The Great Refusal: Dixie Uber Alles

{In the life of a nation, Refusals don’t get much Greater than when a considerable portion of the citizenry hands in their resignations. Secession was nothing but the South’s version of “I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More,” only with rifles, muskets, and cannons instead of drums, piano, and guitar. Steven Channing, in his book Crisis of Fear, refutes those who try to embroider the Confederate cause in ideological finery like “state’s rights” and “economic imperatives”; what Southern secessionists were Refusing, insists Channing, was any attempt by the federal government to limit, much less imperil, their ‘right of property in slaves’. In other words, it was slavery, stupid.}

Steven Channing, Crisis of Fear

The conclusion is inescapable that the multiplicity of fears revolving around the maintenance of [social] controls for the Negro was not only the prime concern of the people of South Carolina in their revolution, but was so very vast and frightening that it literally consumed the mass of lesser ‘causes’ of secession. [Despite] the ‘dry prattle’ about the Constitution, the rights of minorities, and the like, there never was any confusion in the minds of most contemporaries that such arguments were masks for more fundamental emotional issues.

The people of 1860 were usually frank in their language and clear in their thinking about the reasons for disunion. After the war, men came forward to clothe the traumatic failure of the [secessionist] movement in the misty garments of high Constitutional rights and sacred honor; but the people of the antebellum South conceived slavery to be the basis of stability for their social order, the foundation of their economy, and the source of their moral and cultural superiority. State sovereignty was an issue only as a refuge for those fearful of a challenge to their ‘right of property in slaves’.

Southerner Arthur Perroneau Hayne wrote that secession was a noble act: “Slavery with us is no abstraction—but a great and vital fact. Without it every comfort would be taken from us. Our wives, our children, [would be] made unhappy—education, the light of knowledge—all, all lost and our people ruined forever. Nothing short of separation from the Union can save us.” 

For the people of South Carolina, perpetuation of the Union beyond 1860 meant the steady and irresistible destruction of slavery, which was the first and last principle of life in that society, the only conceivable pattern of essential race control. The nation was led into war in 1861 by the secession of the lower South, not by the desire of the Northern populace either to end slavery or bring equality to the Negro. Subsequent generations of Americans came to condemn the racist fears and logic that had motivated that secession, yet the experience of our own time painfully suggests that it was easy to censure racism but more difficult to obliterate it.

If the history of race relations in the United States is an accurate measure, we can assume that there will not and perhaps cannot be a genuine reconciliation between the races, that white and black will never achieve equality, because of the fears of the one and their oppression of the other. But human experience also indicates the possibility of transcending history, for history is neither a lawgiver nor an impenetrable obstacle. The [search for a] solution must and will go on.

People of color in America, and especially the descendants of slaves, have only ever been given grudgingly any rights or any respect, and even then they have been chastised for not being sufficiently grateful. As Steven Channing’s book points out, the possibility of a Great Refusal on the part of black slaves so terrified Southerners that they stampeded toward the exits, thinking they would be safer outside the Union.      

Yesterday (March 5, 2023) was the 58^th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama, an event which took place almost exactly 100 years after the Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, and the Civil War came to an end. ¹ Yet race relations in this country today remain burdened with the weight of the past, with undercurrents of anger and fear, resentment and guilt, denial and outrage.

And so, as Channing says, the search for a solution goes on.

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¹ In fact, despite popular belief to the contrary, the Civil War continued, mostly in small skirmishes, for over a year after Appomattox. President Andrew Johnson (Lincoln’s successor) formally declared hostilities ended in August 1866.