SOUTH CAROLINA COLLEGE AND THE ORIGINS OF SECESSION
In 1856, one member of the South Carolina state legislature, whose proposals for the reform of primary and secondary school education had been thwarted by a voting bloc of alumni, stated bluntly:
The College–the S.C. College–governs the state. Its Trustees are the Governor–the Judges–the Chancellors –the president of the Senate–the Speaker of the House–the Chairmen of certain Committees–distinguished and ex-distinguished personages of the land. Legislators talk of the College with undisguised scorn for all other pretenders to the name of College in the State, and most of those out of it.[1]
South Carolina College was uniquely important in the politics of nineteenth century South Carolina. The elite created by the College was implicated in many of the anomalous characteristics of the states nineteenth century political history, which James Banner once called the “Problem of South Carolina”. Moreover, the influence of the College and its alumni was felt throughout the lower South.
South Carolina was the only state which never developed a two party system in the antebellum period. Often only one candidate ran and was elected without opposition. James Banner has noted that “In the 144 congressional races in the state between 1824 and 1860, -78- or more than one half, offered no contest to the voters. Moreover, 128 or 71 percent of the 180 candidates whose party affiliations are known during the same period considered themselves Democrats. Of the rest, only 18, or 10 percent, were Whigs”[2] Current interpretations do not adequately account for the lack of an antebellum two party system.[3] James Banner suggested that there was “…a link between these out of phase party systems and the two great failures of American Federalism- Nullification and secession- in which South Carolina played the central role. The College and its alumni were intimately involved with all of these crises. Many peculiar aspects of political development in South Carolina before and after the Civil War were determined by the men, ideas and political influence of the College. Part of the solution to the “problem of South Carolina” is to be found in South Carolina College.
During the antebellum period South Carolina College also exerted a powerful influence on the newly admitted states bordering the Gulf: Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana and Texas. At least one thousand, perhaps as many as fifteen hundred alumni left the state, and nearly all went to the lower South. In the process, these ministers, doctors, editors and lawyers contributed to the development of a new political elite in these new plantation societies. College alumni served as antebellum Governors of Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Mississippi. More than a dozen alumni were sent to Congress from Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. One of the forty-three signers of the original Confederate constitution was a former president of the College. Eight of the remaining forty-two signers were alumni.[4]
Transplanted alumni maintained close ties to South Carolina even if they migrated to the Gulf states. In 1833 James Dellett (’10) (later Congressman Dellett) of Alabama opposed Nullification, but could not bear to coerce South Carolina.[5] He wrote “Although I am satisfied in my own mind that So Carolina is wrong- yet I cannot forget that she nourished me in my infancy and taught lessons that I learned in my youth and early manhood. I am proud to say I love her in the midst of her faults…”[6]. Contemporaries commented, sometimes critically, upon the politicians of the South Carolinian diaspora and their connections to the radicalism of their home state. In 1860 when Governor Madison Perry (’32) prepared to lead Florida out of the Union, one writer described the Governor as “a catspaw for South Carolina secessionists”.[7] Alumni of the College represented four of the seven states that ratified the original Confederate Constitution.[8]
More than three thousand young men attended the College prior to the Civil War and it would be hard to overestimate the importance of the College and its alumni on the political culture of nineteenth century South Carolina. South Carolina College was a uniquely important institution in political life and this was often recognized by contemporaries. An early alumnus stated that “the great merit of South Carolina College is that it tended to make the state one people.”[9] One observer noted, “The South Carolina College has done more to make us one homogeneous people than all other influences combined.”[10] The fact that the College was the single most important influence on the politics of South Carolina’s antebellum elite was well known. It was noted by a writer in the Charleston Mercury,
If the College goes [say] farewell to the unity of sentiment which has made South Carolina, small as she is, the center and rallying point of states’ rights resistance; as Massachusetts has been, owing to the influence of Harvard, of the antagonistic principles of encroaching federal power. It is the educated intellect and the trained and developed morale of the state which gives it tone, character and direction.[11]
The College produced ministers, doctors, editors and planters who turned out to be indefatigable writers and talkers. Papers like the Charleston Mercury and periodicals like the Southern Quarterly Review allowed those alumni who dominated politics in South Carolina to reach a wide audience throughout the embryonic Southern Nation, a nation conceived largely in their imaginations. Before the war, South Carolina College was one of the most important institutional sources of ultra Southern, proslavery, secessionist political thought. An alumnus stated that “from its commencement, the College has become to a large extent the center, not only of education, but of political thought in the state, and is doubtless the institution which has done the most to mold and influence the character of the people of the state.”[12]
The students of South Carolina College ranged in age from fourteen to
twenty, and they were drawn almost exclusively from the families of the planting
elite. These young men were given a hyperpoliticized education intended to create
gentleman politicians. The College was an organic institution of higher learning
which articulated and developed both an ethos and a political theory. The cult of
honor greatly influenced the temperament of the College alumni which was
manifested in their social and political behavior. The bluster and personal
touchiness noted in many alumni was manifested throughout their political careers
as well as in their political judgements. In 1860, of those members of South
Carolina’s planter elite who had a college education, more had attended the
College than all other institutions combined.[13] Most importantly, South Carolina’s
Secession Convention was composed of a full forty-four percent alumni.
