I engage with hundreds of people on social media in conversations about the Civil War and Reconstruction. One thing I have heard many times in discussions of individuals who joined the Confederate army to fight against the United States is the claim that “At that time, in the 1860s, a person’s state was their country.” This is not something we only hear among Lost Cause-believing Confederate descendents. I have heard from a number of people who were not defending an ancestor in “Stonewall” Jackson’s Brigade, but from people who seem to be repeating a “truth” they have heard or read at sometime and accepted as authoritative.
The implication is that a man from a state like Virginia who opposed slavery would still serve in the Confederate army once his state seceded. To refuse to take up arms against the United States would be to betray his country, which was Virginia-not the United States. I used to follow up by asking what the United States was in 1860, if it was not its citizen’s country. Sometimes I hear that it was a sort of United Nations of North America. Other times, the United States is said to be something like NATO, a mutual defense pact against possible enemies. At one time, I would respond by exploring the meaning of “country” and whether states fit this definition. Discussions of Grotius would follow. That was fairly fruitless.
More recently I decided to look at the lives of some of the more famous Confederates to see if they were born in the state that was purported to be their “country,” how long they lived in that state before the war and whether they lived in the state after the war was over. I found that while some Confederates lived nearly their whole lives in one place, many others seemed to be constantly in motion-born in one state, receiving an education in another, working in a third or fourth state, marrying a woman from still another state and retiring in yet another state after the war. Few moved outside the boundaries of the United States, but many moved from state to state when career, marriage, investments, or political opportunity called.
Here are the stories of a few famous Confederates:
One of the best known leaders of the Confederacy was the man selected to be its president, Jefferson Davis. Prior to assuming office at the head of the Confederate government, Davis had been a member of the United States Senate from Mississippi. He resigned from the Senate following Mississippi’s issuance of its Ordinance of Secession. If the theory that “A man’s state was his country” is correct, we would expect that he was born in Mississippi, right? Wrong. In fact, Davis was born in Kentucky, a state that did not join the Confederacy, in 1808. As a small boy, Davis’s family moved to Bayou Teche, in Louisiana, and then later to Mississippi. When he was eight, he moved to Kentucky to attend school and then at ten years of age, he moved back to Mississippi. In 1823 he went to Transylvania College in Kentucky. In 1824, Davis was appointed to West Point and he was educated along the Hudson in New York. After graduating from West Point, Davis served in the United States Army first in Michigan and next in Arkansas. In 1835 he was court martialed and, following his acquittal, he resigned from the army and moved to Mississippi.
Davis married the daughter of Zachary Taylor, his commanding officer when he served in Michigan under the future president. Taylor himself was a man who did not grow up in the state of his birth. He had been born in Virginia, but he and his family had moved from that “country” to Kentucky. Taylor’s daughter whom Jeff Davis married, Sarah, was herself born in Indiana. Davis and Sarah married in Kentucky in 1835 and she died of malaria in Louisiana just a few months afterwards. By the 1840s, Jeff Davis clearly had settled on Mississippi as the state he wanted to live in. He created a large slave-based plantation. He married a Mississippi native, Varina Howell, and he raised his children there. Of course, as a Member of the United States Congress, as a U.S. Senator, as Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce, Davis spent a lot of the pre-war period in Washington. He was a prominent defender of slavery. As President of the Confederacy, he was in Alabama and Virginia for most of the Civil War.
At the end of the Civil War, Davis was captured by Union troops and imprisoned. Following his release, he travelled to Europe. When he returned to the United States in 1870 he took up residence in Tennessee. He spent time in Europe during the 1870s and in 1877 he moved to Mississippi. He stayed there for the remaining twelve years of his life, although he passed away in Louisiana during a trip.
Davis’s wife Varina, who was born in Mississippi, was educated in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Three years after her husband’s death, Varina moved to New York City where she lived until her death in 1906.
James Longstreet, one of Robert E. Lee’s most effective Corps commanders, was born in South Carolina. While still a boy, Longstreet was sent to Georgia by his family to live with his uncle Augustus to receive an education. Augustus was the leading theological defender of slavery in the United States. When his father died, Longstreet remained in Georgia, but the rest of his family moved to Alabama. He was nominated for West Point by an Alabama Congressman and went to New York to attend the United States Military Academy. After graduating from West Point, Longstreet was sent to Missouri, where he married the daughter of his commanding officer, John Garland, a Virginian who stayed loyal to the United States during the Civil War. As a soldier before the Civil War, Longstreet served just about everywhere, from New York and Pennsylvania, to Florida and Texas.
