I think too many people automatically assume that the Confederates thought of their states first and their country second. After all, the first thing the Confederates did after seceding from one union was get together and form another one. It’s plausible that the Confederates considered themselves to be Americans but they had a different view on what America meant.
I think you are right. Reading the Cornerstone Speechthe tone is not so much anti-national as such, but more about specific grievances that the southern states were the disrespected whipping boys in the national partnership, and of course the oppression they suffered in that bothersome “slavery is bad” thing.
I going to take back what I said about the Cornerstone Speech above. It really is kind of antagonistic to the main political structures of the United States (as then construed).
But in that speech, Alexander Stephens speaks of the Confederacy as “a country”; of the South having “the essential elements of a high national career” and being able to “maintain a separate nationality”–not seven separate national identities (as there were at that time seven states in the CSA). In June of 1861 L.Q.C. Lamar exulted “Thank God, we have a country at last: to live for, to pray for, and if need be, to die for”–again, Lamar didn’t say “eleven countries”. (By contrast, if several European states decided the EU was becoming too centralized and decided to quit, even if multiple states acted in concert supporters of secessionism would surely speak of getting their countries back, in the plural.)
I just don’t see anything to suggest that the idea that the United States of America was in fact several dozen “countries” or “nations” was all that widespread, even before the War. Is there in fact anything from anyone (other than Robert E. Lee, who was something of an outlier in multiple ways) to suggest that Southern leaders really saw each state as a separate country or nation? Mostly from what I can tell Southerners seemed to have seen the issue in regional terms–of a Southern minority being discriminated against by “the North”, and the need for resistance and secession was cast in regional terms, of “Southern rights”. This regional identity was certainly associated with the idea of the individual states retaining rights or sovereignty. But believing in political decentralization and localism is not the same thing as believing that each locally self-governing unit is or ought to be a separate nation-state. Southerners (apart from Lee) seem to have seen “their country” to be the South as a whole.
Consider how obscure Francis Pickens is in comparison to Jefferson Davis. You never hear anyone refer to Pickens as a national leader.
To bring it back around to the question actually asked in the OP:
When the English first established colonies on the Eastern seaboard of North America, the colonists undoubtedly thought of themselves as “Englishmen”. (After 1707, technically “British”, but the whole English vs. British thing, not to mention the presence of Scotsmen, Scots-Irish, Irish, Welsh, and so on among the colonists shows that questions of national identity can be quite complicated.) Since the English/British colonization proceeded piecemeal, with different colonial provinces being established at different times and for different agendas, naturally people did come to develop particular local identities–“Pennsylvanians” or “Virginians” and so on. Nonetheless, it seems clear that by the time the American Revolution rolled around, many (though not all) people in the colonies had begun to develop a new national identity, as “Americans”. This was far from set in stone–not only would the Loyalists have still thought of themselves as Englishmen or as British subjects, but initially many proponents of colonial rights portrayed themselves as fighting for their “rights as Englishmen”. The experience of the Revolution was of thirteen English (British) colonial provinces facing a common crisis in their relationship with the mother country; forming “continental” institutions to deal with those problems; and eventually proclaiming independence together–on the one hand, nominally as thirteen separate states, but done collectively as a group–and then fighting a war as a (more-or-less) unified group, while forming the first (flawed) attempt at a national government. (The nominally thirteen “free and independent states” never actually acted as fully sovereign states in international affairs, but were united in terms of their international relations and common defense from the start.) And winning the war of course. All of this in turn gave an enormous boost to “American” national identity.
Politically, for a whole host of philosophical and practical reasons, the new nation’s government was quite decentralized, even after the adoption of the Constitution in 1787. (For one thing the United States, though it obviously possessed fewer square miles, was in terms of travel and communications times much larger than it is now.) There was never any real prospect of a single centralized Republic of America, divided up into French-style centrally-controlled departments. Naturally, the existing colonial governments were used as the building blocks of a new federal state.
This political decentralization doesn’t mean Americans didn’t think of themselves as Americans until after the Civil War; the United States was not some sort of supranational organization along the lines of the European Union; and Pennsylvanian and Virginian (and Iowan and Tennessean and the rest) were not seen by most people as “national” identities in the same way that “Englishman” and “Frenchmen” were, and that “Italian” and “German” were increasingly being seen as, even before the establishment of unified Italian and German nation-states. The various states possessed a common nationality–American–and after the adoption of the Constitution there was clearly a national government (albeit one with limited powers), with a President of the United States who was clearly identifiable as the national head of state and government along with a national Congress; a national government which included a House of Representatives and (at least by the time you get to the Jacksonian Era) a national Presidency which were elected in nation-wide elections conducted by political parties (Democratic-Republicans, Federalists, Democrats, Whigs) which functioned across state lines.
