Mexico celebrated the creation of its 1917 revolutionary and “activist” constitution this past Monday, February 4. It is easy to assume that the adjective “activist” issues from the fact that, as constitutional specialist Professor Miguel Carbonell has noted, it has been amended some 600 times.
The sesquicentennial of the United States’ Civil War (1861-1865), which produced the nation-changing 13th Amendment (emancipation), has been and is being marked with a wide variety of events. The commemoration of President Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War and his Emancipation Proclamation began in 2011 and will last until 2015. This year’s scheduled commemoration events will take up an impressive bit of 2013’s calendar in various venues. Especially in Virginia, where Richmond was the Confederacy’s second capital. Originally, in early February 1861, secessionist leaders led by Jefferson Davis selected Montgomery, Alabama. A fairly new city of 9,000 founded in 1819, it was snugly away from the North, and its secessionist fervor had blossomed early and was vigorous and unequivocal. Yet some military minded leaders of the secession believed the capital should be situated within ready march to Washington. And by May, Montgomery’s rising temperatures, humidity and its mosquitoes prompted a move when Richmond, recently seceded, and financially and industrially robust, offered its state capital to the leaders of the Confederate States of America (CSA).
In Montgomery, Davis and other insurrectionist leaders took a mere four days to produce the Confederate Constitution. That should have given them pause. For such haste allowed for little reflective or analytical thought. That intellectual drought was to be the cause of much of the South‘s problems, according to a number of historians. These “problems,” mirroring the vision of both politics and society, contributed to not only the South’s hastily considered secession but also the fateful charter of the CSA. Both were to confuse and divide the society its creators believed it would guard and preserve. Davis was considered much better educated in the accepted conventional sense of the time than Lincoln. Davis was a graduate of the Military Academy at West Point. He had fought with applauded courage in the Mexican War, and then served as an admired secretary of war from 1853 to 1857. Early on, those credentials prompted many people, north and south, to consider him smarter than Lincoln, which later was to cause them to criticize Lincoln vehemently.
But Lincoln had turned a clear disadvantage into an advantage: he became amazingly well self-taught. This backwoods Kentucky born and self-taught Illinois “prairie lawyer” is seen today as a philosophical, political, military and literary genius. (‘Literary’ for the nation-changing 272-word Gettysburg Address if nothing more.)And it was immediately after Gettysburg, that Lincoln “discovered” U.S. Grant, who was to lay siege to and defeat the Confederate defenders of Vicksburg in the summer of 1863. Coupled with General Robert E. Lee’s Gettysburg defeat, that summer was hopefully seen as the turning point of the Civil War.
Yet at the same time, the internal assumptions of the social and political structure of the South were crumbling. These assumptions actually had created an odd, contradictory and brutal culture even before the secession, a stubbornly independent “nation” devoutly structured around a central pro-slavery conviction. Looking closely at this thesis it is no surprise that once the South seceded there were a notable number of “Unionists” in the South. One of the reasons given then and now for the secession is the South’s fear for the future of their personal freedom under Lincoln. Yet in 1861 Georgia passed a law that made continuing loyalty to the Union a capital offense. Hardly a convincing argument for the governmental protection of individual liberty or the rights of minorities.
It’s the arithmetic. When the South seceded its population was nine million, of which more than three million were slaves, and half of the remainder were disenfranchised females. Thus, the newly minted CSA was immediately faced with not a conundrum but “a crisis of legitimacy,” as one historian has said. Three million disenfranchised women turned out to be trouble.
The constitutions of the Confederacy and of its states made it clear that these new governments’ sole goal was the preservation of slavery. Slaves, of course, were property, not citizens. Women were considered “appendages of their husbands.” They were to be protected – up to a point – by the government, but they had “no public voice” independent of their male kinfolk. This rather quickly posed problems as more and more men, of every class, were sucked into the war. Womenfolk, also of every class, were left behind to cope with circumstances they had never been taught to deal with – particularly those on plantations and farms. And those who were members of non-slave-owning households were the most severely handicapped. Letters of the time show, amazingly to us today, that great numbers of Southern females of the period were not accustomed to making their own decisions – in a good many households they were not allowed to make any decisions at all.
Despite the fact that the Confederacy was created as a “white man’s republic,” as the war wore on women of all classes made demands on that government to provide them assistance. Of course, wealthy women making such demands were considered a “national elite,” and got the most attention and aid. But poor women created a different category of Confederate citizenship. Theirs wasn’t a social category that spoke for Southern nationalism or upper-class citizens retaining influence, connections and special status. Poor women spoke for the Southern family, for its communities and emphatically as wives of Confederate soldiers. Lacking slaves to help them, they sought aid to sustain themselves in the names of their male family members fighting to preserve the Confederacy. For this new, startling voice from females who, living on formerly self-sufficient farms, were now unable to feed themselves and their children. And often they were victims of government policies that permitted the army to appropriate farm products. Poorer women, of course, were more apt to suffer from this policy of confiscation and indifference than wealthy women.
Whenever the fortunes of the Confederacy faltered, desertions from the army began to pose a problem. Women of families whose men had gone “missing” were harassed, their homes invaded and torn apart by local “home guards” looking for male relatives. Often such families didn’t know their menfolk were alive or dead, much less that they had become deserters. They simply hadn’t heard from them for months. At its best, mail service from the frequently moving “front” was poor for civilians. Contemporary reports and letters show that womenfolk of those men accused of desertion were often “tortured” (meaning raped) to force them to provide information about “missing” male relatives. “So much for the period’s myth of Southern male chivalry,” wrote one veteran, whose family was abused because he had been unconscious and then “addled” for months, and being sent home to recover.
In addition there were Unionist communities and those made up of disaffected and disillusioned veterans located in places like Jones County, Mississippi, the “Quaker Belt” in central North Carolina and venues in East Texas. Men and women in such places had come to hate the Confederacy. Many of the women were wives of deserters. They all depended on scattered extended family members for information, for warnings of possible impending home guard raids. Some even took up arms against the Confederacy, threatened or attacked government officials, sacked wealthy plantations – even though they usually lived in areas apart from primary plantation regions. Thus, a second, internal civil war began. The frequent brutal treatment of unsuspecting families, or families suspected by local home militias and others of harboring or aiding deserters, shattered the fairy tale of “honor,” as a central trait of the white Southern culture.
Lesson for lawmakers: Learn to add and subtract, think long and hard – and analytically – before meddling with citizens’ lives.