A History of the American People

said that he deplored talk of secession, but nothing could be done, by him anyway, to prevent it.
Three days later South Carolina elected an overwhelmingly secessionist state convention which
on December 20 declared that the state was no longer part of the Union. Davis himself tried to
promote a compromise, then despaired of it. On January 7 the secession convention of his own
state, Mississippi, met and on the 9th voted 84 to 15 to leave the Union. Two days before, the
senators from Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi had met
in caucus in Washington and decided to meet again in Montgomery, Alabama on February 15 to
form a government. Like other senators, Davis made an emotional speech of farewell in
Congress. Going south through Tennessee, he was asked to make a speech at his hotel,
Crutchfield House, and did so. Whereupon the brother of the hotel's owner, William Crutchfield,
told him he was a renegade and a traitor ... We are not to be hoodwinked and bamboozled and dragged into your Southern, codfish, aristocratic, Tory-blooded South Carolina mobocracy.' The crowd, many of them armed, backed these accusations-there was strong Union sentiment in the back-country and in the mountains. Davis was promptly chosen general in Mississippi's army. Many, including his wife, wanted him to be commander-in-chief of the confederate forces, rather than president. He agreed with Varina. Meeting on February 4, the six states which had already seceded, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Alabama, drew up a new constitution, which was virtually the same as the old except it explicitly recognized slaves as property. Robert Toombs (1810-85), Senator from Georgia, might have got the presidency, but he got publicly drunk several nights running. In the end Davis was chosen more or less unanimously. His journey from his home near Vicksburg to his inauguration in Montgomery was a sinister foretaste of the problems the South faced. The two cities were less than 300 miles apart, along a direct east-west road, but Davis, trying to get there more quickly by rail, had to travel north into Tennessee, then across northern Alabama to Chattanooga, south to Atlanta, and from there southwest to Montgomery, a distance of 850 miles around three-and-one-half sides of a square on half a dozen different railroads using three different gauges. No railway trunk lines bound the rebellious states together. The South had no infrastructure." Its railroad system was designed solely to get cotton to sea for export. There was virtually no interstate trade in the South, and so no lines to carry it. It took five railroad lines to get from Columbia to Milledgeville, for example; the railroads in Florida, Texas, and most of Louisiana had no connection at all with the other Southern states. The functional geography of the South, both natural and manmade, was against secession. In his inaugural, Davis said the Confederacy was born ofa peaceful appeal to the ballot box.'
That was not true. No state held a referendum. It was decided by a total of 854 men in various
secession conventions, all of them selected by legislatures, not by the voters. Of these 157 voted
against secession. So 697 men, mostly wealthy, decided the destiny of 9 million people, mostly
poor. Davis said he was anxious to show that secession was not a rich man's war and a poor man's fight,' but the fact is it was the really rich, and the merely well-to-do, both of whom had a major interest in the struggle, who decided to commence it, not the rest of the whites, who had no direct economic interest at all. And the quality of Southern leadership, intellectually at least, was poor. The reasons for secession, put into the declarations of each states, made no sense, and merely reflected the region's paranoia. Mississippi's said: ‘the people of the Northern states have assumed a revolutionary position towards the Southern states.' They hadinsulted and outraged
our citizens when traveling amongst them ... by taking their servants and liberating the same.'
They had encouraged a hostile invasion of a Southern state to incite insurrection, murder and rapine.' South Carolina's was equally odd, ending in a denunciation of Lincoln,whose opinions