Like many Victorian controversialists, the proslavery writer George Fitzhugh often displayed more interest in outraging his opponents than in convincing his allies. His starkly reactionary critique of “free society” circulated with greatest effect during the 1850s among antislavery partisans like Abraham Lincoln and William Lloyd Garrison, each of whom invoked his formulations as evidence of slaveholding depravity.Footnote ¹ Antebellum masters, by contrast, rarely accorded Fitzhugh the same respect that they gave to those more “moderate” polemicists who vindicated bondage upon avowedly republican terms. Even those who warmed to Fitzhugh's brand of “slavery aggressions” were reluctant, prior to 1860, to embrace his audacious challenge to reigning political orthodoxy.Footnote ²

The historiography of proslavery thought as it has developed over the last half-century has echoed this nineteenth-century discrepancy. Fitzhugh, Henry Hughes, and the other contributors to what the political scientist Louis Hartz memorably dubbed the South's “Reactionary Enlightenment” still garner first-rate analysis in studies of American political and social ideology.Footnote ³ Yet the recent reassessment of proslavery thought by Southern historians has paid far less attention to Fitzhugh's eccentric brand of counterrevolutionary polemics than to other aspects of proslavery intellectual endeavor.Footnote ⁴ Even Eugene Genovese has shifted his assessment of a figure he once associated with the “logical outcome of the slaveholders’ philosophy.” Over the past quarter-century, Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese have devoted less attention to sensational provocateurs like Fitzhugh than to the sober moralists within the proslavery clergy and to similarly erudite proslavery political economists, legal theorists, and historians.Footnote ⁵

The following essay revisits the nexus of proslavery extremism and Southern thought by attending to the transformative period of secession and war. Between the summer of 1860 and Fitzhugh's heralding of a “great Conservative reaction” in the middle of 1863, the slave South witnessed one of the sharpest counterrevolutionary turns in American history.Footnote ⁶ In the context of disunion, constitutional revision, and military mobilization, the region's two most important journals featured a dramatic uptick in full-throated reaction and thereby indicated a growing appetite for more absolutist modes of proslavery governance. Fitzhugh and a group of fellow Confederate ideologues who wrote for these journals provided an unusually systematic validation of wartime militarism and its utility in securing social order. In doing so, they foresaw how the Confederacy's military struggle would lend new credence to Fitzhugh's conviction that human government was first and foremost “a thing of force, not of consent.” Though they quickly passed from the scene after the Confederacy collapsed, these failed counterrevolutionaries anticipated key aspects of the Southern authoritarian tradition that persisted long after emancipation.Footnote ⁷

THE VEHICLES AND VISTAS OF COUNTERREVOLUTION

Most scholarship on George Fitzhugh has addressed the two idiosyncratic books he wrote during the 1850s, neither of which inspired much emulation from fellow proslavery writers. A more meaningful index of Fitzhugh's influence was his trailblazing advocacy of a proslavery variant of “higher journalism.” After he began to write for DeBow's Review in 1857 at the age of fifty, Fitzhugh demonstrated over the subsequent decade how a magazine ostensibly devoted to commerce might be transformed, through a combination of writerly verve and editorial vision, into a cosmopolitan incubator of reactionary politics. His own eclectic articles on literature, travel, genealogy, moral philosophy, ethnology, and political commentary laid the groundwork for the counterrevolutionary Confederacy by inspiring other writers to champion proslavery authoritarianism through erudite, polemical essays of their own. Running throughout Fitzhugh's journalism was an exalted notion of what the ideal proslavery review might accomplish for Southern society as a whole. The business of a magazine like DeBow's, he wrote, was not to “confine itself to mere sectional and ephemeral party politics” but to “try to settle or to solve questions of world-wide interest.” Given the right set of contributors, such an organ might stretch imaginations and place contemporary events in the broadest possible context, thus allowing white Southerners to consolidate their intellectual advantages over those parochial Northerners whose “little narrow intellectual visions” made them unable to “comprehend the whole field of action.” By the end of 1861, DeBow's seemed to have attained Fitzhugh's ideal, displaying what he termed “a much wider range than any English periodical” and having thus “already become the favorite medium of the highest order of Southern thought and Southern attainments.”Footnote ⁸

Fitzhugh's admonition to remake Southern periodicals into platforms for advanced cosmopolitan reaction bore fruit during the summer of 1860, when DeBow's deployed a new stable of energetic counterrevolutionaries at the same time that the previously staid Southern Literary Messenger of Richmond underwent an even sharper transformation. The combative mode of “slavery aggressions” that Fitzhugh had honed as a relatively isolated figure was replicated most thoroughly by the thirty-year-old Mississippi lawyer John Quitman Moore, who burst onto the publishing scene in June of 1860 with the first of more than a dozen articles for DeBow's. Having quixotically attempted in 1854 to sway proslavery readers with a quirky endorsement of Louis Napoleon's “pure, healthy, high-toned conservatism,” this planter's son recognized how the Republican Party's 1860 insurgency presented an auspicious opportunity to gain a new hearing. Facing the likely victory of Abraham Lincoln, Moore reported in the late fall of 1860 that “lingering on every lip” was the ponderous question “Quo Tendimus?” All across the South, white masters were “looking, tremblingly, into each other's faces” and asking “what does all this mean?” Moore catered to those puzzling over “where are we heading?” with a distinctive mixture of edgy assertion and cosmic assurance. Exhilarating excursions into the distant past and an equally heady set of prophetic glimpses of slaveholders’ imperial future helped him to show how Southern destiny was not simply “a question of to-day” but a matter “of yesterday and tomorrow.”Footnote ⁹