South Carolina College helped keep alive a tradition of political discourse which borrowed heavily from Federalism and the deferential “gentleman’s politics” that it legitimized. Many themes stressed by South Carolina’s Federalist elite, such as the pursuit of republican virtue by an independent squirearchy, the support for virtual as opposed to actual representation, the belief in natural aristocracy, the equation of democracy with demagoguery, and the abhorrence of factions and parties, were kept alive on campus and in the state house long after they became extinct elsewhere. South Carolina’s planter elite consciously restricted access to higher education the sons of the elite, and they educated these planters’ sons in a locally developed political tradition which was weighted toward quasi Federalist proslavery conservatism which was gradually transformed into proslavery Southern nationalism.[14] The College, which graduated its first class in 1808, was a locus of atavistic politics from its inception until the fateful afternoon in 1861 when every student simultaneously joined the Confederate army. In 1857 the Charleston Mercuryacknowledged the conservatism of the College when it asserted that “Our state Constitution … but for the influence of the College would long since have fallen before the attacks of prejudice, demagogism and the spirit of shallow, narrow, socialistic reform.”[15] Another newspaper noted that by educating the sons of the elite at the College, the state successfully insulated the upcoming generation of politicians from “foreign ideologies.”[16] Although in later years some tried to deny that the College was “the hotbed of disunion and the political parent of those who were the great leaders of anti-Union sentiment in the state,” such denials were more than a little disingenuous.[[17]](applewebdata://E3766755-8EFB-4058-A44F-8FFB89F0455C#_ftn17) From the 1820s on, a majority of the Trustees, faculty, alumni and students were closely connected with proslavery secessionism.
The uniquely close connection between politics and higher education in South Carolina was underscored by the fact that the College was located in the state capital, Columbia, just down the street from the state legislature. During the antebellum period, South Carolina College alumni were a dominant force in the legislature. If the alumni and their relations voted together as a bloc, a majority could be found in most legislative sessions, as some would be reformers found out to their dismay. South Carolina College alumni dominated Federal officeholding as well: between 1830 and 1860, nearly half of South Carolina’s Congressmen and Senators were made up of alumni. In the absence of organized political parties, the alumni were the most cohesive network of influential political figures in the state. South Carolina College was also crucial to the invention of the South as a self conscious region with a distinct political, cultural, ideological and racial identity. A complex of ideas, institutions, and men, all connected to the College in some way, pervaded political life in nineteenth century South Carolina and extended into new Southern states as they entered the union.
