After reading through a few threads here on the Civil War, it got me thinking whether any of the states (or parts of states) which seceded from the Union to join the Confederacy then attempted to secede from there. West Virginia is a somewhat special case perhaps, but I also think I remember some places in Tennessee attempted to do the same as well.
I was just thinking, based on the myriad causes, if one of them was to establish the right to secede (among other states’ rights/slavery issues), wouldn’t the Confederate States have then allowed further secession, even if they won? Or would it be a somewhat hypocritical “It’s okay if we do it, but you can’t leave us”?
Rather than succession from the Confederacy, it might be better to consider parts of the southern states that didn’t recognize the southern succession in the first place. Notably, Jones County, Mississippi, AKA “The Kingdom of Jones”:
If you mean “secede back into the Union” or refuse to recognize the initial secession, yes. They are named by county in the Emancipation Proclamation: “Louisiana, (except the Parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the City of New Orleans)… and Virginia, (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth[)], and which excepted parts, are for the present, left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.” These are the Louisiana and Virginia counties exempted from the Proclamation because even though they practiced slavery, were still regarded as loyal to the Union.
If you mean “seceded from the Confederacy because the Confederacy wasn’t hardcore enough,” I don’t think so, although there was that fringe element that moved to Brazil to keep the cause alive.
Anyone wishing to defy “Northern Aggression” would have to team up for military purposes. Maybe if the Confederacy had won there would have been further secessions, but as it was military purposes demanded solidarity.
These counties weren’t exempted because they were considered “loyal”, but because they were already under heavy Union military occupation. It’s safe to say that the people of Virginia (bar West Virginia) and Louisiana were overwhelmingly antipathetic toward the Union. New Orleans residents in particular were pretty steamed over the military administration of Union Major General Benjamin Butler, whose orders included arresting as a prostitute any woman who insulted a Union soldier.
Yes and no. There was a considerable legacy of Whig, Union Conservativism in Louisiana. And poorer classes of all kinds were a lot less favorable to the Confederacy than the elties, but they had little say. And of course, if we aare going to look at it, black Americans were extremely favorable to the Union, but were obviously prevented from any representation.
Outside of that, there were significant movements in Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina to stop the war, or perhaps even leave the Confederacy so they wouldn’t lose any more soldiers. None of these succeeedded, but the potential was there if it could have been harnessed. A combination of military repression, political manhuevering, and support fom Richmond kept that from happening.
“The Kingdom of Jones” is probably the best-known example, and of course there’s West Virginia. smiling bandit is correct as to the other hotbeds of pro-Union sentiment.
Having asserted the legal right to secession, it’s hard to see how the Confederacy could deny it to others - but in wartime, principles often are thrown out the window. A noted diarist in the Confederate War Department (his name now escapes me) wrote that the Confederacy faced every bit as much a threat from internal dissent as it did from the Union armies. They cracked down pretty hard. Some historians such as MacKinlay Kantor (in his celebrated 1960 Look alt-history magazine article, “If the South Had Won the Civil War”) suggest that, had the Confederacy won its independence, it might’ve been only a matter of time before Texas, in particular, decided to split from the CSA and make a go of it as an independent republic.
East Tennessee was known for its pro-Union leanings. One of Lincoln’s ongoing issues with his generals was his difficulty in getting someone to push into East Tennessee and support/protect those citizens.
In general, a lot of mountainous regions, (including East Tennessee and Western Virginia) perhaps because they were unsuitable for cotton plantations, were less enthusiastic about the Cause, sometimes viewing it as a “rich man’s war” to protect plantation-owners’ interests.
The Appalachians were the center of pro-Union support in the Confederacy. West Virginia is the most obvious example (and the one that was adjacent to the United States). But it went down through Tennessee and into Alabama. Nickajack and Winston.
These were people who were defending slavery in the name of liberty. Hypocrisy was not a problem. The Confederate government opposed any secessionist movement within the CSA and was willing to use military force against people trying to secede.
The situation in Missouri could charitably be described as chaotic. The governor and legislature favored secession. However, delegates to a constitutional convention called to formally secede refused to ratify the necessary amendment. Meanwhile, the governor sent militia troops to seize the federal arsenal in St. Louis, but the militia was defeated by U.S. Army troops. The Army then dispatched troops to the state capitol, but the governor and legislature fled and established a rump capitol. There, they elected representatives to the CSA. Meanwhile, a pro-Union legislature and governor were elected.
In short, the Missouri government tried to secede, but didn’t get the necessary consitutional amendment passed to make it official. They sent representatives to the CSA congress, but those representatives were appointed by a government that wasn’t really governing anything.
Yip, I was going to mention that. It’s always been an odd source of pride for people around here that we were “on the right side.”
Note that it was almost purely economical, though. Northern Arkansas is hilly and doesn’t have good farm land. And, due to this was and still is more sparsely populated. We were mostly self-sustaining, and thus had little need for slaves.
People were not philosophically opposed to the concept: I find this is proven when the KKK capital existed here and the race riots of just a little more than 100 years ago.
Your logic certainly makes sense. All of the states that seceded from the Union certainly seemed to implicitly agree with the proposition that a state could secede from the Union.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean they agreed that a stated could secede from the Confederacy.
After all, when it comes to politics, logic doesn’t always have as much sway as political alliances, graft and treachery.
With regard to secession from secession and the Emancipation Proclamation, remember that the Great Proclamation applied to those parts of the country that were in active rebellion against the United States. It did not apply, for instance, to Maryland which was a slave state and had not joined in secession even though there were Maryland volunteer regiments in Lee’s army. The recited exceptions in the Proclamation were areas like West Virginia that had opted out of secession and opted out of Virginia and places like New Orleans and costal Carolina that were under Union occupation during the winter of 1862-1863.
The exceptions were consistent with the political position that it was not a generalized emancipation (as would be the case with the 13th Amendment) but rather a war measure under the Presidents war powers to weaken the Rebellion. It clearly cast a shadow before it, however, and did mark the transformation of the war from an effort to restore the status quo to one to work a radical change in the social and political structure of the nation.
The Confederate States of America Constitutionfollows the U.S. Constitution pretty closely (except for the whole slavery thing.) Curiously, it says nothing about the right to secede.
That actually makes sense, in fairness. If the CSA had endured, and Texas tried to leave, one could imagine a sympathetic future CSA Supreme Court saying something like, “Where the constitution of the Confederacy is silent, we must assume the founders intended to maintain the provisions of the Union constitution intact. The foundational doctrine of our Confederacy was that, while American States may enter into such arrangements as are appropriate to the maintenance of their soveriegnty, they remain sovereign. Just as the States of the Confederacy never surrendered their right to seceed from the Union, the State of Texas never surrendered its sovereign right to seceed if it wished to do so.”