Page 368 - American Stories, A History of the United States

Watch the Video What Caused the Civil War? 15.1

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Men of Moderation Jefferson Davis, inaugurated as president of the Confederacy on February 18, 1861,
was a West Point graduate and had served as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce and as a U.S. senator.

tariffs, subsidize internal improvements, or interfere with slavery in the states and was
required to protect slavery in the territories. As president and vice president, the con-
vention chose Jefferson Davis of Mississippi and Alexander Stephens of Georgia, men
who had resisted secessionist agitation.
The moderation shown in Montgomery resulted in part from a desire to win sup-
port in the upper South. But it also revealed that proslavery reactionaries had never
won a majority. Most southerners had opposed dissolving the Union so long as slavery
seemed safe from northern interference.
Lincoln’s election destroyed that sense of security. But the Montgomery con-
vention made it clear that the new converts to secessionism did not want to estab-
lish a slaveholder’s reactionary utopia. They wanted to re-create the Union as it had
been before the rise of the Republican party. They opted for secession only when it
seemed the only way to achieve their aim. The decision to allow free states to join the
Confederacy reflected a hope that the old Union could be reconstituted under southern
direction. Some optimists even predicted that all of the North except New England
would transfer its loyalty to the new government.
Secession and the formation of the Confederacy thus amounted to a conservative
and defensive kind of “revolution.” The only justification for southern independence on
which a majority could agree was the need for greater security for the “peculiar institu-
tion.” Vice President Stephens spoke for all the founders of the Confederacy when he Quick Check
described the cornerstone of the new government as “the great truth that the negro is not How did secessionists conceive of
equal to the white man—that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural the U.S. constitution, and how did
condition.” their new constitution differ?
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