ABRAHAM LINCOLN, SLAVERY, THE CIVIL WAR, THE SENATE
Washington, D.C., Jan. 28, 1861
His speech was a memorable one — that was the only thing that
everyone could agree upon. The anti-slavery New-York Tribune
called it “pathetic.” A pro-Southern newspaper in Washington
found it “solemn and impressive.” Today, the words have even
more resonance than in 1861. For they may have been the very
first eerie echo of what would become a famous American
rallying cry: “The South will rise again.” They also marked a
moment in national politics whose repercussions are still being
felt.
Library of Congress
Sen. Alfred Iverson of Georgia
After six years in the Senate, Alfred Iverson of Georgia had come
to the Capitol that morning to bid farewell to his fellow legislators,
to Washington — and to the United States of America. He waited
impatiently through the chaplain’s morning prayer, a report from
the secretary of the Navy, and multiple petitions from citizens
begging their lawmakers to forge a Union-saving compromise. At
last he could sit quiet no longer and interrupted one of his
colleagues, begging leave to speak.
Iverson began by having the Senate secretary read Georgia’s
ordinance of secession, passed little more than a week earlier.
Unlike other Southern politicians, he had never claimed that his
state ’s withdrawal was constitutional. It was, he frankly admitted,
simply a revolution. And now he challenged the Northern
legislators:
You may acquiesce in the revolution, and acknowledge the
independence of the new confederacy, or you may make war
on the seceding States, and attempt to force them back into a
Union with you. If you acknowledge our independence, and
treat us as one of the nations of the earth, you can have
friendly intercourse with us; you can have an equitable
division of the public property and of the existing public debt
of the United States. If you make war upon us, we will seize
and hold all the public property within our borders or within
our reach.
As he went on to imagine this war that might well lie ahead, the
senator ’s rhetoric grew more and more heated:
You boast of your superior numbers and strength.
Remember that “the race is not always to the swift, nor the
battle to the strong.” You have your hundreds of thousands of
fighting men. So have we; and, fighting upon our own soil, to
preserve our rights, vindicate our honor and defend our
homes and firesides, our wives and children from the invader,
we shall not be easily conquered.
You may possibly overrun us, desolate our fields, burn our
dwellings, lay our cities in ruins, murder our people and
reduce us to beggary, but you cannot subdue or subjugate us
to your government or your will. Your conquest, if you gain
one, will cost you a hundred thousand lives, and more than a
hundred million dollars. Nay more, it will take a standing army
of 100,000 men, and millions of money annually, to keep us
in subjection.
You may whip us, but we will not stay whipped. We will rise
again and again to vindicate our right to liberty, and throw off
your oppressive and accursed yoke, and never cease the
mortal strife until our whole white race is extinguished and our
fair land given over to desolation.
“The Rubicon is passed,” Iverson concluded, “and it shall never,
with my consent, be recrossed.” There was still a chance, he
conceded, that other Southerners might agree to a compromise.
“ I may safely say, however, that nothing will satisfy them, or
bring them back, short of a full and explicit recognition of the
guarantee of the safety of their institution of domestic slavery and
the protection of the constitutional rights for which in the Union
they have so long been contending, and a denial of which, by
their Northern confederates, has forced them into their present
attitude of separate independence. ”
Library of Congress
Members of the Senate, Thirty-Sixth Congress (1859-1861), in a
composite photograph by Mathew Brady. Jefferson Davis is in the
lower left-hand corner, Robert Toombs in the lower right. David
Levy Yulee is the third senator directly above Davis. Stephen
Mallory is just above Toombs, diagonally to the left. CLICK TO
ENLARGE
Not all of Iverson’s colleagues listened to him with the respect that
he might have hoped for. According to one Washington
newspaper, some of the Republican senators interrupted several
times with “derisive cheers and laughter.” (Its editor expressed his
“deep sense of shame and disgust that men occupying such high
and dignified positions could be guilty of such unseemly levity.”)
But the legislators were growing weary of operatic farewells.