Moore's whirlwind tour across time and space introduced readers of DeBow's to conquering Normans, European feudalists, Portuguese slave traders, Hamiltonian federalists, and those staunchly conservative Southern masters on the verge of carrying their “institutional” genius across the breadth of a continent. Perhaps his most striking historical destination came in an article titled “‘Eikon Basilike’—Now as Then,” which explored the English Civil War and the subsequent restoration of the Stuart dynasty. By borrowing this essay's title from the purported autobiography of the martyred King Charles I of England, Moore lent substance to his conviction, which had been bolstered by the fate of the 1848 European revolutions, that republics were an inherently provisional form of government. Any government based on popular will would at best provide “a temporary bond of union,” he wrote, which would “secure the public order and preserve the political integrity” for a limited period of time. History showed that an all-important set of “social forces” would usually solidify within a republic, and thus clear the way for “some more stable and high-toned polity.” As such a process seemed to be under way within the slave South, Moore moved from analysis to prophecy, forecasting that “out of revolution springs counter-revolution.”Footnote ¹⁰

The same historical precedents for proslavery reaction informed a series of articles for the Southern Literary Messenger begun the same month by the forty-year old Alabama planter and Mexican war veteran William Falconer. This distant relative of former president John Tyler traced simmering sectional antagonisms to the “racial” differences between Northern and Southern whites that he dated to the Norman Conquest of 1066 and to the subsequent English Civil Wars between Roundhead and Cavalier. The six pieces that Falconer contributed to the Messenger between 1860 and 1862 established a more philosophical tone than he had taken while working as a Whig Party political operative and then as a Louisiana newspaper editor in the late 1840s. Tucked within his novel exposition of Confederate racialism was a hostility to popular government even more pronounced than that of Fitzhugh or Moore. Falconer's conservatism, honed as it was by the politics of Whiggish Unionism, led him to denounce unilateral state secession as an unacceptable concession to an ill-advised contractual understanding of government. As events undermined his pleas for continuing Southern predominance within the Union, this Virginia-born and New-England educated planter made his peace with Confederate independence, which he recognized as a rare opportunity to overturn “the swift traveling government” initiated by the American founders. His hope was that the “hurry-scurry life we have led since the revolution of 1776” might soon give way to greater political and social stability.Footnote ¹¹

In contrast to George Fitzhugh's singular interventions of the mid-1850s, the reactionary vistas charted by Moore, Falconer, and other proslavery essayists in the heat of “secession winter” were part of a communal effort not unlike the multifaceted “Low-life” of the late eighteenth-century French counter-Enlightenment.Footnote ¹² Compared to the ultra-conservative pamphleteering engineered by Parisian priests, monarchists, and other reactionary members of an urban intellectual canaille, the South's proslavery counterrevolution was pushed forward by a more geographically dispersed, if no less motley, group. Forming a larger ensemble were government officeholders, political journalists, party hacks, and those who, like Falconer, hoped mainly to win local laurels through prestigious publication. The job of converting loosely shared sensibilities into institutional form had been undertaken by the statistician and journalist James D. B. DeBow, whose relocation from New Orleans to Washington in the mid-1850s had helped him to establish a national network for advanced proslavery extremism. His magazine at this point spent more time advocating a resumption of the African slave trade and the introduction of black slavery into the Old Northwest than in repudiating democracy. DeBow had established an important base of contributors in Washington by eliciting essays from George Fitzhugh, Edward A. Pollard, and Archibald Roane, each of whom had secured minor patronage jobs from allies of “Hunker” president James Buchanan. His magazine brought Virginian fire-eaters like Edmund Ruffin and John Tyler Jr into conversation with such new talent from the Mississippi valley as John Quitman Moore, the New Orleans racialist W. W. Wright, and the Bavarian-born Americus Featherman, who would provide bracing secession-era commentary on earlier revolutionary movements in France.Footnote ¹³

The same conservative milieu of Washington, DC “Hunkerdom” that DeBow tapped for contributors helped to shape the political consciousness of George W. Bagby, the journalist and fiction writer who in 1860 assumed editorship of the Southern Literary Messenger at the age of thirty-two. While DeBow gradually escalated his commitment to proslavery extremism over the course of the 1850s, Bagby instituted rapid change at the Messenger, which had scrupulously avoided both political controversy and Tory nostalgia during the long stewardship of John Reuben Thompson.Footnote ¹⁴ Bagby's work during the late 1850s as a political correspondent for Deep South newspapers (several of which espoused the causes of nativism and the African slave trade) prepared him to open the floodgates of reaction once he took charge of the Messenger (which was then the only Southern journal that could rival the regional prestige of DeBow's).Footnote ¹⁵ Besides churning out commentary that made him one of Virginia's best-known secessionists, Bagby cultivated a stream of contributions from Falconer and other mainly anonymous critics of popular government. With even more fanfare than DeBow, Bagby also lavished praise on the controversial and widely publicized warning of the South Carolina editor Leonidas Spratt that “Slavery cannot share a Government with Democracy.”Footnote ¹⁶