The issue of slavery caused a deep regional division among Americans, between “Northerners” and “Southerners”, eventually deep enough that the Southerners sought to split away and establish a new national identity (I suppose their national appellation would probably have wound up being “Confederates”, which is even more imperfect than “Americans”, but there you go). The system of political parties, previously national in scale, splintered along regional lines; but you still didn’t have separate systems of political parties in each different state (with a Bloc Louisiane here and a South Carolinian Independence Party there). (The Confederate States never developed a system of political parties, but it also never functioned except under wartime emergency conditions while fighting for its very existence.) Since the U.S. was always a federal republic, this regional division was often expressed in terms of “states’ rights” and state sovereignty; but that still doesn’t mean that people (except maybe Robert E. Lee) thought of the U.S. as a collection of thirty-three nation-states.
The Civil War in turn did its part to further cement American national identity (though it took a long time for the wounds to fully heal–if they actually have–in the South; but the North of course was already committed enough to American national identity in 1860 to go to war to “preserve the Union”.)
We’re beginning to argue over shades of meaning that we’re trying to ascribe to large groups of diverse people who thought of the world in terms foreign to us.
I agree that nobody thought of the states as nation-states. I agree that people in the states thought of themselves as Americans.
The shades of meaning come into play in the subtler question: how did they think of America as a political entity?
The Confederacy did not break away as a nation, not even as a region. Individual states voted to do so over a period of about six months. There was no realistic way for a set of individual states to survive against a much larger, more populous, and far more industrialized nation, even the remnant of a larger former whole. They had to form an alliance. They did so, but tried to assume as loose a federal format as was possible under the circumstances. Too loose by far, as Jefferson Davis would find out.
Did the Confederates truly think of themselves as Confederates, with a Confederate identity? No, they thought of themselves as southerners or rebels or members of their states. They defined themselves in opposition to the North. Whether that would have consolidated into a national identity as the original U.S. did is pure guesswork. The South could not have won under any circumstances other than the North abjectly surrendering for no reason.
Did other nation-states look at the Confederacy as a country? No one of them ever formally recognized the Confederacy as a new breakaway nation. One oddity exists that supports my side of the interpretation. From the Museum of the Confederacy:
The end of the Civil War placed the formal discussion of the sovereignty of states in the attic, to be hauled out and dusted occasionally by various reactionary groups to this day. It can’t be said that the losers in this battle immediately switched their identities to Americans, although that was preferable to thinking of themselves as Northerners or Yankees. It’s just that the losing side quieted and eventually became part of the political fringe rather than the mainstream. Later wars were supported by all segments of the country and created a united patriotism that could be supported as a national identity, especially with the growth of the federal government after the 1930s.
The relationship among the states and to the federal government was shaky and often surprisingly legally undefined until the Civil War. People who wanted to exploit the uncertainties did a masterful job of it. And for a few years they got their way - in a way of their choosing but in the worse possible way. It couldn’t and didn’t last. But it took its failure to tromp down the uncertainties and make the whole whole.
That’s why we argue about shades of meaning. Depending on exactly which aspects of history you want to emphasis, different attitudes come to the fore. Heck, we haven’t even mentioned the New Englanders who wanted to secede during the War of 1812, at a time when the Southerners were denouncing any such possibility. History is bigger than any set of people living in it. You can’t define history by pulling out individuals. You have to look at the whole.
How about these comments from Andrew Jackson (born in South Carolina, professional career in Tennessee):
Well, 1830 was a full generation before the Civil War. A lot changed in that time.
And we’re taking generalizations about large groups of people. You can always find individual quotes from individuals on any side of the issue.
How about this legislative decree:
Or this one:
Or a town:
Or an individual:
Or newspapers:
Oops. That was all from Massachusetts. In 1804.
Those are all from Donald Livingston: The New England Secession Tradition, Part II
Livingston also says:
What states thought about the federal government went back and forth depending on whose ox was being gored. People talked very seriously about secession and nullification and their anger at having to submit their ways to the ways of others at every point during the 19th century up until 1860. The South didn’t invent it and the North was hypocritical when denouncing it. At any given point you could find people on any side - depending upon the situation and who the opposition was. That’s why I said “shades of meaning.” Probably only a handful of specialist historians - me not among them - really have done enough contemporary reading to get an intuitive understanding of what the country was feeling during those times. I’ve done just enough to begin to understand how complicated and difficult it is to generalize. Think about how people 150 years from now will compress all of our splits and angers into a single country mood. But we don’t have one, you might say. True, but we will to them.
What is interesting there, too, is that this represents only one half of the people. There were a lot of southerners who didn’t give a damn about the Confederacy: they were Gerogia, Mississipi, or North Carolina men (and so on). The Confederacy was just the means to achieve their goal.
This doesn’t mean that national sentiment didn’t exist. A lot of ordinary people in the South, particularly in east Tennessee, north-western Virginia (today’s West Virginia), west North Carolina, and west Mississipi were all inclined more towards the Union, though of course some did serve the COnfederacy wehn their states went South. And a lot of pro-Union southerners had already left the South by the start of the Civil War.
It’s a complicated subject and the history of the evolving national identity is a strange one. In fact, I’d say it’s really unique in history.