The alumni were a self-consciously radical regional elite. After leaving South Carolina, most of those educated at the College continued to entertain the extreme proslavery, secessionist opinions inculcated there, although those who held elective office necessarily modified the expression of these views to suit their new circumstances. Dixon Lewis (’20) who served as a Congressman and Senator from Alabama, mastered the idiom of Gulf state politics yet maintained the same vocabulary and pan Southern assumptions as did the nullifiers of South Carolina. During a Nullification meeting in Columbia, a letter from Lewis (’20) was read with the following toast “South Carolina- her course is the course of the whole South. Her defeat would prove a death blow to Southern Liberty”[18] Apart from alumni of the College, such opinions were scarce outside of South Carolina.[19] During the Nullification crisis, one of the few Congressman not elected from South Carolina who consistently supported the nullifiers was Lewis (‘20).[20] He articulated the same militant vision of a South united in the defense of slavery that the congressmen from South Carolina did. Virtually alone among Congressmen not representing the Palmetto state, Lewis predicted in 1832 a unified Southern struggle with the North:
…I will not even discuss this great question of Southern wrongs as an Alabamian, but as a southern man, completely identified in feeling and interest with that oppressed portion of the Union south of the Potomac… Gentlemen on this floor believe that excitement, if not the opposition, to this system in the South, is confined to South Carolina, and that it has been produced by disaffected politicians. …Let gentlemen not deceive themselves into the belief that the other Southern states can or will separate from South Carolina in the common struggle for their common rights, whatever apparent differences there may be as to the manner in which this struggle shall commence.[21]
Lewis’ statement was not descriptive but performative. He was constructing a Southern identity. A collective identity is an all too temporal accumulation of such incantations. In 1851, while travelling in Alabama, Oscar Lieber (‘49) wrote home to his father, a professor at the College, about the homogeneity of the political beliefs held by the alumni he met as he traveled throughout the lower South:
Our College certainly holds the highest position among southern institutions of the kind and most men who graduate are above the average intellect of the country…they spread over the whole broad acres of the South and yet whenever you meet a graduate of our College, you can be sure, yes 50 to 1 that he is strong in his political faith and that that faith is of the right sort. It would be interesting if it could be ascertained , for instance, what number of her alumni were Know Nothings. I feel confident not more than 5% were of that party and not more than 20% were indifferent. So regular is this similarity of opinion that a priori I should never hesitate to speak to them, but as if they had already expressed it.[22]
The political faith of transplanted alumni was predictable and homogeneous. It is noteworthy that alumni like Lieber (’49), armed with a diploma and letters of introduction, had no problem finding other alumni who might offer them hospitality, introductions to the local gentry, or useful influence with other alumni politicians. The formidable influence of this “old boys network” extended throughout the Gulf states back to South Carolina to Washington itself.
In their Secession Convention of December, 1860, the elder statesmen of South Carolina proclaimed the reasons for their decision in a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes of Secession”. Of the seven men delegated to draft this document, one, Robert W. Barnwell was a former president of the College, three of the other six, C.G. Memminger (‘19), F.H. Wardlaw (‘18) and J.P. Richardson (‘19) were men who had met more than forty years earlier at South Carolina College. The views in this document were endorsed by the Commissioner that had been sent to South Carolina’s Convention by the state of Alabama, John A. Elmore (’24). He had encouraged Cooperationists by informing the Convention on the first day of its meeting that secession would “ give the cause strength not only in Alabama, but with other states united with her in sentiment.”[23] After seceding, the Convention prudently attempted to cement political ties with other states. On December 24, one member of the Convention, William S. Lyles (’32), made a motion to extend an invitation to sit at the Convention to Madison S. Perry (’32), Governor of Florida.[24] Lyles and Perry had been friends at College during the Nullification Crisis. The next day Perry cabled back to the Convention that he regretted not being able to attend immediately, though
I approve of every act of your Convention, in so far as it is known to me, in every particular. Your Ordnance is in good taste, to the point, and covers the whole ground. Permit me to assure you that gallant little Florida will be the next to follow your patriotic lead. Upon the meeting of the Convention, Florida will, as certainly as anything in the future can be certain, wheel immediately into line behind the gallant old Palmetto. We are identified with you in interest, in feeling, in determination not to submit to Black republican rule, and a common destiny must be ours.[25]
At the Secession Convention, some men like Maxcy Gregg (‘35) wished to include a list of peripheral issues like the tariff of Abominations and the Bank in the Declaration, but fire-eater Lawrence Keitt (‘43) argued forcefully for clarity, insisting that such trivial diversions diminished their cause. He insisted that the focus be kept on slavery, which was, as he put it, “the great central point from which we are proceeding.”[26] The Convention voted with Keitt. The document produced by the Convention was perfectly candid about their reason for seceding. State sovereignty is mentioned, but only with reference to slavery,
We affirm that these ends for which this government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been destructive of them by the action of the nonslaveholding States. Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and they have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted the open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.[27]
The Declaration frankly acknowledged that the election of Abraham Lincoln prompted
them to secede because it signaled the triumph of abolitionism. Their Constitution
would not be safe in his hands:
For twenty five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found in the Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. [28]
According to the Declaration, extending citizenship to black people only
exacerbated the lawless sectional partisanship and antislavery fanaticism which had
dishonored the North for a generation. The Declaration continued:
This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the states by elevating to citizenship, persons, who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.