Spratt's antidemocratic credo was accompanied by similarly defiant assertions of “slavery principles” by DeBow's and the Messenger during the secession winter of 1860–61. Writers who had vindicated slavery within the Union began to boast how a purely slaveholding republic might make bondage into what Spratt termed “a living principle of social order.” Appreciating that “the power and the charm of slavery is over the land,” William Falconer thus imagined bondage becoming “a new fact, bidding defiance to all the old theories of the past” and courting “a higher order of examination for the future.” For Moore, Southern slavery lent the cotton states “a fixed, independent, and inevitable destiny” that promised “a solution of all the disturbing problems, social, political, ethical, and economical, that are convulsing the bosom of modern society.” Americus Featherman agreed that “the Southern labor system” was “not only moral, in the highest sense of that term,” but also “a holy cause. . . the cause of humanity and civilization,” capable of becoming “the comely form of an entire new creation.”Footnote ¹⁷ George Bagby invoked the international reassessment of free black tropical labor then under way. “We owe it to humanity to give the two forms of society a full and fair trial in separate and distinct Republics; each having its special line of expansion and its own mode of developments,” Bagby explained to readers of the Messenger. The formation of an avowedly proslavery Confederacy was likely to institute “a grand experiment of two different civilizations, destined to widely different results,” which might “serve to guide mankind” and help to solve “the great problem of the African and the still greater problem of reconciling labour and capital.”Footnote ¹⁸

Enthusiasts of slavery disagreed about how far counterrevolutionary political initiatives should proceed. Bagby believed that severing ties with the free states would guarantee slaveholders’ global mission, and he thus joined most other secessionists in locating the main threat in the Republican Party's expressed hostility to bound labor. In contrast, the more robust strain of reaction articulated by Spratt, Moore, and Fitzhugh sought to move beyond the sort of “pre-emptive counterrevolution” that James McPherson and others have associated with Deep South disunionism in 1860.Footnote ¹⁹ By calling for a radical modification of political power within the white South, this trio sought to inaugurate a starkly more authoritarian polity than leaders of an independent Confederacy would ever consider. The reactionary upheaval they sought to push forward would—at least in theory—reinstitute principles of political legitimacy that had been discredited during the colonial struggle for American independence in the 1770s. In this, they went back farther than most, blaming current strife not on Lincoln, or even on abolitionism, but on the faulty vision of politics elaborated by Jefferson and Madison four score and five years before the Confederate republic was born.

“THE SUPREMACY OF INSTITUTIONALISM”

Had reactionary ideologues been entrusted with naming the revolution of 1861, they would have shied away from “Civil War,” the “Slaveholders’ Rebellion” or even the “War for Southern Independence.” The “War on Behalf of Slave Society” would have made a better fit with their counterrevolutionary preference for social order over inherited political rights.Footnote ²⁰ George Fitzhugh articulated the main point early in 1861, when he considered how “the natural organism of society, its prescriptive organism, its historical and God-ordained organism, has been disturbed, and almost destroyed at the North.” For the South to escape a similar fate would require a concerted effort to vivify what had been a latent program of “socialism, unconsciously struggling to restore the natural constitution of society.” The new Confederate government thus was not to be judged according to how well it secured rights or even how fully it protected masters’ human property. As Leonidas Spratt put it, the proper criterion of a “slave republic” was whether its system of governance was “expressive of its social nature.”Footnote ²¹

The reactionaries’ invocation of “society” as an organic entity, with needs, exigencies, and urges distinct from those of its citizens and superior to any set of political principles, testified to their readiness to mix the new with the old, and to cast their gaze on the future as well as on the past. While Fitzhugh traced his understanding of the relationship of society and politics back to Aristotle, his fellow proslavery reactionaries invoked more recent trends in addressing social development, racial hierarchy, economic principles, and constitutionalism. Their projects had clear affinities with Comtean positivism, Lamarckian evolutionism, and other intellectual ventures of the early and mid-nineteenth century. But unlike such bookish pioneers of proslavery Comteanism as George Frederick Holmes, Henry Hughes, and Joseph LeConte, the publicists of Confederate reaction displayed little systematic rigor and had no discernible ambition to influence scholarly understanding. Adapting available vocabularies as they saw fit and modifying these according to the task at hand lent their enterprise its eclectic character. The attraction of various rarified forms of organicism had little to do with their explanatory power among the learned or their intellectual integrity as emerging classificatory systems. The modish nature of the social sciences offered a language of popular persuasiveness, which could be as inspiring and pertinent to a moment of crisis as those expanded historical vistas that looked deep into the past and far into the future.Footnote ²²

Leonidas Spratt provides an instructive example, in that his distinctively utopian organicism had emerged on the hustings, as part of his contentious campaign in the late 1850s to reopen the African slave trade. After a sojourn in northern Florida (where he dabbled with Dr John Gorrie on the precursor to the modern air conditioner), Spratt returned home to South Carolina in 1853 to edit the Charleston Standard. Having come to appreciate slavery as “the germ of a living and an enduring form of society” whose own “physical energies will be necessary to protect its existence,” Spratt soon concluded that the South's slave population needed to increase faster than the current rate of internal reproduction allowed. Imported African labor would equip the South's “slave society” (to use a neologism that Spratt was among the first to popularize) with a new means of achieving political and social parity with the expansive free society of the North. Such a policy might also produce both social “integration” (by elevating all male whites into slave masters) while achieving the “emancipation” of slavery from international ill will.Footnote ²³