Iverson ’s swan song was just the latest of many throughout the
preceding month. As they joined the new Confederacy, one
Southern senator after another had risen to declaim his valedictory
address.
Some left bitter recriminations as their last entries in the
Congressional annals, others gave polite and regretful farewells.
On Jan. 7th Iverson ’s fellow Georgian, Robert Toombs, had used
his departure speech to fire parting shots at “Black Republicans”
and abolitionists: “We want no negro equality, no negro
citizenship; we want no negro race to degrade our own; and as
one man [we] would meet you upon the border with the sword
in one hand and the torch in the other. ”
Library of Congress
The Senate Chamber, 1859
On Jan. 21, no fewer than five senators had departed in quick
succession. Stephen Mallory of Florida blasted the North with
brimstone: “You cannot conquer us. Imbrue your hands in our
blood and the rains of a century will not wipe from them the stain,
while coming generations will weep for your wickedness and
folly. ” His fellow Floridian, David Levy Yulee, was somewhat more
genteel, “acknowledging, with grateful emotions, my obligations
for the many courtesies I have enjoyed [from] the gentlemen of
this body, and with most cordial good wishes for their personal
welfare. ” Alabama’s Clement Clay and Benjamin Fitzpatrick likewise
departed.
Finally it was the turn of the man whom many already suspected
would be the first president of the new Confederacy: Jefferson
Davis of Mississippi. In a low, hoarse voice, weakened by recent
illness and by the emotion of the moment, he explained why his
state had seceded:
It has been a conviction of pressing necessity — it has been a
belief that we are to be deprived in the Union of the rights
which our fathers bequeathed to us — which has brought
Mississippi to her present decision. She has heard proclaimed
the theory that all men are created free and equal, and this
made the basis of an attack upon her social institutions; and
the sacred Declaration of Independence has been invoked to
maintain the position of the equality of the races.
Then Davis bade a gracious farewell to his longtime colleagues: “I
carry with me no hostile remembrance. Whatever offense I have
given which has not been redressed, or for which satisfaction has
not been demanded, I have, Senators, in this hour of parting, to
offer my apology. … Senators, having made the announcement
which the occasion seemed to me to require, it only remains to
me to bid you a final adieu. ”
At these words, Davis and his four fellow Southerners turned to
make their way slowly up the aisle toward the door. It is said that
spectators sobbed in the gallery, as stern legislators choked back
tears. The Union seemed truly — perhaps irrevocably —
dissolved. Democrats and a few moderate Republicans crowded
around to shake the five men ’s hands and wish them well. The
rest of the Northerners sat, hands folded, at their desks.
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That dramatic exit overshadowed another piece of business
transacted in the Senate that day, one that may, however, have
been just as momentous. After the Southerners ’ departure, their
remaining colleagues passed a bill that had languished for almost a
year: one that admitted Kansas to the Union as a free state. The
newly powerful Republican majority thus settled peacefully an
issue over which so much American blood had already been
spilled.
A week later, on Jan. 28, as Iverson was speaking in the Senate,
the House of Representatives made Kansas ’ statehood official. The
balance of power had shifted for good that week, in the nation and
in Congress. Throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction years,
a Congress dominated by Northern Republicans would pass
legislation that, collectively, would change America forever. And
the South might “rise again and again” over the following century,
but it would never regain the political leverage that it had just
willingly abdicated.
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Sources: Congressional Globe, 36th Congress, 2nd Session; New
York Times, Jan. 29, 1861; New-York Tribune, Jan. 29, 1861; The
Constitution (Washington, D.C.), Jan. 30, 1861; Thomas Ricaud
Martin, ed., “The Great Parliamentary Battle and Farewell
Addresses of the Southern Senators on the Eve of the Civil War.”
Note: The exact text of Iverson’s address varies a bit from source
to source, due to the vagaries of period newspaper reports. I have
relied on the official record, the Congressional Globe.
Adam Goodheart is the author of the forthcoming book “1861: The
Civil War Awakening.” He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the
Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-
Griswold Director of Washington College ’s C.V. Starr Center for
the Study of the American Experience.
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