I’m sure you have “some” of these examples?
Like some bronze age king.
And there are statutes of him and schools named after him.
Along similar lines to the Great Locomotive Chase, there’s a good story about a slave piloting a Confederate ship to freedom. Probably not a popular topic among Lost Causers.
Why does the Lost Cause myth persist? The simple answer is because it has been passed down from generation to generation. It has also been the beneficiary of some damn good 20th Century propaganda, in films such as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and, of course, Gone With the Wind.
There was also a desire among Northerners to move past the wounds of the Civil War and to reconcile – with White southerners. Keep in mind that, generally speaking, most people who lived in the Union were themselves white supremacists; they just didn’t agree with slavery per se. There was a desire among Southerners to reconcile with white racists in the North by telling ‘their side of the story’, and northerners looking to reconcile demonstrated a willingness to consider it. Hence the fact that there are or have been many monuments to the confederacy that have been erected well beyond the boundaries of the CSA.
And that also explains why today, in 2021, candidates like Donald Trump have just as much support in places like Iowa, Kansas, and the Dakotas as they do in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
Drunk History covered this:
I gotta take issue with you on this one. AFAICT not only the concept but the exact phrase “public opinion”—'scuse me, “Publick Opinion”—was very commonly recognized and discussed at least by the early 19th century. Here’s what Fenimore Cooper said about it in 1838:
Here’s another discussion from 1817, and there are innumerable similar examples (early 19th-c. Americans sure wrote a lot about democracy and society). And if you include synonyms such as “public sentiment” and “public feeling”, there are innumerable instances of those too.
Oooh, I’ve always had a fondness for the historical figure Captain Robert Smalls, ever since I chose his Planter maneuver (can’t remember why, though) for the first real Research Paper I ever had to write in school. I looked him up in an actual ENCYCLOPEDIA. 
I’m not really sure we disagree here. As I said “it was in its infancy”, and you cite a quote from 1838…that would seem to roughly correspond to it being in its infancy. Or rather, I don’t find it interesting to dispute much further what “in its infancy means” beyond the broad phrase I used. If you had found evidence of public opinion being commonly spoken about in say, the mid 18th or 16th centuries, I would find that to be a significant difference from my understandings of the history. But rather my understanding was that modern style measurements of public opinion started largely with Newspapers “polls”, they would basically publish questions in their paper asking people to write them in with what their opinion was in a multiple choice format. My understanding is those newspaper polls actually became common enough later on that the concept of marking your selection and submitting it became ubiquitous with the word “polling” and is why people started calling locations where they cast actual votes polling places
It was my understanding this all developed in the middle of the 19th century, if that is materially incorrect it would be new information to me, but 1838 doesn’t to me seem much different. Going back to the larger argument, due to limitations of the methodology of the newspaper polls and the scattered availability of their records, we don’t really know much about the real public opinion of the “people.” We know a lot more about the opinions of people who put their thoughts to paper, either in the form of letters to newspapers, important published works or private correspondence. But even still a great bit of our perceptions of the antebellum Americans’ thoughts is really shaped by our history of elites. of that period, the wealthy or educated (or both), who were notable persons of the day who recorded their thoughts and whose thoughts were considered important/influential.
But it is always difficult to really know how representative that is. The antebellum period wasn’t that long ago, so we also have a lot of private letters of ordinary people, diaries etc still extant, which can help flesh out maybe the vague hints of public opinion. But it is nothing like the eras from say, 1930 on where we actually have modern, scientific opinion polling that we believe was fairly decent in capturing the real representative opinion of the country, at least within a reasonable margin of error.
Oh I see, you were referring to quantitative statistical measurement of public opinion on specific issues, rather than the concept itself. The concept of public opinion, and the importance of a democracy being responsive to public opinion, was absolutely already a mature and well-established idea by the early 19th century. But I agree with you that mechanisms for quantitatively estimating public opinion on specific issues were still in their infancy in the mid-19th century.
Well it was in the context of @SunUp post, in that he wanted to build quantitative data of who supported secession and etc, I said that I am not entirely sure that data exists. We did gather some data like that at the time, but in a way more flawed than modern opinion polling, and records also are more scarce than in modern times. Only three states had referenda on secession, it was generally implemented by State legislatures or special conventions, who we can presume had the support of their constituency, at least those constituents who had voted for them, but that’s an imperfect level of understanding. Hence my comment that I’m not really sure we can know in a real numbers sense.