Spratt's basic aversion to democracy was as quirky (and as marginal to antebellum political debates everywhere except perhaps in his native South Carolina) as was his rarefied championing of “slave society.” He believed that the greatest flaw of popular government, which he presented as the normative political expression of free-labor societies, was its underdeveloped form. Societies organized on the merely “horizontal” principle of equality lacked the intricacy of the more “articulated” structures prevailing within the slave South, whose sense of its own distinctiveness had bred a growing recognition of how equality was only right when practiced among “natural” equals. That social stability required the same hierarchies that were present within the natural order was evident in the fate of Rome (which “perished in a military democracy”) and of France (which “leans on despotism” ever since “the natural props of social order have been stricken down.”) Spratt cared little whether slave society provided the greatest happiness to all its members. Unlike Fitzhugh, he recognized the basic despotism of white rule and, like eighteenth-century Southerners, he acknowledged the profound misery endured by the enslaved. Validation of human bondage came in its conformity to an ever-evolving natural order, which proceeded from the lowest organisms all the way through advanced political societies. Such a process of evolution would continue until a slaveocracy rose “as much above the democratic ideal of the present age as is the vertebrae above the radiate in animated nature.” A society operating on the principles of chattel slavery might even come “to a consciousness of its own responsibility for its own preservation” and thus become “an actor in the drama of its own fate.” If “the world speaks of slavery, the North speaks of slavery,” and even “we speak of slavery as a thing apart from us”; the institution “never yet has spoken” of its own volition simply because it had yet to be kindled into existence by those committed to its full realization.Footnote ²⁴

John Quitman Moore's discussion of the mysterious processes of social and political development of “slave society” displayed the same blend of improvisation and imagination seen in Spratt's idiosyncratic polemics. Sprinkled amidst Moore's regular forays into past examples of authoritarianism was a recurring concern for Southern “institutionalism,” a French term that he was among the first to introduce to American audiences.Footnote ²⁵ Political sovereignty, he insisted, resided in “those grand primal institutions that antedate the formation of governments.” The development of social norms such as private property allowed “the race of man” to advance beyond its primordial status as a “vast mass of animated vegetation.” Institutions not only ordered humanity's collective existence but animated it, though they did so in ways that could be disastrously overturned. The chief threats came from the rampant “individualism” of the nineteenth century and from the political ascendancy of “inorganic and irresponsible opinion.” To contain these nefarious modern forces, Moore affirmed that the destiny of the South was “to organize society in reference to its distinctive institutions” and thus to demonstrate the wider applicability of those principles on which the Southern labor system rested. With breathless anticipation, Moore imagined the dawn of a new age, in which an emboldened master class would work “to restrict the sphere of government to the protection of homogeneous interests; to assert the principle of inequality; to vindicate the supremacy of institutionalism; to carry out the idea of political insubordination [sic]; to crush the heresy of individualism; to solve the disturbing problem of social philosophy” and “to subordinate laws and constitutions to the paramount authority of the vital, social forces, as expressed under the forms of organic institutions.”Footnote ²⁶

Moore's writing repeatedly circled back to the importance of “ethnology,” a term many white Southern readers would have recognized and embraced, at least at first glance. His conviction that the “eternal laws of organic, social relation, and marked ethnic diversity must lie at the basis of political organization” lent a new vocabulary to the white supremacist polemics that proslavery ideologues had long invoked. As was the case with Falconer, however, Moore understood racialism as an element of providential design, which manifested itself more clearly in historical developments than in any measurable anatomical distinctions between physically distinct “races.” In this, they displayed a greater affinity with the European conservatism of Arthur de Gobineau or Robert Knox than with the “American School” of racist science that sought to demonstrate a materialist basis for distinguishing between “Caucasians” and inferior “dark” races.Footnote ²⁷ A primary contribution of the Confederate reaction was thus to deconstruct the racial category of “white” that formed the proslavery bedrock of the American legal order. In doing so, these essayists breached a Southern norm that had prevailed even during the nativist upsurge of the mid-1850s, when Northern whites had displayed greater willingness to “racialize” Celtic and other white ethnic “stocks” than had most proslavery writers.Footnote ²⁸ Fitzhugh summed up a new Confederate consensus late in 1861, when he explained how the hierarchical divisions existing within races were “just as ineradicable as the wider ones between the races.” Moore extrapolated the circumstances of the Norman/Saxon divide to affirm that such “ethnological” differences were “the most powerful shuttle-driver which ever worked upon the net of human affairs.” Summing up the two most important tenets of the Confederate reaction, Moore instructed readers that “if there be not a profound and eternal significance in institutions, an indestructible force and energy in the principle of Race, then has the Southern patriot drawn the sword in vain.”Footnote ²⁹

The same process of intellectual cross-fertilization through which Moore incorporated Spratt's distinctive organicism and Falconer's racialized Normans was evident in these writers’ echo of Fitzhugh's scorn towards written political constitutions. In 1854 Fitzhugh's Sociology for the South had adopted a strain of Burkean conservatism by insisting that “constitutions should never be written till several centuries after governments have been instituted” (he defended this stance by noting that “it requires that length of time to ascertain how institutions will operate”). As Louis Hartz recognized in the 1950s, this rejection of the “State Rights’ School” of contractual constitutionalism required greater conceptual innovation from Fitzhugh than did his better-known attacks on the “failure” of free society. Prior to 1860, few other proslavery writers shared this preference for Americans’ “organic” constitution over that textual one that had been framed by the secret Philadelphia convention of 1787. The imperatives of secession shifted the debate over what sort of Confederate government would be formed, however. Over the opening months of 1861, essayists for DeBow's and the Messenger expended notably less effort in defending secession as a right under the 1787 federal pact than in expressing an explicitly anticontractual understanding of political authority.Footnote ³⁰

