Photo of the Day: ‘Secession House,’ Beaufort SC

When I was down in the lovely coastal town of Beaufort, SC, last fall, I fell in love with the antebellum homes on virtually every street of this Lowcountry community, including this Greek Revival mansion. A sign outside identified it as the Maxcy-Rhett House, and gave some details about its principal owners: Milton Maxcy, an educator, and Edmund Rhett, a lawyer, planter and politician.

All seemingly helpful, except for a few details of critical importance. The lifespan of Rhett, I noticed, extended into the middle of the Civil War, and the name seemed to speak of all manner of planter privilege. (Indeed, the name chosen by Margaret Mitchell for her rakish hero of Gone With the Wind, Rhett Butler, combines two of the most storied names in South Carolina history.)

It took just a few clicks on the Internet to discover the nickname left off the sign: “Secession House,” denoting the critical discussions held here in which Edmund Rhett—and, even more important, his brother Robert Barnwell Rhett, a U.S. Congressman and Senator—propounded ideas of states’ rights that found explosive and divisive expression in the secession movement and the Civil War.

The declaration of secession by South Carolina, the most die-hard secessionist state, was a dream come true for the Rhetts, particularly Robert, whose oratory for the cause over the last three decades had been so extreme that it became known as "Rhett-oric," I discovered in Adam Goodheart's "Disunion" post for The New York Times back in 2010.  After that, things did not go well for the state, and even less so for the Rhetts. Edmund died mid-war, and Robert may well wish he had, who lost two songs in the conflict and, because of facial cancer, became so disfigured that he eventually had to stop going out in public.

Under the circumstances, it's nice to see that American flag flying on the home rather than the other flag that's become notorious the last several weeks, isn't it?

This Day in Texas History (Sam Houston Defies Secessionists)

March 16, 1861—Twenty-five years to the day that the republic he helped establish approved a constitution, Sam Houston, now governor of the state of Texas, made the last great stand of his long, stormy public career, defying secessionist sentiment by refusing to join the Confederate States of America.

Like another Andrew Jackson protégé, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Houston was a slaveholder who, for the last decade, had found himself on increasingly thin political ice for not backing unlimited expansion of slavery into Western territories. The victorious commander in the successful Texas War of Independence was now watching a large segment of the state turn its back on him.

Perhaps because he had seen so much bloodshed in his life—first as an Indian fighter under Jackson, then in his win over Mexican dictator Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto—Houston was prescient about the cost of secession. “I see only gloom before me,” he observed in rejecting calls to link up with other states breaking out of the Union.

In a prior post, I touched on Houston’s improbably victorious campaign for governor in 1859, only three months after he had been unceremoniously turned out of the U.S. Senate. Why talk about him again?

Because he was a colossus—a man whose virtues and failings (including alcoholism for much of his life) were as large as his frame. Because his life and career were filled with one surprising and dramatic turn after another (e.g., adoption by Cherokees, then becoming an Indian fighter several years later).

And because the current occupant of the governor’s mansion in Austin, Rick Perry, has made his outsized predecessor all too relevant. By paying heed to the loudest calls in his state—i.e., those who insist there can be no compromise with those who see any form of constructive role for the federal government—Perry is deviating from the wise example of Houston, who sought to conciliate factions.

Last year, the Dallas Morning News speculated that Perry’s invocation of “states’ rights” posed problems for voters who associated the term with segregation. But the term had an even longer, and equally problematic, association: with the agitation that led to the Civil War.

Houston correctly foresaw that passage of Stephen Douglas’ Kansas-Nebraska Act--in particular, its advocacy of “popular sovereignty,” enabling residents of a territory to choose whether they wanted slavery or not--would open up unparalleled agitation concerning “the peculiar institution.” His delicate balancing act in the 1850s--denouncing abolitionists and “fire-eaters” alike--failed to placate the latter, who increasingly--and correctly--saw him as their foe.

The election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 put Houston on the spot as no other event did. He stalled on holding a special legislative session just before the state’s secession convention, then yielded when he thought he could influence the vote. (Even then, he didn’t make any secret where his sympathies lay. Working on the first floor of the Capitol building, he referred to the delegates convening on the floor above as “the mob upstairs.”)

He was mistaken about his ability to sway events. On February 1, 1861, only four days after delegates began to convene in Austin, they voted in favor of the Texas Ordinance of Secession, 166-8. A downcast Houston, seeing another opening, said he could abide by the vote if the people endorsed it. Though this vote was less lopsided than the first, it was just as decisive, 44,317 to 13,020.

Now Houston tried to argue that, though the voters wanted secession for the state, it wasn’t as part of the Confederacy. Rather, it was as an independent republic--the kind he’d brought into being a quarter century before.

The last maneuver Houston could summon against the secessionists--securing the federal arsenal at San Antonio by calling on Texas Rangers supporting him--likewise failed. With the Confederacy calling on all state officeholders to swear allegiance to the new provisional government forming in Montgomery, Ala., all escape routes out of his dilemma were closed off.

No matter how much he might have talked about supporting states’ rights over the years, people sensed where Houston’s heart really was. It undoubtedly related to sentiments like this, voiced at the time of the Kansas-Nebraska Act: "Mark me, the day that produces a dissolution of this [Union] will be written in the blood of humanity."