We do know that the elements that ran Southern society were in favor of secession, and a non-trivial number of its adult men volunteered to fight and die to try to achieve it–although even that is a little imperfect, as I’ve read accounts of Confederate soldiers who were not in favor of secession, but felt an obligation to fight for their State in a shooting war, even if its war aims didn’t line up with their own preferences–I do think we can assume most who went to fight for the CSA were pro-secession, though–but even then that’s just a subset of adult males.
The South Carolina secession convention is somewhat of an interesting look at the situation. The South Carolina General Assembly called for the convening of a secession convention, delegates to that convention were elected. A total of 169 delegates were sent, my understanding is that 153 of them were slaveholders, with over half of them being “significant” slaveholders of large numbers of slaves. But the thing is I’m not really sure in the selection of these delegates if the voters had any real choice. I think a lot of these delegates ran unopposed, and I think where they didn’t it was more selecting which pro-secession person you wanted to send as your delegate. I’m not really sure it was structured for anti-secession South Carolinians to have a voice, and I suspect many just did not participate in the process at all, seeing it as invalid.
In Mississippi the secession convention appeared to have been more openly contested, with something like 15 of the delegates out of 105 or so voting not to secede.
Florida’s secession convention had 69 delegates (all of whom owned at least 10 slaves), 7 nay votes–they held no debate on whether to secede or not, only when and what text should be in their secession declaration.
Alabama had a 100 delegate secession convention, my understanding is they were not elected on secession or unionism, but “immediate secession” or “cooperative secession”, the latter simply meaning the position that they would be willing to secede in cooperation with a number of other neighboring states i.e. they did not want Alabama seceding by itself. A number of the cooperative secession delegates joined in with the immediate secessionists (who had 53 seats) to pass the secession ordinance due to the fact South Carolina, Mississippi and Florida had already finished seceding by the time the Alabama convention voted.
Georgia’s secession convention is one of the few I find documentary evidence of actual Unionist candidates standing for–and winning, delegate positions, and one of the few secession conventions that actually debated whether to secede or not vs when and how to secede, the Georgia convention met for a lengthy period of time, and despite some early estimates of it being a close vote among the delegates, there was a shift as the previous four states passed secession ordinances and the convention ended up voting for immediate secession via a strong margin–interestingly Georgia’s secession convention then immediately converted to a constitutional convention to redraft the Georgia State constitution.
Skipping over several of the other states with more or less similar histories,Texas’s secession is somewhat interesting. Its governor Sam Houston was an ardent unionist, and was not willing to call the legislature into special secession initially. He only ultimately relented when it became obvious the citizens were simply going to form their own secession conventions in spite of him if he did not. The Texas legislature as in the other states established for the election of delegates to a secession convention. We know that these elections would not meet any modern standards of democracy. Unionists were strongly discouraged from attending, and selection of delegates was usually via a “voice vote” at a public meeting house, where any Unionists who dared attend or speak out were subject to assault or worse if they raised objection. Given this voting method was strong armed by secessionists, it is unsurprising that Texas had the strongest margin for secession in its convention other than South Carolina (which had a unanimous vote.) The Texas secession convention unlike most of the other states, did put approval of the ordinance up to a referendum, which passed 46k to 13k, but voting in that referendum was ripe with all the same issues of voting in the convention delegation elections, this was an era before the anonymous vote, and bullying and physical violence at voting places as the norm in the middle 19th century. The fact that Texas had a pro-unionist Governor and had 13k out of around 60k votes willing to actually vote to stay in the Union suggests to me secession was probably significantly less popular in Texas than in a number of the other Confederate states in the “Old South.”
Arguably of course Virginia and Tennessee were even more divided on secession. Virginia so much so that it permanently lost its Western counties over secession, as they were enough opposed they formed their own “Restored Government of Virginia” meeting in Wheeling, that declared the Richmond Assembly invalid, and then approved the splitting of the state in two. Tennessee had a very similar movement going on with its Eastern Appalachian counties, but it was able to suppress it with martial law and heavy handed tactics–one of Tennessee’s United States Senators was an ardent unionist–Andrew Johnson, who went on to be Lincoln’s second Vice President and successor after his assassination.