The reactionaries’ disdain for written compacts informed their commentary on the Montgomery convention that assembled early in 1861 to draft a frame of government for their new Confederacy. Spratt's heated opposition to that body's ban on the slave trade—and to its decision to copy most features of the US Constitution—slackened once a comparatively easy amending process was adopted. The ease of further constitutional modification comported with the reactionaries’ strategy of cultivating an appetite for counterrevolution before recasting those political structures that were most at odds with the authoritarian implications of slave society. Though John Quitman Moore believed that the “institution of an hereditary senate and executive” would recognize “the political form best suited to the genius, and most expressive of the ideas of Southern civilization,” such a permanent Confederate ruling class seemed “wholly incapable of realization” by a government that had not yet solidified the loyalty of its citizens.Footnote ³¹ His organic constitutionalism caused him to place greater faith in the everyday workings of governmental institutions and actual leaders than in blueprints established by speculative conventions. “Governments cannot be built upon paper constitutions, nor decreed by acclamation,” Moore explained, but “must come in the appointed course of nature, and follow in the path of prescribed conditions.” In sum, “governments worthy of the name. . . must be lived and acted” and “must be fashioned in obedience to the great laws of institutional action, and express the vital forces of the social life, springing out of the imperious relations imposed by the grand ideas of civilization.”Footnote ³²

Given such assumptions about the path toward political reaction, Confederate counterrevolutionaries were willing to build upon what seemed politically possible at any given moment and to delay the attainment of their highest ideals when prudence required them to do so. Early in 1861, Falconer accompanied his lament that presidential electioneering had been “the one great cause” of federal failure with a realization that it was “neither the time nor place” to introduce a plan to “modify or avoid these quadrennial revolutions.” Later that summer, he was similarly vague about how to achieve a “patrician republic,” calling for the creation of “a free and liberal, but a strong government” that might “eliminate all such weak branches from our next system, as have broken under the might of this last.” Only after the fall of the Confederacy would he clarify how “governments only wage protracted war successfully, somewhat in the proportion which they approach a despotism, and hush up all this senseless wrangling on constitutional points, and send every capable man into the army.” What the Southern republic had needed was “neither Congress nor Constitution, but a despotism,” he retrospectively concluded, in which all collective energies would find focus in a dictatorship of “ONE MAN, men and munitions.”Footnote ³³

The workings of the permanent Confederate Congress, which was inaugurated early in 1862, vindicated the assumption that ordinary legislation held greater authoritarian promise than broadly debated constitutional revisions. After the permanent Congress enacted conscription and condoned martial law in its first few months, the twenty-two-year-old writer Frank Alfriend wondered whether the same body might undertake an even more ambitious “anti-popular re-modeling of our political organizations.” In 1863 Alfriend (who would soon replace Bagby as the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger) warned about the “extreme democratic and popular characteristics” that were “stamped upon every feature of our national and social organism.” Excessive popular input not only threatened an effective military effort but menaced slavery, Alfriend warned, asserting that “our whole political community, so far as it relates to the communication of political privilege,” was “plainly at war” with the principles of bondage. Rectifying this dangerous situation seemed to require solidifying the power of the slaveowning master class, restricting the privileges of citizenship to those born within slave society, imposing a property requirement for voting, and radically curtailing the number of elective offices.Footnote ³⁴

Even the least controversial of Alfriend's suggestions—the tightening of naturalization procedures—alarmed those Confederate editors who had grown more wary of reactionary tendencies once the frenzy of secession winter had passed. Discussing a new, more limited, basis of citizenship, the Richmond Enquirer identified a concerted effort to undermine republicanism itself. “Those who long for strong government of higher classes know not what they speak,” the paper wrote, warning, “Let no man, then, venture to lay hands upon the organic principles of our society.” This stalwart voice of the Virginia Democracy hearkened back to antebellum themes of white egalitarianism by insisting that “nothing can ever compel [Confederates] to erect certain families into a generation of hereditary masters.” As if to indicate how war tended to push political discussions rightward, this same article carved out a crucial exception, however. Regardless of past practices, conditions might soon make it necessary for Confederates to “convert the whole of society into a drilled army” and to “give the military chief dictatorial power for the good of all.”Footnote ³⁵

MARTIAL AWAKENINGS: FROM SOUTHERN MASTERS TO CONFEDERATE WARRIORS

From the publication of his first major book in 1854, George Fitzhugh had identified military discipline as one among many legitimate forms of human compulsion. “Wellington at Waterloo was a slave,” he had insisted in Sociology for the South, explaining that even the British Army's highest commander had been prohibited from quitting his command. It was not until 1860 that Fitzhugh began to venture a more sustained consideration of authoritarian armies, and in doing so he began to consider the fate of enlisted soldiers and sailors as more than just a foil for the comparatively “benevolent” treatment of slaves. The absolute command of officers over common soldiers furnished him a new prototype for the hierarchical, organic relationships that he had earlier associated with the patriarchal family and with the paternalism of bound plantation labor. By the late summer of 1860 he affirmed what would be a basic tenet of that Confederate militarism that was transforming proslavery extremism. “The most perfect system of government is to be found in armies,” he wrote, “because in them there is least of liberty, and most of order, subordination and obedience.” In the months to come, fellow Confederate commentators would join Fitzhugh in alternating between romantic celebrations of combat and a set of crustier observations that scoffed at “a society of equals” being every bit “as absurd as an army without officers.”Footnote ³⁶

