The Militant South, 1800-1861

335 Pages·2002·7.979 MB·English

by  John Hope Franklin

THE
MILITANT
SOUTH

THE
M I L I T A N T
SOUTH
1 8 0 0 - 1 8 6 1
John Hope Franklin
THE BELKNAP PRESS OF
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
(g) Copyright 1956 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Second Printing, with a New Preface, 1970
Distributed in Great Britain by
Oxford University Press, London
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 56-10160
SBN 674-57450-8
Printed in the United States of America
MOZELLA
For ANNE
BUCK (In Memoriam)

Preface to the Second Printing
When I began to do research for The Militant South more
than twenty years ago, I was searching for answers to the
question of why the South invariably reacted violently to
crisis situations. I had in mind, of course, her responses to
her many difficulties during the two generations preceding
the Civil War. I was not unmindful, however, of the possible
illumination that such answers might provide for much later,
even recent, periods in Southern history. I made reference to
that possibility in the original preface. Meanwhile, I dis­
claimed for the South any monopoly on bellicosity; and the
history of violence in the country as a whole makes it abun­
dantly clear how pervasive the tradition of violence has been.
If America in general has been a land of violence, it was
the South that institutionalized it and bestowed on it an aura
of respectability. It was a part of the section’s social and cul­
tural heritage, sanctified by such time-honored institutions
as the code duello, the militia muster, the military academy,
the ring tournament, and the lynching party. Thus, it could
hardly have been regarded as entirely uncivilized. And if one
could find such institutions and practices in other parts of
the country — as, indeed, one could — they could hardly be
branded as peculiarly Southern. But the role of the South in
developing, maintaining, and commending such activities has
been a large one. Throughout their history, many Southerners
have continued to invoke the rule of personal judgment as to
what the law was, long after the raw frontier had passed their
region by. In no other part of the country was it so necessary
that every white man decide for himself whether and how the
law applied to him as in the region where it was so important
to make certain that the blacks should not enjoy equal pro­
tection of the laws.
Long after the duels, the military academies, and the ring
tournaments had become rather pleasant and innocuous relics
of a distant past, the South’s fundamental attitude toward the
law — especially where the former slaves were concerned —
remained essentially what it had been before the Civil War.
And an important manifestation of that attitude was the mil­
itant defiance of unpopular law, whether enacted by a legis­
lature or made by a judge. No other section of the country had
viii PREFACE TO THE SECOND PRINTING
ever responded so violently to legislation as the Southern
whites responded to the laws passed by Congress and the state
assemblies between 1867 and 1875. At no other time in the
nation’s history was the judgment of the law based so much
on who the lawmakers were rather than on what the laws
were. And the antipathy toward the Reconstruction law­
makers and their supporters revitalized and made even more
respectable the militance that had been a part of the ante­
bellum tradition.
Keeping this tradition alive and making it a part of the
apparatus for maintaining white supremacy became a way of
life in the South. Indeed, as Ulrich B. Phillips pointed out, it
became the “central theme of Southern history.” The man,
white or black, who challenged what came to be regarded as
the racial orthodoxy of the South learned by bitter experience
what it cost to make the challenge. In 1898 it would cost
Alex Manly, the Negro editor of Wilmington, North Caro­
lina, his career as an editor, and it would cost four hundred
of his fellow blacks any semblance of legal rights, including
the right to remain in their homes. In 1954 it would cost the
United States Supreme Court most of the respect and prestige
it enjoyed in the South, when numerous prominent white
Southerners, including a hundred Southern Congressmen,
denounced bitterly the highest tribunal in the country for
declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional. In
1956 it would cost Nat “King” Cole bodily harm and untold
indignities in Birmingham, presumably because of his virtu­
osity as a pianist and singer, even before an all-white audi­
ence.
When they were unsuccessful in securing their rights under
the Constitution, Negro Americans took a page from the
white Southerners’ book and began to defy local segregation
laws and discriminatory practices. In time, the militant de­
fiance of the law that was as old as the South itself became
the watchword and practice of Southern blacks. Sit-ins and
freedom rides and militant demonstrations were the answers
that Negroes gave to the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citi­
zens Councils who were determined to maintain segregation
at all costs. The South had reaped a whirlwind, resulting in
a breakdown of respect for law among Negro Americans not
unlike that which had traditionally characterized the atti­
tudes of Southern whites toward racial laws.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND PRINTING ix
If the white people of the South could be militant in the
defiance of the law and if the most submerged element of the
population could take the law into its own hands to redress
ancient grievances, it is not surprising that others were in­
spired to do likewise. The White Citizens Councils and the
Minute Men of the present day are determined to protect the
nation — by violence, if necessary — from its own racial her­
etics and political subverters. The “higher law” adherents
among the student and racial activists are equally determined
to press the nation into an acceptance of their own objec­
tives — within the law if possible, outside the law if necessary.
Meanwhile, a hundred groups, large and small, have taken
up one cause or another, and their general posture can best
be described as a fierce determination to achieve their ob­
jectives, with or without the sanction of the law. The climate
has encouraged not only the hording of arms but a resort to
their use. The result has been a general escalation of violence,
tragically dramatized in the assassination, in recent years, of a
President of the United States, a distinguished civil rights
leader, and a United States Senator.
Surely the South cannot be held responsible for these un­
happy consequences of militancy and violence. But when the
nation, even on the frontier, was groping toward an existence
under the rule of law, the South contributed heavily to the
idea that law could be successfully defied. In making heroes
out of those who, on the basis of personal judgment, de­
cided that a law should be disregarded or defied, it helped
to preserve a tradition that lends respectability to the open
flaunting of the law. The way in which that tradition de­
veloped and the manner in which it influenced later sectional
and national history would seem to make the subject of this
work germane to an effort to understand the condition of
our society today.
JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN
September 1, 1969
Preface to the First Printing
When the Union fell apart in 1861, it was not possible for
anyone to answer all the questions that arose in the troubled
minds of Americans regarding that catastrophe. In searching
for an explanation of the tragic dissolution, thoughtful ob­
servers looked at the political and philosophical bases of the
nation’s structure. They found that the controversial ques­
tion of the autonomy of the states and the concept of liberty
that had evolved offered a partial answer to the question.
They examined the economic order and realized that be­
tween a commercial-industrial section and one that was pre­
dominantly agricultural there was basis for conflict. They
looked into the structure of society in the two sections and
concluded that there were inherent conflicts between that
committed to the view that universal freedom was the proper
foundation for improving the social order and the other
that insisted that its half-free, half-slave society needed only
to be left alone.
Questions of how and why the war came have continued to
baffle the minds of men in the generations since 1861. A
notable lack of agreement, except on the point of the almost
hopeless complexity, and the remarkable accumulation of
details regarding the course of events prior to 1861 have been
the most impressive results.
While considerable attention has been given to the social,
cultural, and psychological conditions of the South before
1861, certain aspects are yet incomplete. In the ante-bellum
period, large numbers of observers, including Southerners,