Ultimately while I strongly believe a majority of free white males in the South approved secession, the evidence isn’t necessarily certain, because like everything in the old slaveocracies, it was as process dominated by, started by, ran by large slaveholding wealthy men, and anti-democratic measures were employed almost across the board to suppress any opposition to it. These were less free elections than the ones Hitler won in the final years of Weimar Germany (which themselves were certainly problematic elections.)
I don’t think that’s accurate. According to Etymology.com, the term “poll” comes from a word for the head. “Polling” was a verb that was used for counting sheep, and then by 1620s, is the first recorded use of “polling” to mean counting votes: you counted heads who were for a measure, and heads who were opposed to it. “Polling place”, as a place where you counted heads, is first recorded in 1832. “Poll” in the meaning of an opinion poll is not recorded until 1902.
He’s one of those guys your read about and wonder why they never made a movie about his exploits. But then you remember that a movie has to be believable and real life doesn’t.
Whew - where to start? Well, for starters, great post.
There’s one interesting state example you left out - North Carolina. We do have county-by-county returns of the February 28th vote barely against calling a secession convention. Along with that, there were 120 delegates voted to the convention had it been called.
This still doesn’t give much insight into the motivations of those voting against the convention. There were certainly a mix of conditional and unconditional Unionists, and even a small smattering of antislavery (and largely apolitical) Quakers and Moravians in the Western Piedmont and Appalachian foothills. About one fourth of the state were slaveholders, and one fourth of them held ten or more slaves. Slaveholding was rarer in the western areas of the state. One irony of the war was that Union control of both blue and brown waters meant that the proslavery portions of both North Caroliana and Tennessee were occupied early in the war while the Unionist sections along the backbone of the Appalachians were not liberated until later.
Perhaps I need to consider thought and action on these matters to be less ideologically and more practically based. If we accept that popular thought is, at least in the context of secession, irrelevant due to the slaveocracy’s grip on the levers of power, then perhaps simple support or opposition to that group based on practical factors is more important than the degree of allegiance to a particular political outlook.
Fascinating post!
I often overlook North Carolina in my thinking about the ACW, and I’m not sure why that is. I did know I wasn’t able to research all of the state’s of the Confederacy, so I kind of focused on the first five–because the fifth state, Georgia, voting to secede was kind of the “dam breaking” and what in some sense made the whole project more likely to conclude in a large scale Civil War. Virginia and Texas were interesting because in some ways they broke the mold of the other Confederate states.
I think there’s probably some similar factors running from western Virginia (modern WV), eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina–these regions are all firmly in the Appalachias, where large scale plantation type agriculture just wasn’t viable outside of a few very limited areas, for this reason slavery was never practiced on anything approaching the scale of the larger big agricultural plantation areas.
I think the lack of large plantations is important not just for the consequent lack of large plantation owners, but maybe even more importantly–lower economic class whites who are dependent on that large plantation owner. The large plantations were major economic drivers in their areas. They firstly, employed free whites in various jobs, and they had significant commerce with the local economy. Lots of businesses would have sold goods and equipment to the large local plantations when they were things the plantation owner couldn’t have fashioned on their own. There’s the often quoted figure that something like 10% of the South owned slaves, and even a smaller portion owned large plantations.
But that isn’t a good measure of the direct impact of slavery on the white population. A historian did an analysis of the unit that went on to become Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and over 50% of the men in it had a direct connection to slavery–either they were owners themselves, employed working for slaveholders, or ran a business or had economic ties that made slavery essential to their economic well being.
In the Appalachians there was just almost none of that, you had a few small freeholders that had scraped together enough money and made the decision to by 1-5 slaves to make their small holdings a little more profitably run, but even that wasn’t very common. The people of the Appalachians thus not only were not major slavers themselves, they didn’t do much business with them, so they were maybe not surprisingly far less enthused for the cause of the big slavers.
The French were ahead of us there. One of the characters in the 1858 comic opera Orphée aux Enfers is Public Opinion.
It bears pointing out that one of the main disagreements the Texicans had with the Mexican government was that it outlawed slavery.
It bears pointing out that your avatar is marvelous! What a treat for the eyes.
It did not, not for Texas. They had a waiver.
Texas had a disagreement with that madman Santa Ana who tore up the Constitution, etc. Several other provinces of Mexico also declared independence.