Though Fitzhugh was too old to join the ranks himself, he fully recognized the reactionary potential of mass military mobilization and of a popular enthusiasm for martial developments. By early in 1862 he applauded how a program of Confederate conscription and martial law had overcome that “excess of liberty” that Virginians had “labored until a few months past” to overcome. “Martial law has corrected” prevailing libertine tendencies and “everybody hails martial law as a blessing.” Equally telling was the cheerfulness with which freeborn white soldiers willingly subjected themselves to a regime in which “their slaves are ten times freer than themselves.” Even as the Confederate electorate forestalled most counterrevolutionary proposals for constitutional revision, they warmed to the reactionaries’ vision of an orderly nation of all-powerful military leaders commanding devoted followers both within and beyond the ranks. As Fitzhugh moved his contributions from DeBow's to the pages of Richmond's largest circulating newspaper, he reported that “everybody feels” that the hierarchical relations during a time of war were “eminently right.” Recent historians have supported his conclusion in noting the acquiescence of ordinary white Confederates to the military's gradual extension of its authority into most areas of civilian life.Footnote ³⁷

Other proslavery extremists writing for DeBow's and the Southern Literary Messenger shared Fitzhugh's perspective about the benefits of militarization, and several of the most prominent proslavery essayists entered the Confederate armed forces themselves. Moore, who had in 1854 tried without success to join a filibustering expedition to Cuba, was especially keen to trade “the offices of the Pen” for the “duties of the Camp.” Following the example of fellow Oakwood College graduate Colonel Henry Hughes, Moore applied his intellectual enthusiasm for institutionalized violence to the field of combat, expecting that battlefield exploits would offer “a sublime and awful beauty—a fearful and terrible loveliness—that atones in deeds of high enterprise and acts of heroic valor for the carnage, the desolation, the slaughter” of modern war.Footnote ³⁸ Though he never rose above the rank of private, Moore was less concerned with personal advancement than with positioning himself at the heart of an authoritarian enterprise. “Armies represent the conservative principles of government,” he wrote shortly after enlisting, reasoning that “the more martial a nation becomes, the stronger it is, the more secure its liberties and permanent its rule.” Sounding themes that evoked seventeenth-century Anglo-American republicanism rather than its nineteenth-century variant, Moore argued that “permanent military establishments can alone keep alive the martial spirit among nations, and arrest that tendency to decay that shews itself so soon as the degrading and demoralizing pursuits of commerce convert a nation into a race of plundering banditti.”Footnote ³⁹

Moore's militarism extended the reactionaries’ conviction that public institutions should express a polity's prevailing social forms. In his opinion, even before the first gun was fired, the slave society of the Deep South was essentially “martial, in the framework of its society; martial, in the genius and temper of its people; martial, from the necessities of its situation and the dangers that surround it.” Moore's waning interest in formal constitutional changes (which his essays barely noted after the spring of 1861) can be explained by his newfound expectation that the Confederacy would enact the “laws of its institutional life” through the conduct of its armies in an all-absorbing war. In this, he followed up on Leonidas Spratt's 1859 axiom that “revolutions never come by resolution,” and that it was nothing less than an “ordinance of nature” that “the germs of animal life can only come through hemorrhage and rupture to development.” Once the Confederacy's violent process of wartime genesis was under way, Moore expected greater results than simple political independence. The stern discipline of war and army routine would teach Confederates more fully than proslavery polemics ever had that “life is an organized system of subordination, resting primarily on conquest,” and that “the principle of force” formed “the necessary basis of social organization.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Confederates’ embrace of martial law and military hierarchy vindicated William Falconer's prediction that armed conflict would move the South towards an authoritarian destiny mandated by the Norman blood of its ruling class. Though Falconer himself avoided a return to the army (he had already endured the rigors of enlisted life in Mexico), he nonetheless appreciated how Southern mobilization might launch an internal reorganization of principles and convictions. For Confederates to reestablish their dominion across the entire continent required them first to “fall into rank under a strong government.” Yet, in his opinion, secession would make this move towards centralism and away from popular control far more difficult, since disunion seemed likely to intensify white Southerners’ aversion to consolidation. Thus framing the pressing dilemma of achieving antidemocratic centralism in an effort many associated with states’ rights, Falconer explained how “the presence and consequences of a state of war” might work to compensate. If the conflict with the Yankees was prolonged, then so much the better. An ongoing struggle would likely “superinduce habits of subordination” and lead to “a curtailment of the present status of political privileges in the masses, as military discipline of necessity controls all other liberty.”Footnote ⁴¹