On the 4th of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the Common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.
The guarantees of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal government will have become the enemy.
Sectional interest and animosity will deepen the irritation, and all hope of remedy rendered vain, by the fact that public opinion at the North has invested a great political error with the sanctions of more erroneous religious belief. [29]
This document, which the Commissioners of the new Republic of South Carolina took with them when they invited other Southern states to join them to form the Confederacy, contained familiar ideas that faculty and alumni of South Carolina College had been advocating since Nullification. The individuals who were appointed as Commissioners from South Carolina and proclaimed its independence were equally familiar. The convention had to choose its best and most capable men for such a momentous task, and the choice fell largely upon alumni. On New Year’s day, Leonidas W. Spratt (’40) was elected Commissioner to Florida. On January 2, 1861, A. P. Calhoun (’32) was elected Commissioner to Alabama, John L. Manning (’37) was elected Commissioner to Louisiana, A. C. Spain (’41) was elected Commissioner to Arkansas, and former Congressman M. L. Bonham (’34) was elected Commissioner to Mississippi, but illness struck and he was replaced.[30] C. G. Memminger (’19) was eventually appointed Commissioner to Virginia.
Each of these appointments was apt because these Commissioners had previously established connections in the states that received them which enhanced their credibility. John L. Manning (’37) was sent to Louisiana, where he was well known as a planter with large land and slaveholdings. Indeed, South Carolina’s Commissioners doubtless got a warm reception from the transplanted alumni who graced the secession conventions in Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.
On January 9, 1861, Mississippi was the second state to secede. The Mississippi Secession Convention had five alumni among its members. Henry Vaughan, Sr. (‘16) described himself as an “Old Line Whig Secessionist.” Hugh R. Miller (’33) was on campus during Cooper’s agitation over Nullification and he described himself as a “States Rights Democrat.” Andrew Pickens Hill (’41) came from a family of Nullifying South Carolinian gentry who moved to Mississippi during the “flush times.” J. R.Chalmers (’51) a “States Rights Democrat” who had been the valedictorian of his class, spoke in favor of secession.[31] A few years later in 1864, Col. Chalmers became infamous as one of the commanders in the massacre of surrendered black troops at Fort Pillow.
Leonidas Spratt (’40) was welcomed warmly by the Florida Secession Convention.[32] Governor Perry (‘32), was an enthusiastic secessionist, as was the President of the Convention, John C. McGeehee, (’21). McGeehee and the other four alumni at the Convention voted for secession. The third state to leave the Union, Florida, seceded January 10, 1861. Andrew Pickens Calhoun (’32) was well received by the Alabama Secession Convention. He had been a planter in Marengo County for twenty years, had family ties to influential “Southern rights” politicians in the state, and since he was the late Senator’s son, he was known to be a Calhounite.[33] Important state officials, like the President of the Alabama Senate, were alumni. In addition, five members of the Convention matriculated at the College during the 1830s and 40s. Alabama seceded on January 11, 1861.
Georgia seceded January 19th. Louisiana seceded January 26th. Texas seceded February 1st. South Carolina College alumni were among the members of all these Conventions. In later months, alumni were also members of the Arkansas and Virginia and North Carolina Secession Conventions. For a small group of men, the alumni of South Carolina College were astonishingly ubiquitous in the creation of the Confederacy. The most dramatic index of the connection between South Carolina College and the development of Southern sectionalism is the activities of the graduates in the Civil War. The College contributed many officers, including at least twenty-three generals. Sixteen College alumni were members of the short-lived Confederate Congress: they represented Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and of course, South Carolina.[34]
The alumni had helped construct the collective identity of the antebellum South
and eventually of the Confederacy. Their influence was an important source of fireeating
radicalism in South Carolina and of the entire lower South, which many alumni took to
be a greater South Carolina. As one alumnus, who had served in the Confederate
army remembered:
To the College is very largely attributable the influence which has not only made South Carolina the prompt and determined champion of Southern rights and interests, especially state sovereignty, free trade, and the institution of domestic African slavery, but which has also deeply impressed the doctrines entertained, by South Carolina, on those subjects on the heart and mind of the entire South and Southwest. So great has been this influence as to give it historical significance.[35]
[1]Thomas Moore (’62), a student at the College collected a scrapbook with newspaper clippings of a controversy about the College and its political influence. These clippings were from 1856 dates of The Spartanburg Express, (edited by T. Stobo Farrow (’52) and the Carolina Spartan, which served as a vehicle for non-alumnus legislator J. Wofford Tucker, alias “Viator,” to attack the College. These editions, otherwise unavailable, are in a notebook, manuscript, bound n.d., SCL, Columbia.