It was undoubtedly because he feared that “blood” that Houston refused to take the one active step that would have enabled him to stay in office while keeping Texas in the Union. Abraham Lincoln offered him 50,000 troops and the rank of major general if he would put down the rebellion in the state. But Houston couldn’t fire on his own people--and, after five decades of military conflict, had grown too tired of the tumult.

Instead, Houston opted for a defiant act of resignation. On March 16, the bluff-speaking 68-year-old wrote a letter to the people of Texas that repeatedly cried out his opposition:

“Fellow-citizens, in the name of our rights and liberties, which I believe have been trampled upon, I refuse to take this oath. In the name of the nationality of Texas, which has been betrayed by this convention, I refuse to take this oath. In the name of the Constitution of Texas, which has been trampled upon, I refuse to take this oath.”

The post of governor being declared vacant, Houston retired to his farm in Huntsville. His last two years alive were spent in fear of the calamity he was certain would strike the state--and that did, in fact, hit his family. A year after his warning of bloodshed, his firstborn son with wife Margaret, 18-year-old Sam Houston Jr., was so badly wounded at the Battle of Shiloh fighting for the Confederacy that he was left for dead. It took him months under the care of his mother before he recovered.

In July 1863, Houston himself died. Not long before the end, he confided his torment about and love for his state to friend Ashbel Smith:

“It is my misfortune to be a prophet like Cassandra, for my warnings are disbelieved. This war will be disastrous to the South and to Texas. The Northern armies will cut the Confederacy asunder. But while forecasting the perils and woes of Texas, I love her. Texas may spurn my counsels; Texas may cast me off, but in my abiding love for Texas, her fortunes are my fortunes; I shall lay my bones to repose in her bosom, I shall leave my blessings on her.”

This Day in Presidential History (Lincoln Holds Firm Against Extending Slavery)

December 13, 1860—For the second time in four days, Abraham Lincoln did what virtually no prior President-elect had done—influence the course of legislation before he took the oath of office—by urging a member of his own state’s delegation not to yield so much on compromise that he would break his party’s major plank: curbing the expansion of slavery.

Lincoln’s election the month before had spurred secessionist impulses in the South. One week after Lincoln’s second message, South Carolina would vote to secede from the Union. Five more Southern states would join her by the time Lincoln was inaugurated in March 1861.

If Lincoln’s pre-inaugural intervention in legislation was extraordinary, it was because the times themselves were. Perhaps the best explanation of why comes from historian Elizabeth Varon of the University of Virginia. This past weekend, I saw her on a C-Span panel, “The Nation Before and After the Civil War,” in which she discussed how, after years in which disunion had been dismissed with a shudder because of the prospect of vast bloodshed that would follow in its wake, influential Southerners now imagined a scenario where disunion became thinkable, without the terrors so long ago )(and, it turned out, accurately) envisioned.

Upping the stakes in this situation: the sea change in American parties. The Republican Party, having come into existence only six years before after the Kansas-Nebraska Act, had just won its first Presidential election.

But that race was the most sectionally divided in American history to that point. Lincoln won the Electoral College vote in a landslide, but not a single Southern state. In fact, his name did not even appear on the ballot in a number of these states. Whatever unionist sentiment was represented in these states divided between John Bell and Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s longtime Illinois rival, both of whom were prepared to compromise, in some form, with the forces of slavery (including extending the old slave-free line of the Missouri Compromise west to the Pacific).

A new party, then, was taking over the national government--or what remained of one, since many Southerners on Capitol Hill had either departed already or were making no bones about doing so. But two years before Lincoln would tell Congress in his annual message, “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew,” he was already acting on this belief in coping with this unprecedented crisis.

Four days after counseling Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery,” Lincoln wrote essentially the same thing from Springfield on December 13 to another friend on Capitol Hill from the same state, Congressman Elihu Washburne, in a short letter marked “Private and Confidential.”

Washburne had written Lincoln on December 10, warning that William Seward, a former rival for the Republican nomination who was about to become his Secretary of State, was “misrepresenting your position” with respect to slavery, in an attempt to conciliate the slaveholding South.

Lincoln would have none of it, writing in a nearly identical manner as the one he’d taken with Trumbull: “Prevent, as far as possible, any of our friends from demoralizing themselves and our cause by entertaining propositions for compromise of any sort on ‘slavery extension.’ There is no possible compromise upon it but which puts us under again, and leaves all our work to do over again…. On that point hold firm, as with a chain of steel.”

In a way, Lincoln was surprised both that secessionist advocates could misconstrue his intentions concerning slavery and that he needed to say anything further on the subject. Ever since re-entering politics six years before, he had qualified his adamant, fiercely argued brief against permitting slavery into Western territories with an equal insistence that he would not interfere with it where it already existed. He had said this so long and so often, he told Northern congressional advocates of compromise, that he couldn’t believe that it needed to be said again.

For once, this most eminently rational of men was being naïve. Just as the Soviet Union would react with anger--and, often, refusal to negotiate seriously--when American Presidents criticized human-rights violations in their country, so the South lashed out over any criticism of “the peculiar institution.” Both cases might have been a century apart, but the principle remained the same for the U.S.S.R. and the slaveholding South: moral criticism undercut the very foundations of their legitimacy, even if opponents professed not to want to take military action against areas where these violations continued.