As William Falconer appreciated, implementing reactionary principles through the military could be done without any of the lobbying that circulated during the counterrevolutionary push for constitutional change early in 1861. Army protocol proceeded as generals in the field and administration officials in Richmond saw fit, and was largely insulated from deliberation among Confederate civilian leaders, from the press, from the electoral assent of its citizenry, or from the mass of civilians whose enlistment required them upon pain of death to follow orders without question. Private Henry Hotze of Alabama (himself a proponent of proslavery extremism in the early 1850s) wrote in glowing terms about just how attenuated democracy had become within the Confederate rank and file. On the day that his Alabama regiment elected their officers, his company and every other was “arranged in a single file” and given “a slip of paper. . . to be delivered to the returning officer with his name.” Once “each man took his place again on the other side of the shed he could only surmise who he had voted for.” In Hotze's account, the unanimous election of a colonel was thus engineered in advance by a small group of commanders. If soldiers did not object to such a clear mockery of their “right” to elect leaders, it seemed unlikely they would resist other incursions on the political prerogatives they had jealously guarded as peacetime civilians prior to 1861.Footnote ⁴²

In valorizing Confederate military authority, the reactionary writers of DeBow's and the Messenger recast the role they would play in public deliberation. To the degree that these men urged their own readers to place their absolute trust in the decrees and orders of military officials, they served less as meaningful advocates than as analysts of changes that neither they nor their audience any longer presumed to direct. Moore and Fitzhugh both initially joined the frothy public debate about the policies enacted by Confederate military strategists in Richmond.Footnote ⁴³ Even while enthusiastically endorsing partisan warfare and the deliberate targeting of enemy pickets, Fitzhugh insisted that those with greater military expertise make the most consequential decisions on behalf of those they led. Late in 1861, he registered his increasing impatience with those critics who were “freely expressing their opinions in the streets, in hotels, and in private houses, about the strategic details in the conduct of the war.” Drawing a parallel with popular trust in doctors and lawyers, he urged supporters of the war to “trust to our experienced and educated officers, whether educated in camp or at military schools, in war matters.” When press and public carping only increased early the next year, Fitzhugh lashed out at the “senseless clamor of home-keeping people” who knew no more about military matters than they did about “the Chaldaic language, or the Egyptian hieroglyphics.” After the summer of 1862, Fitzhugh practiced the deference he urged others to observe.Footnote ⁴⁴ Altogether discontinuing his war commentary, he devoted the rest of his Confederate career to framing a philosophy he termed “moral pathology,” to issuing a signature wartime essay on the revolutions of 1861 and 1776, and to recovering from a brief experience as prisoner of war. At the end of hostilities, he again became a polemicist for DeBow's and gained an unlikely appointment to a Freedman's Bureau court in Virginia. In this last capacity, his “almost unlimited” jurisdiction emboldened him to act with an arbitrary will to settle disputes, despite the fact that he lacked any “precise notions of military law.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Emancipation would finalize the gradual shift from reactionaries’ antidemocratic vindication of racial slavery to an avowed faith in militarism. In 1866 John Quitman Moore's last major article all but ignored social institutions or ethnological questions in favor of a comparative survey of European military traditions. Invoking a larger context of more absolutist states helped Moore to emphasize the limitations, rather than the achievements, of Southern militarism. Despite the South's unprecedented embrace of militarism, Moore's piece on “Modern Armies” noted how an “absence of a rigid discipline” had emerged as the Confederacy's “fatal defect.” In his view, a “morbid, organic derangement” had perpetuated the popular distrust of a thoroughly militarized society and this aversion had “defeated every hope of healthy bodily action” by having “preyed upon the seat of life” of the new proslavery republic. Slavery was partly to blame, since decades of mastery had taught whites exactly the wrong lesson. From Moore's perspective, Confederate militarism was constrained by a spirit of personal autonomy at odds with slave society's exemplification of order, rank, and inequality. He thus believed that even in its finest hour, “the Southern army was nothing more than an association of patriotic gentlemen, animated by the enthusiasm of a common cause, and regarding army regulations and discipline as designed only for a race of slaves.”Footnote ⁴⁶

CONFEDERATE NOSTALGIA AND NEW SOUTH AUTHORITARIANISM

Proslavery reactionaries in defeat may have been frustrated by the Confederacy's insufficiently bold constitutional changes and by its insufficiently disciplined armies. But such perceived shortcomings were far less jarring than were the “strange, uncertain, bewildering, and threatening” policies the Union took towards defeated Confederates after 1865. With slavery overthrown, with both state and federal governments expanding the political franchise, and with a federal military using its muscle on behalf of black political rights, Confederate reactionaries came to appreciate how armed forces could operate not only as bulwarks of social order but as agents of social transformation. Under such circumstances, most advocates of a failed proslavery counterrevolution fell silent, at least for the time being. Spratt and Featherman eventually returned to their sociological inquiry with book-length projects that appeared during the waning years of the nineteenth century. But these generated little notice and were animated by none of the heady political engagement that had informed these men's essays of the early 1860s.Footnote ⁴⁷

