Confederate Reckoning

In December of 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the United States with a unanimous vote. However, South Carolina was unique in that most of the state depended on a slaveholding, plantation economy, there was no real political competition, and “planters were systematically overrepresented” (41). In particular, South Carolina was alone among Southern states in using the federal government’s three-fifths system to count enslaved people toward the electoral representation of plantation owners. Still, even in South Carolina, fire-eaters (Southern politicians who supported secession) were anxious over and contemptuous of the popular vote and the political power of working-class whites, who did not have enslaved workers.

Because of this anxiety over opposition from non-slaveholding whites, fire-breathers organized the 1860 Association in South Carolina, which “aimed…to unify the public opinion of the state and the South behind secession as the proper response to the election of a ‘Black Republican’ president” (44-45). The 1860 Association published pamphlets like James D.B. DeBow’s The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Nonslaveholder, which rallied support by arguing that enslavement prevented poor whites from having to perform degrading labor and that, if enslavement were lost, the South would be subjected to “sexual and racial degradation that the rich white man could escape by emigration, but that nonslaveholders and their families would have to endure” (45).