After the Civil War, Longstreet settled in New Orleans. He was a prominent figure in Louisiana until the bi-racial Reconstruction government there was overthrown and his life was placed in danger. In 1875, Longstreet moved to Georgia.
Albert Sidney Johnston, the commander of the largest Confederate army in the Western Theater, was born in Kentucky in 1803. His father was from Connecticut. Neither kentucky nor Connecticut seceded. Albert Sidney Johnston was educated in New York at West Point. After graduation, he served in the army in New York, Missouri, and Michigan. He moved to Texas in the 1830s and served as the Secretary of War of the Republic of Texas for two years. He then moved back to his native state of Kentucky, but after he married for the second time, Johnston moved back to Texas. He later moved to Los Angeles, California, where his sixth child was born.
Braxton Bragg was born in North Carolina in 1817. Bragg went to school in New York, at West Point, and served in the United States Army in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere. After serving in the Mexican War, Bragg left the army to run a slave-labor plantation in Louisiana. After the Civil War he lived in Alabama and Texas.
John Hunt Morgan, the famous Confederate raider, was born in Alabama in 1837. As a child, he moved to Kentucky. Morgan’s state did not secede and most Kentucky men who participated in the conflict served in the United States Army.
William Barksdale, a Confederate general killed at Gettysburg, was born and raised in Tennessee. He attended college in his native state. After his schooling, Barksdale was a pro-slavery newspaper editor in Mississippi and he later represented a district from that state in Congress.
Confederate Corps Commander Daniel Harvey Hill was born in South Carolina to a slave-owning family, but was educated in New York at West Point. After service in the army, D.H. Hill moved to Virginia to teach at a college. In the late 1850s he moved to North Carolina. After the Civil War he returned to North Carolina, but he later moved to Arkansas and then to Georgia.
John Bell Hood, who is most often associated with Texas, was born in Kentucky, a state which remained in the Union during the Civil War. He was educated in New York at West Point. He entered the Confederate army as an officer in a Texas regiment. After the war he moved to Louisiana.
Leonidas Polk, the Episcopal bishop who became a Confederate general, was born in Georgia and educated in Virginia. In the 1830s he moved to Tennessee where he was the largest slaveowner in his county. When the Civil War erupted, Polk entered the Confederate service while still remaining a bishop. He was killed in action.
Sterling Price, famous as a Confederate leader in Missouri, a state which never seceded, was born in Virginia to a “moderately wealthy” slaveowning father. When he was in his 20s, Price moved with his family to Missouri. After the Civil War, Price resettled in Mexico, but later returned to Missouri where he died in 1867.
A number of prominent Confederates like Joe Johnston, A.P. Hill, and Robert E. Lee lived most of their adult lives outside of their native states due to military duties, but kept lifelong ties to the states where they were born. A smaller number of leaders, like the chronically ill Alexander Stevens, lived for long periods in one state.
What we find in looking at the lives of many Confederates is that they moved about the United States, but largely did not move outside the boundaries of the U.S. When they moved from one state to another they did so as people today move from one state to another rather than as immigrants from the Country of Virginia to the Country of Kentucky.
As the Special Professor of Immigration Law at Hofstra University I also looked to see whether United States-born people who moved from one state to another were subject to the immigration laws passed by states during the Know Nothing period that placed restrictions on immigrants from other countries entering these states. What I found is they while they might be used against Irish or Chinese or German immigrants, these restrictionist laws were not used against people coming to settle from other states.
Of course, this was not an exclusively Southern phenomena. After the opening of the Erie Canal, New Englanders supported their children moving to Ohio to settle in the early 19th Century. Abraham Lincoln is an example of someone born in one state, Kentucky, who moved to another, Indiana, and then moved again, to Illinois.
Neither the native-born moving from state to state nor the receiving states saw these internal migrants as foreign immigrants changing countries of allegiance or engaged in international immigration. They were just folks moving from state to state, not country to country.
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I will come back to this with a longer reply when I’ve the opportunity.
