Preface

doi:10.14325/mississippi/9781628460971.002.0006

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Preface

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https://doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781628460971.002.0006

Pages

ix–xvi

Published:

October 2014

Extract

a northern newspaper reporter covering the mississippi secession convention wrote a seemingly odd line given the situation early in 1861. Looking on the crowd of delegates debating such aspects as secession, connection to the new Confederacy, and war, the New York Tribune reporter wrote, “You feel that the future historian may well say of these times: ‘There were giants in those days.’” This statement gives rise to thoughts of heroes or villains as far as secession is concerned, and there are many even today who flock to each school of thought. But while this book attempts to understand both those delegates and their deliberations, it does not seek to lay blame or canonize. Instead, I choose to hone in on the reporter’s reality that a future historian would examine these men. That is exactly what I propose to do in this study.¹

“The great historical riddle of secession,” historian Christopher Olsen has called it, has actually been the subject of much writing through the decades. Well-known historians such as William Freehling and David M. Potter have covered the topic in great detail. Concerning Mississippi specifically, one of the state’s foremost historians, Percy L. Rainwater, has written the seminal text on the subject, Mississippi: Storm Center of Secession. To Rainwater, the secession movement was primarily an effort to protect slavery. Writing in 1938, he argued that secession was “a political device for preserving a social system which was believed to be in greater danger in the Union than out of it.” He described Mississippians as being “thin-skinned” in defense of slavery, thus resulting in the major 1860 move toward secession. In the end, he concluded that “her valor in defense ran far ahead of her discretion.”²

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