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Article Excerpt
IN THE FALL OF 1860, LIMESTONE SPRINGS WAS AN UNDISTINGUISHED village in the far upper piedmont of South Carolina, in sight of the Blue Ridge foothills and only a few miles distant from the North Carolina border. The village itself was home to a female academy and a few shops; the surrounding countryside was hilly and dotted with small farms rather than the slave plantations that characterized much of agriculture in antebellum South Carolina. Remote as the area may have been, at least some white residents were determined not to be left behind as the state moved toward secession in the final months of 1860. In early November, after returns in the national elections made clear that Abraham Lincoln would be the next president, a group of men at Limestone Springs set about organizing a volunteer military company under the name of the "Southern Rights Guards." Members of the company were on hand at a secessionist rally on November 16, parading under a flag emblazoned with a lone star and the word "SECESSION!" A committee of organizers explained their purpose in a letter to Governor William H. Gist. "This Section of our Dist. (+ indeed we might add, our whole Dist.) is far behind the Central + Coast Dists. in the doctrine of 'States Rights,' +, more especially, in that of 'separate action' on the part of our State," they wrote. "We are endeavoring to take advantage of the present extraordinary circumstances to arouse our Sec[tion] to a sense of our true position." (1)
Historians have long recognized the existence of organizations like the Limestone Springs Southern Rights Guards, but scholars have seldom subjected those groups to close or systematic scrutiny, or acknowledged the crucial importance that secessionists attached to them. Many accounts of South Carolina's path to disunion quote William Gilmore Simms's memorable assertion that the secession movement was "a complete landsturm, a general rising of the people." Few have noted, however, the evidence that Simms himself offered as proof of that claim. "In this district of Barnwell, which can send 3000 men into the field there is not one who is not a secessionist & preparing his arms," wrote Simms, who had made a "call for Minute Men" at a secessionist rally in late October. "The old men of 60 are forming companies. Never was such enthusiasm seen, from seaboard to the mountains." Pronouncing the movement "a perfect landsturm" a few days later, Simms asserted that "Twenty thousand men are now armed in S.C. and there are squads of Minute Men in every precinct." (2)
This article examines the vital role that Minute Man companies played in the mobilization for secession by focusing on the upper piedmont of South Carolina, a white-majority region where radicalism had met with only limited success before 1860. The Limestone Springs Southern Rights Guards was one of twenty-seven volunteer companies known to have organized in support of secession in the upper piedmont during the final months of that year. These groups represented the culmination of a long tradition of paramilitarism in antebellum southern politics. Drilling and parading at secessionist rallies, they offered supporters of disunion a chance to participate actively in the movement and served to intimidate any who were not like minded. For secessionists such as William Gilmore Simms, anxious to claim popular legitimacy for their cause, these groups also provided self-evident proof of the popularity of secession. A closer look at how those organizations operated--and who participated in them--challenges the view that "[y]eoman joined planter to make a revolution" on behalf of secession in South Carolina and suggests the need to rethink the wider analysis of politics and ideology on which that interpretation is based. (3)
During the past twenty years, historians of South Carolina have contributed greatly to a historiography that makes the study of the yeomanry--small farmers who owned land and perhaps a few slaves--central to understanding electoral politics and political ideology in the antebellum South. In South Carolina, to be sure, the planter class probably wielded greater political power than in any other state in the union, due to the nearly statewide extent of the plantation belt and a political structure that was the most undemocratic, even for white men, in the antebellum United States. Lacy K. Ford Jr. and Stephanie McCurry have argued that South Carolina nonetheless possessed a vibrant political culture marked by the widespread participation of yeoman voters, who far outnumbered the planter elite. An ideology of proslavery or slave-labor republicanism provided grounds for an accommodation between yeoman and planter and united them in the defense of slavery, an institution that members of both classes saw as essential to their privileges as citizens, property owners, and heads of household. Both McCurry, in her study of the South Carolina Low-country, and Ford, in his study of the upcountry, view the secession crisis as confirming the strength of proslavery republicanism and the yeomanry's support for the politics of slavery. In McCurry's words, "yeoman farmers not only supported the cause of secession and dis,4 union, they made it their own." (4)
Such assertions about yeoman support for secession in South Carolina have two difficulties--one evidentiary, the other conceptual. For other southern states, historians have used returns from the elections to state conventions to measure support for secession, attempting to correlate support for candidates of different stripes with variables regarding slave ownership and other social, economic, and political characteristics. These attempts have proved problematic even where the returns are available, and historians have used them to support contradictory conclusions. (5) Such analysis is not possible for South Carolina, where in most districts supporters of immediate secession ran unopposed in the December 6 elections for the state convention. The lack of organized opposition demonstrated the wide support for secession among the state's political leaders but was hardly proof of popular enthusiasm for the cause.
