With respect to Virginia, there clearly were a variety of rhetorics in play
during the political debates over secession.  That said, based both on my
own (admittedly unsystematic) reading of the sources and on the secondary
literature (such as it is), I don't think I am off base to say that the
most important issue at stake was slavery.

We should note that the rhetoric of republican independence requires, at
least as an implicit oppositional category, the existence of slavery.  It
is no accident (as Edmund Morgan demonstrated in 1972) that the creation of
a slave society in Virginia in the late 17th and early 18th centuries
produced an articulate understanding of republicanism among Virginia's
leaders in the late 18th century.  Thus, to show that there was a
republican rhetoric in play in the popular politics of Georgia should not
be taken to *exlude* the premise that slavery was at the core of the
debate.  We should at least hold open the possibility that a debate about
republican values was also a debate about the desirability of slavery--the
categories ("slavery" and "republican") do not exclude each other.

I think really to settle the issue, we'd have to look at the evidence, and
I don't think anyone has done that systematically.  In the mean time, the
weight of the evidence seems to me to support the strong claim I have
advanced (that slavery was *the* central issue in the secession crisis) and
not the weaker claim (it was one of several issues) advanced by Professor
Gutzman.  I am willing to be convinced otherwise--I don't have a strong
emotional stake in this one way or the other.  But so far as my own reading
of the sources can take me, the strong claim seems to me to be the one most
in consonance with the evidence.

I think this is a subject crying out for further research.  I don't mean to
imply that I think this is argument is closed--merely that the weight of
the evidence adduced so far supports the claim I have advanced.

Warm regards,
Kevin

--On Saturday, February 22, 2003 6:09 PM -0500 Constantine Gutzman
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> A couple of decades ago, a graduate student at U.Va. wrote a Master's
> essay on the secession crisis in Georgia.  What he found was that during
> the popular debate on the question, the advocates stressed the
> republicanism/self-government question; when the elections had already
> been held and the matter lay in the hands of the members of the
> slaveholding elite elected to the secession convention (or was it the
> legislature?  I don't recall), however, the proponents of secession
> focused on Lincoln's election as a threat to slavery.  So, what can one
> conclude from that?
>
> I do not myself understand why there is this felt imperative to insist
> that slavery was the only cause of secession, on one hand, or that it was
> virtually not a factor, on the other.  People seldom make such decisions
> on the basis of lone motives, and slavery seems certainly to have been
> one of the factors involved in this process.  We needn't agree with
> either side in this argument, then.
>
> Along that line, I would note that Woody Holton's _Forced Founders_ proved
> several years ago that fears concerning slavery was one of the factors
> motivating Virginia Patriots to separate from Great Britain in the 1770s.
> It's odd that while the Confederates are always castigated on this score
> (rightly, in my opinion), the Patriots of 1776 get a pass.  This, it seems
> to me, likely says something about the motivations of the people involved
> in this historiographic debate -- but I'm not sure exactly what.
>
> Constantine Gutzman
>
> Prof. K.R. Constantine Gutzman
> Department of History
> Western Connecticut State University
>
> To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions
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--
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of History, MSC 2001
James Madison University
Harrisonburg VA 22807
Phone:  540/568-6306
Email:  [log in to unmask]

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