A Strange Foreboding of the Civil War
William Jenks wrote a history of that war... 53 years before it happened!
In 1808, the American writer, William Jenks, published a book entitled “Memoirs of the Northern Kingdom”. Jenks identified this work as a collection of letters penned in the future by Rev. William Jahnsenykes to his son in 1872 but of course it was not. It was actually written by Jenks as a fantasy satire on the politics of Thomas Jefferson by way of describing an American civil war.
In the book, Jenks split the United States into three nations, roughly the Northeast, the South and the Midwest and revealed regional, cultural characteristics peculiar to the several populations. He wrote that the issue of slavery had finally brought the “Southern Kingdom” into direct conflict with the “Northern Kingdom”
Jenks assumed that members elected to the governments of both the North and the South were not able to avert a conflict over slavery. That issue simply could not and would not be compromised away. Southern states maintained loyalty to the United States only to the degree that it served their right to own slaves and to expand slavery as the nation grew westward.
If slavery couldn’t spread as new states were formed then the existing slave states would be doomed to perpetual minority status in Congress, guaranteeing that sooner or later the North would vote the institution out of existence and the freed slaves would then turn on the white population and slay them.
There had been a foretaste of such horror in 1739, when African slaves rose up in a revolt in South Carolina. Twenty-three whites and 50 blacks were killed in what became known as the Stono Rebellion (started at the Stono River southwest of Charleston). Though there were numerous slave uprisings in the southern colonies, this was the largest and deadliest and it got lodged in the minds of whites as an ineradicable fear. Jenks had been aware of such events.
Jenks, writing under the pseudonym of “Jahnsenykes” saw that the Southern Kingdom, led by Virginia, would try to gain the support of European powers a half-century before Louisiana’s John Slidell and Virginia’s James Murray Mason actually went to England and France to lobby for support of the Confederacy.
Jenks saw that there were two aristocracies in America … the one in the north being ruled by wealthy industrialists and in the south by wealthy planters and landowners. Neither would willingly be ruled by the other even if survival of the nation might demand it. From the remote distance of 53 years in time, Jenks saw that conflict between the two “kingdoms” was inevitable and so he wrote the “history” of it … not of specific instances of warfare on the battlefield but of the cultural warfare between them which had been boiling for generations.
A sense of urgency had grown throughout southern politics over the years, becoming a force for open defiance of the United States Government by the spring of 1861. In April, Confederate guns around Charleston Harbor forced the surrender of its Union garrison at Fort Sumter and started four years of tragic and devastating war.
It’s been said of the Civil War that if Jefferson Davis had been president of the Union the North would have lost and had Abraham Lincoln presided over the South it would have won.
Robert Rhett, owner of the Charleston Mercury, was a rabid fire-eater who took every occasion to oppose and ridicule Davis. Vice President Alexander Stephens even refused to move from his Georgia home to the Confederate capitol at Richmond as long as Davis was there. Georgia’s Robert Toombs, an alcoholic, was a member of Davis’s cabinet and refused to believe the Confederacy could win the war. These men were the “tip of the iceberg”.
Beneath them was an elite class of wealthy plantation owners and stubborn, egotistical politicians who demanded more recognition for themselves and for their separate states than the Confederate government could possibly agree to.
A far larger population of modest or poor, non-slave holding whites made up the majority of the antebellum South, tilling meager farms, sharecropping, operating small general stores, grist mills, saddleries and sawmills and raising small herds of cattle. These people had little if any impact on the events that were propelling them into conflict
Yet they saw the north as a real and grave threat that would set loose a population of revenge-seeking slaves to wipe them out.
So, yes, they would go to war, not for the property of slave owners but for their own homes. A classic line from that conflict was “it’s a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”
Jenks, writing a half-century before the guns fired on Sumter, saw that at the core of the dominant Southern society and leadership lay an instinct for oligarchy that only serf labor or slavery could sustain. To do that they would have to have a nation of their own. That was an impossibility for several reasons.
Not least among which is the fact that the South is not a single culture with a single dialect. No two states could be as different from one another as hillbilly Arkansas and cavalier Virginia. For that matter, even south Louisiana and north Louisiana are markedly different, as are east Tennessee and west Tennessee and trying to weld all those disparate loyalties into a cohesive government was probably a fool’s errand from the start.
But they started!
“Things,” as Mark Twain famously said, “are easier to get into than they are to get out of.”
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