One of the many false claims Shelby Foote made in the Ken Burns miniseries was that R.E. Lee called Virginia his country. If we look at what Lee actually wrote we see he never called Virginia his country. He called it his native state. He called the United States and later the Confederacy his country.
Thanks Al, I never followed up on that and someone on facebook responded to this article by telling me that Lee said Virginia was his country.
Lee never called Virginia “my country”. However, it ought be noted that ‘state’ has a deep history of being another word for this thing.
And it is very clear that Lee believed strongly in the typical Southern view of American federalism and the Constitution; that the states were the paramount political unit within the Union and of American federalism.
In short, he believed that America was structured in the same manner as Switzerland had been in the late 1700s, wherein, the cantons were paramount to the republic which bound them.
So when Lee used the terms like, ‘the country’, he was indeed referring to America as the larger political organized structure, but one in which the federalism model was understood that states, such as his native Virginia, were the foremost aspects of this and that persons were citizens of these first and foremost, exactly like the Swiss.
You see evidence in this such as his letter after the war to a mother, wherein he penned, “Madam, don’t bring your sons up to detest the United States government. Recollect that we form one country now. Abandon all these local animosities and raise your sons as Americans.”
In the 1774 ‘Letter to the Inhabitants of Quebec’, from the First Continental Congress, we see the foundations for the typical Southern conception of the Constitution and outline of American federalism that would be defined by it.
https://digitalarchive.tpl.ca/objects/344690/a-letter-to-the-inhabitants-of-the-province-of-quebec-extra#
This document’s purpose was to allay the religious and sectarian fears of the Quebecois and entice them to join the budding American nation. However, we see plainly the kind of country the Founding Fathers were envisioning in political and federal terms-
“October 26, 1774,
Friends and fellow-subjects,
We, the Delegates of the Colonies of New-Hampshire, Massachusetts-Bay, Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New-York, New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, the Counties of Newcastle, Kent and Sussex on Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North-Carolina and South-Carolina, deputed by the inhabitants of the said Colonies, to represent them in a General Congress at Philadelphia, in the province of Pennsylvania, to consult together concerning the best methods to obtain redress of our afflicting grievances, having accordingly assembled, and taken into our most serious consideration the state of public affairs on this continent, have thought proper to address your province, as a member therein deeply interested…We are too well acquainted with the liberality of sentiment distinguishing your nation, to imagine, that difference of religion will prejudice you against a hearty amity with us. You know, that the transcendant nature of freedom elevates those, who unite in her cause, above all such low-minded infirmities. The Swiss Cantons furnish a memorable proof of this truth. Their union is composed of…States, living in the utmost concord and peace with one another, and thereby enabled, ever since they bravely vindicated their freedom, to defy and defeat every tyrant that has invaded them.”
It is clear that the argument that the States as being paramount to the Union had long roots. The South’s view of the Union as being akin to an above model of Swiss federalism was no post-war creation by the Lost Cause school. This model was clearly championed by Americans such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John C. Calhoun, John Tyler, John Quincy Adams, Jefferson Davis and a wide berth of regional support in the South.
We find from the outset as well a responding different notion of American federalism, the constitution, etc, by Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Daniel Webster, Zachary Taylor, Abraham Lincoln and US Grant. This school saw the Union as paramount to the states.
The example of Jefferson Davis is apt, above; he and Abraham Lincoln were both born in the state of Kentucky, but each followed the track of regional understanding of the American nation and constitution that was behest in their life journeys, Lincoln adopting the notion of America being defined as the Union, that political orbit that brought about the joining of a vast array of stars into the one flag, while Davis understood that each all states chose to stand together as American satellites organised for common cause, (an example of this was how he declined some honor or medal, etc, as a result of his Mexican American War service, but he declared that only states had the right to dispense these).
The matter is elucidated when we consider such examples as when Sam Houston became Governor of Tennessee in the 1820s, he called Tennessee, ‘my adopted country’, in his innaugral speech. US Grant’s father in law tried to persuade Grant at war’s outbreak that he could apply for and receive a Missouri state commission from the Confederacy.