George Fitzhugh set himself apart in fostering a postbellum form of reaction through the same forms of “higher journalism” he had honed as a defender of slavery. Relocating from Richmond back to rural Virginia at the close of hostilities, Fitzhugh reemerged as the lead essayist for DeBow's “After the War” series, which ran from 1866 through 1870. His articles there courted Northern conservatives in hopes that a traditionalist coalition might be rallied against the “rationalist” program of Congressional Reconstruction. In framing the fight over a postbellum settlement in such terms, Fitzhugh abandoned his earlier emphasis on warring social systems and instead presented a contest of intellectual commitments and religious orthodoxies. When, in 1870, he attempted to reach a national audience through Lippincott's Magazine, memories of his earlier proslavery zealotry so offended Northern readers that the editor was compelled to apologize. Deprived of a regular outlet and tarnished by his reputation as slaveocrat par excellence, Fitzhugh lived in obscurity for a decade before he died, nearly blind, in 1881. Though a 1943 biography revisited his life, he garnered little serious attention until Louis Hartz established him in 1953 as the leading light of America's “great imaginative moment” when the country had “almost got out of itself” and “looked with some objectivity on the liberal formula” it had “known since birth.”Footnote ⁴⁸

William Falconer was doomed to far greater obscurity, even though he showed a marked appreciation of how Reconstruction had remapped the available cultural space in which neo-Confederate authoritarianism might flourish. Having exhausted the possibilities of magazine commentary and then failed at a short-lived stab at newspaper journalism late in 1865, Falconer moved to the more inviting field of retrospective fiction. His 1870 novel Bloom and Brier had a decidedly more intellectual bent than most Confederate period pieces published during Reconstruction. Within the guise of a romance, Falconer reprised the Norman/Saxon theme and concluded that it had been “democracy that defeated the South—a social condition foreign to her whole nature, but which had gradually slipt upon her shoulders, without her knowing when, why, or how.” Echoing John Quitman Moore's views that the Confederacy had been doomed by a breakdown in order within the white community, Falconer wistfully explained how the South's “natural aristocracy of character would have led her to success” had not noisy white “mongrels” bred dissent and distracted those coordinating the war effort. As for the future, the destiny of “ruling” whites seemed assured, both because of their distinguished Norman bloodlines and because of their recent conditioning as soldiers. Falconer thus refused to believe that men who had, “for four years, stepped to the step of the soldier, by the martial roll of the drum and the shrill music of the fife,” could be excluded from power indefinitely.Footnote ⁴⁹

The martial strain within postbellum Southern conservatism resulted from wider trends than nostalgic fiction of Falconer, of course. Broader political currents within the white South drove this phenomenon, just as broader currents had ultimately been more responsible for the flourishing of Confederate militarism than counterrevolutionary essays had been. Within the postbellum white South, the militarization of colleges (often headed by former Confederate generals) and the cult of the “lost cause” transmitted to future generations the virtues of soldierly self-restraint and a respect for the capacity of regimented force to order society. The Confederate experience joined with other postwar developments to heighten New South appreciation for the political relevance of coordinated violence. The paramilitary attacks upon black freedmen and their Republican Party allies during political “Redemption” both reaffirmed the relationship between armed force and the restoration of white supremacy and offered the example of a successful counterrevolution against suffrage expansion.Footnote ⁵⁰ Given such trends, a basic antipathy towards American liberalism came easier to Southern conservative intellectuals such as Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Robert Lewis Dabney, and Edward McCrady Jr (each of whom had played important roles in the Confederate war effort) than it had to those “moderate” proslavery writers who predominated during the 1850s.Footnote ⁵¹

It was surely less a sign of weakness, then, than of strength that the South's postbellum martial tradition lacked the systematic intellectual expression provided by Confederate polemicists for DeBow's and the Messenger. Twentieth-century Southern conservatives were moved less by rarified notions of “institutionalism” or of messianic proslavery destiny than by those Stoic battlefield heroics that made “the inventory of the mind of the soldier” into what Richard Weaver termed “very nearly an inventory of the Southern mind.” The Agrarian writers of the 1920s and 1930s performed a crucial role in drawing Southern conservatism towards the visceral aspects of the Confederate heritage and away from its most systematic intellectual expressions. The abstruse theorizing of a Leonidas Spratt or a John Quitman Moore would have seemed peculiar to the Vanderbilt Agrarian writers, even if they had been aware of figures who were almost completely forgotten after 1865. The poet John Crowe Ransom's image of the Confederacy rested on the slave South's “antique conservatism,” not the considerably bolder reactionary spirit set forth by cognoscenti responsible for the extremist “higher journalism.” Simply put, Confederate theorists had precious little to contribute to what Allen Tate dubbed that “knowledge carried to the heart,” which was kindled not by deep thought but by emotional communion in graveyards filled with the martyred Confederate dead.Footnote ⁵²

The reactionary streak of post-Confederate Southern conservatism in this way very nearly reversed the pattern that the sociologist Karl Mannheim established in his influential schema of modern right-wing European ideologies. A Southern penchant for militarism did not move from an undertheorized “traditionalism” into a systematized “conservatism,” as Mannheim proposed was happened once the French Revolution had shaken the political and cultural foundations of western Europe. In the case of the counterrevolutionary Confederacy, a systematic vision of martial conservatism first emerged in the speculative writings of self-consciously extreme defenders of slavery. Even before the onset of military conflict, Fitzhugh and fellow polemicists recognized the implications of transferring their provocative justification of hierarchy and force to new circumstances and they thus had a keen insight into how a thoroughly militarized slaveocracy might be both perfected and transformed through the crucible of war. In this way, a handful of figures achieved the dubious distinction of unwitting prophets, achieving their primary significance in marking the transition from the antebellum extremist defense of slavery to the militarist dark side of Southern conservatism that would endure for generations thereafter.Footnote ⁵³