[2]James Banner, “The Problem of South Carolina”, in The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, eds. (New York, Knopf, 1974) p.80.
[3]Lacy Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, The South Carolina Upcountry 1800-1860 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1988) p.99-144.
[4]Marshall L. de Rosa, The Confederate Constitution of 1861: An Inquiry into American Constitutionalism (Columbia, Missouri, University of Missouri Press, 1991) p.151.
[5]Those men who can be identified as alumni will be indicated with a year after their names, indicating the year that they left or graduated from South Carolina College. Alumni” and “alumnus” will be used to refer to all those who matriculated at South Carolina College, whether they received degrees or not. The exact number of matriculants at the College is not known as the records are incomplete. Three thousand is a minimal figure. The true figure may be as high as thirty five hundred.
[6]James Dellett-Joseph B. Earle, May 29, 1833, Dellett Papers, ADAH, Montgomery.
[7]“Incognito” Tallahassee Floridian and Journal, December 8, 1860.
[8]DeRosa, The Confederate Constitution of 1861, p.151. Alumni represented Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and of course, South Carolina.
[9]Grayson, Autobiography, Robert D. Bass, ed. “The Autobiography of William Grayson” (unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1933) p.86.
[10]Joseph Daniel Pope, The State and the College (Columbia: Presbyterian Publishing
House, 1892) p.18.
[11]Quoted in the Columbia Daily South Carolinian, September 8, 1857.
[12]Leroy Youmans, “The Historic Significance of South Carolina College,” Proceedings
of the Centennial Celebration of South Carolina College (Columbia, The State Co., 1905)
p.37.
[13]Chalmers Davidson, The Last Foray: South Carolina Planters of 1860: A Sociological Study (Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1971) p.21.
[14]Compare Larry Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America 1701-1840, (Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1987) p.41-74.
[15]Charleston Mercury, September 3, 1857.
[16]Columbia Daily South Carolinian, September 3,1857.
[17]Joseph Daniel Pope, The State and the College (Columbia, Presbyterian Publishing House, 1892) p.22.
[18]Charleston Mercury, August 14, 1832.
[19]See E. Merton Coulter, “The Nullification Movement in Georgia”, Georgia Historical Quarterly 5 (March,1921) p.4-39, Lucie Robertson Bridgeforth, “Mississippi’s Response to Nullification; 1833” Journal of Mississippi History, 45, (February, 1983) p.1-22, Paul H. Bergeron, Tennessee’s Response to the Nullification Crisis” JSH, 39, (February,1973) p.23-44.
[20]Richard E. Ellis, The Union at Risk, Jacksonian Democracy, States Rights, and the Nullification Crisis, (Oxford, 1987) p.70. [Hereafter Ellis, The Union at Risk]
[21]Dixon Lewis, June 15, 1832, Register of Debates, 22nd Congress, 1st Session, p.3570-3577.
[22]Oscar Lieber-Francis and Matilda Lieber n.d.,1851, Lieber Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
[23]Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion, Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War, (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2001) p.27.
[24]John Amasa May and Joan Reynolds Faunt, South Carolina Secedes, (Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1960) p.20.
[25]May and Faunt, South Carolina Secedes, p.21-22.
[26]Cited in John H. Merchant, “Lawrence M. Keitt; South Carolina Fire-eater” (unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Virginia, 1976) p.343.
[27]Declaration of the Immediate Causes of Secession” in May and Faunt, South Carolina Secedes, p.80.
[28]Declaration of the Immediate Causes of Secession” in May and Faunt, South Carolina Secedes, p.81
[29]Declaration of the Immediate Causes of Secession” in May and Faunt, South Carolina Secedes, p.81
[30]May and Faunt, South Carolina Secedes, p.26.
[31]Journal of the Mississippi Secession Convention, p.8.
[32]Faunt and May, South Carolina Secedes, p.34.
[33]Thornton, Politics and Power, p.86.
[34]Ezra J. Warner and W. Buck Yearns, Biographical Register of the Confederate Congress (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1975).
[35]Youmans, “Historical Significance,” p.161-2.