If we look at these Confederates, we can find evidence that shows that the matter is not so necessarily clear as the argument would make, (though it is a very well put argument and appreciated)-
Jeb Stuart, James Longstreet, John Kemper, John Mosby and Robert E. Lee all very clearly said in their primary records that they were offering their services to their states out of loyalty to these. This accords with what I have said above that ‘state/country’ have a deep historical connection of being synonymous and not even in just America. As well, even when Southerners said ‘country’ in the federalism sense, it is clear that they envisioned America as a country wherein the states, (specifically, the ones wherein they made their homes), were paramount to the Union which bound them together.
In his Memoir, ‘From Manassas to Appomattox’, Longstreet recounted that just before departing from the South in New Mexico territory at war’s outbreak, a colleague at his post from New York tried to persuade him to side with the Union. When Longstreet asked this colleague what he would do if his own state of New York were to secede, that colleague said he would fight with New York and against the Union.
As well, the Fathers of Canadian Confederation, long and intimately familiar with American slavery, (due to the fact that veritably all of them opposed it and many were connected to the Underground Railroad activities in at least some capacity), observed in detail about Alexander Stephens that it was his understanding of the Southern notion of ‘state paramountcy’ in American federalism that had caused him to side with the Confederacy, not a devotion to slavery, at the Quebec Conference in 1864.
The notion of the states being paramount to the Union found a wide, if not absolute, adherence and audience in the South, producing a particularly strong adherence to the state that Southerners defined as their ‘home state’.
The manner in which this produced the opposite reaction and understanding in the North is just as interesting to examine.
Allow me to add one or two examples of what I was saying about how the very word ‘state’ has long been synonymous with ‘country’, ‘nation’. In the American context of the South, it is demonstrable that the term ‘state’, by context and wider scope of history, could indeed be used to infer one’s state as one’s country.
-Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany: “The Party which dares to attack the foundations of our State, which sets itself against religion and does not stop at attacking the person of the All-Highest Ruler must be rooted out to the very last stump.” (Speech (26 February 1897), quoted in Michael Balfour, The Kaiser and His Times (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 159)
-(about) Alexander Mackenzie, Prime Minister of Canada, 1973-78: ‘St. John Telegraph’, New Brunwick, on : “…he was loved by the people and his political opponents were compelled to respect him even above their own chosen leader. As a statesman, he has had few equals.” (Buckingham and Ross 1892, p. 660)
-John Stuart Mill, author of, ‘On Liberty’: What is called the Law of Nations is not properly law, but a part of ethics: a set of moral rules, accepted as authoritative by civilized states. It is true that these rules neither are nor ought to be of eternal obligation, but do and must vary more or less from age to age, as the consciences of nations become more enlightened, and the exigences of political society undergo change. But the rules mostly were at their origin, and still are, an application of the maxims of honesty and humanity to the intercourse of states. They were introduced by the moral sentiments of mankind, or by their sense of the general interest, to mitigate the crimes and sufferings of a state of war, and to restrain governments and nations from unjust or dishonest conduct towards one another in time of peace. Since every country stands in numerous and various relations with the other countries of the world, and many, our own among the number, exercise actual authority over some of these, a knowledge of the established rules of international morality is essential to the duty of every nation, and therefore of every person in it who helps to make up the nation, and whose voice and feeling form a part of what is called public opinion. Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject. It depends on the habit of attending to and looking into public transactions, and on the degree of information and solid judgment respecting them that exists in the community, whether the conduct of the nation as a nation, both within itself and towards others, shall be selfish, corrupt, and tyrannical, or rational and enlightened, just and noble. (Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews, Feb. 1st 1867 [1867] p. 36.)
(*Mill explicitly uses ‘states’ and ‘nation/s’ interchangably above)
Oh, my bad above-
Please read Alexander Mackenzie as Cdn. PM from 1873-78.
I enjoyed your article. One small correction though, James Longstreet was indeed born in South Caroline, but his mother went there to have the baby at her mother-in-laws home. Longstreet’s family were already living in the Piedmont section of Northeastern Georgia and his mother brought him there within weeks of his birth.
You are correct that at the age of nine, James was sent to live with his aunt Frances Eliza and uncle Augustus Baldwin Longstreet in Augusta, Georgia. but he did not come there from S.C., he was already living in Georgia.
James spent eight years on his uncle’s plantation, Westover, just outside the city while he attended the Academy of Richmond County. In 1833 Longstreet’s father died and then the family moved to Alabama while Longstreet stayed with his uncle.