who took that position were largely old Whigs from the plantation counties along the river. They had long distrusted the Democrats as demagogues, and secession to them was just another manifestation of Democrat hotheadedness. Furthermore, like most wealthy people, the great planters defended the status quo. They found strange allies in nonslaveholding farmers of small acreages from the counties of the northeast and the piney woods. Mississippians hardly approached the fateful years of 1860–1861 with unanimity.

The national Whig party broke up over the slave issue in the mid-1850s. Out of the wreckage emerged the new Republican party, dedicated to the Free-Soil position and strong only in the North. When Abraham Lincoln, a Free-Soiler from Illinois, received the party’s nomination for the presidency in 1860, the state Democratic convention of 1859 had already resolved

that in the event of the election of a Black Republican to the Presidency, by the suffrages of one portion of the Union only, to rule over the whole United States, upon the avowed purposes of that organization, Mississippi will regard it as a declaration of hostility, and will hold herself in readiness, to co-operate with her sister States of the South, in whatever measures she may deem necessary for the maintenance of their rights as co-equal members of the Confederacy.15

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