This is where the evidence regarding Minute Man companies is especially useful. The men who organized and joined these groups represent the most enthusiastic and active grassroots supporters of secession. And the evidence indicates that even in the upper piedmont of South Carolina--an area with a majority of non-slaveholders--the mobilization for secession was squarely in the hands of the slave-owning minority. Within the region, Minute Man companies appeared first and most frequently in areas of the countryside with high percentages of slaveholders in the white population and less frequently if at all in areas where non-slave-owning whites were most numerous. About three-quarters of identified Minute Men came from slaveholding households, more than double the incidence of such households in the population as a whole. More particularly, the membership rolls of these companies suggest a split among the yeomanry along lines of slave ownership, as slaveholding yeomen participated at levels far exceeding those of their non-slave-owning counterparts.
These findings point to a conceptual problem with the thesis emphasizing proslavery republicanism. The contribution of that historiography has been to explore the place of small farmers in a society dominated, economically and politically, by slave-owning planters and to emphasize the significance of slavery for political discourse and relations among white men of different classes. But the task of exploring that significance is made more difficult by constructing the yeomanry as a category that includes both non-slave-owning and slave-owning small farmers and by failing to differentiate between the two in discussing their response to the politics of slavery. The implication of this approach--odd for a historiography that has tended to emphasize class and material relations--is that the actual ownership of slaves had no bearing on how white men responded to a movement whose leaders unabashedly put the defense of slavery at its center. Evidence from the upper piedmont suggests that some yeomen did indeed participate in that movement and make it their own, but they tended to be those who owned the human property in question. In joining the Minute Man companies of the upper piedmont, slave-owning yeomen took their place alongside the larger slaveholders among their neighbors; non-slave-owning yeomen played little part in the movement and, in that respect, pursued a course similar to that of laborers, tenants, and other poor white men who owned neither land nor slaves. (6)
The relative abstention of non-slave owners from the mobilization for secession, finally, suggests the need to appreciate the limits as well as the power of proslavery ideology. Events from the fall of 1860 provide little evidence of widespread Unionism among the non-slave-owning majority of the upper piedmont, and certainly not of opposition to slavery. But non-slave-owning white men could accept the premises of proslavery doctrine without rushing to embrace the secessionist conclusion. Their failure to do so in the state where radical doctrine had received the fullest airing and faced the fewest structural obstacles could hardly bode well for the ability of secessionists to obtain substantial support among non-slave owners elsewhere in the South.
In a state dominated more thoroughly by plantation slavery than any other in the Union, the upper piedmont of antebellum South Carolina stood out as something of an anomaly. The region lies in the state's far northwestern corner, where the broad piedmont plain of the Atlantic seaboard meets the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains; in 1860 it consisted of five districts (as South Carolina then called the civil divisions that later became counties)--York, Spartanburg, Greenville, Pickens, and Anderson. On the eve of the Civil War, slaves composed almost 60 percent of the population of South Carolina, and plantation agriculture extended to nearly every part of the state. The upper piedmont, however, remained a white-majority region where small farms rather than plantations predominated and staple production continued to be limited. To be sure, the extent of slave ownership and plantation agriculture varied considerably with the topography and quality of soil within the region; thus, only about one in six white families in mountainous Pickens owned slaves in 1860, compared to three-fifths or more of those in some of the flatter and richer lands of York District. Such variations notwithstanding, through the end of the antebellum era the upper piedmont remained a redoubt of that broad category of farmers whom historians conventionally label as yeomen--landowning farmers who tilled their fields with the labor of white family members and perhaps a few slaves. (7)
For much of the antebellum era, white residents of the upper piedmont appeared to be dubious allies of the radical planter-politicians who controlled state politics. The region emerged as an area of strong Unionist sentiment during the nullification crisis of 1832-1833, when the state's political leaders defied President Andrew Jackson and declared their intention to nullify enforcement of federal tariffs within the state's borders. (8) The 1832 state legislative elections, which were dominated by the question of nullification, put radicals on notice regarding their weak support in the upper piedmont. Nullifiers won a clear-cut victory only in the electoral district of Pendleton, an area that included the plantation of chief nullifier John C. Calhoun. The nullifier ticket in York District won by fewer than 60 votes out of almost 2,200 cast, and Unionists triumphed by margins of more than two-to-one in Spartanburg and Greenville Districts. A mountainous area of upper Greenville District earned the nickname the "Dark Corner" from nullifiers, who called it a place "in which the light of Nullification would not shine," and the region as a whole acquired a reputation for Unionism that persisted long after the immediate crisis was defused in 1833. (9)
Upcountry residents again demonstrated no great enthusiasm for radicalism during the first secession crisis of 1850-1852. Even as leading planter-politicians in the state made loud threats of disunion in response to federal restrictions on slavery in the territories, many voters in the upper piedmont turned a deaf ear to the controversy. W. K. Easley, the secessionist editor of the Pickens Keowee Courier, complained of an "indifference or disposition of neutrality existing in the minds of some, based upon the supposition, that as they own none of that particular kind of property to be affected by the conflicting interest of the North and South, they are not really parties to the contest...." The issue was put to rest for the moment in October 1851, when...
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