Break It Up by Richard Kreitner

Author:Richard Kreitner
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2020-05-11T16:00:00+00:00

Stuck between North and South, the mid-Atlantic states had the most to fear from disunion. A center of manufacturing and agriculture, twin pillars of the national economy, with few radicals of either the Northern or Southern variety, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland had often acted as a force for national unity. Now they hoped to prevent their farms from becoming blood-soaked battlefields.

Those calculations changed, however, when it became clear that war was imminent. If last-ditch compromise efforts failed, the states stuck in the middle needed a plan. What they came up with, though far-fetched and now little known, was at the time seen as a viable solution: Secede from the Union and establish a “Central Confederacy.” Only then could they halt the march to war and broker a peaceful resolution. Caught between the unstoppable force of Northern arms and the immovable object of Southern determination, the area’s citizens, even its conservatives, found themselves favoring secession—if only, they hoped, as a temporary measure.

The idea of a Central Confederacy first emerged in Maryland. The state kept nearly ninety thousand people in bondage, but it was as divided as the country. In the South and East, powerful proslavery interests wanted to follow the lower South out of the Union. Before a massed crowd in Baltimore, the lawyer and politician Severn Teackle Wallis condemned any move to coerce the Southern states into remaining. “You cannot shoot and hang men back into union,” he thundered. By contrast, Maryland’s northern and western counties, closer to Pennsylvania, were filled with antislavery German immigrants. Business interests in Baltimore, tied to the North by rail and river connections, also opposed secession. Complicating matters was the fact that federal troops would have to cross Maryland to reach South Carolina. Residents had to either join the separatists or aid their suppression.

One way to avoid the choice was to secede but not join the Confederacy, to instead create a separate republic as a buffer between the two sides. In December 1860, the novelist John P. Kennedy published a pamphlet, The Border States, in which he argued that a mid-Atlantic nation could “serve as a center of reinforcement for the reconstruction of the Union.” The region would provide a coolheaded example, and a “beneficent power of gravitation would work with irresistible energy in bringing back the dislocated fragments.” Eventually, those fragments could be glued back together.

Maryland’s governor, Thomas Hicks, picked up on Kennedy’s idea. Though a slaveholder, Hicks opposed disunion. He refused to meet with Confederate commissioners who wanted him to summon a secession convention. He preferred to see what Virginia would do first. But Hicks also valued the state’s ties to Pennsylvania, and it pained him to think of choosing between the two. Days after South Carolina’s secession, Hicks sent a letter to his Delaware counterpart suggesting that the “honor, safety, and interests” of their states would best be served by forming their own republic. Delaware’s governor demurred, thinking small states could prosper only in a large union. One of the state’s U.

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