November 2022
prophesied that seceding states could avoid bloodshed and get their share of federal property as well. Indeed, a united South would present such a strong front, Ruffin predicted, as to intimidate the authorities in Washington: “If all the fifteen slaveholding States united in this action, they would be far stronger, at home and for repelling invasion, than would be the Northern States as invaders.”5
After Harpers Ferry, in a piece entitled “What Are We To Do?” Joseph Turner proclaimed that if Southerners boycotted Northern goods and strengthened home industries, they could force Northern abolitionists to cease spreading their heresies.6 (This was the same Turner of
middle Georgia, by the way, whose weekly newspaper, The Countryman, gave employment to a young Joel Chandler Harris.)
What is remarkable is that when war came, De Bow’s contributors appeared more confident than ever of their country’s future. One writer in December 1861 even laid out the terms by which the Confederacy should accept Federal surrender. Northern vessels, for instance, should be barred from navigating the lower Mississippi except under heavy tariff.7
George Fitzhugh counseled that Confederate generals had only to maintain defensive warfare until Yankees realized their losses and gave up the fight or wilted when Southern forces surged across the Potomac. “A half dozen defeats would not injure us,” he confidently predicted,” while “a single one would ruin them, and open the way to Washington and Maryland.”8
Of Paskoff and Wilson’s selections, only that by James Thornwell warned in mid-1862 of the South’s danger. But as a clergyman, he reasoned that a more resolute trust in God would lead to Confederate victory. More than that, the Confederate cause itself was holy. “We are struggling for constitutional freedom,” he attested.
We are upholding the great principles which our fathers bequeathed us…. We shall have a government that acknowledges God, that reverences right, and that makes law supreme. We are, therefore, fighting not for ourselves alone, but, when the struggle is rightly understood, for the salvation of this whole continent. It is a noble cause in which we are engaged….9
Thus thoughtful men viewed their society and coped with the tensions it produced. But in this we discern a way of thinking that led them to anticipate, even yearn for a war that at least some reckoned they could not win. It is this impression that renders the pages of De Bow’s Review a rather wistful trip back through time. And it is this impression that makes Paskoff and Wilson’s work an insightful glimpse into a society that took itself forthrightly to war.
Notes 1. Paul F. Paskoff and Daniel
3. William Gregg, “Domestic
4. J. W. Morgan, “Our School 5. Edmund J. Wilson, eds., The Cause of the South: Selections from De Bow’s Review, 1846–1867 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 1-2.
Mississippi Planter,” “Management of Negroes Upon Southern Estates,” DBR, June 1851.
Industry—Manufactures at the South,” DBR, February 1850.
Books,” DBR, April 1860. Ruffin, “Consequences of Abolition Agitation,” DBR, June 1857. 6. Joseph A. Turner, ‘What 7. [Anonymous], “What of the
8. George Fitzhugh, “Conduct 9. James H. Thornwell, “Our
Are We To Do?” DBR, July 1860.
Confederacy—The Present and the Future?” DBR, December 1861.
of the War,” DBR, January/ February 1862.
Danger and Our Duty,” DBR, May/August 1862.
Atlanta Will Fall: Sherman, Joe Johnston and the Yankee Heavy Battalions (2001) What the Yankees Did to Us: Sherman’s Bombardment and Wrecking of Atlanta (2012) A Long and Bloody Task: The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton through Kennesaw Mountain to the Chattahoochee River, May 5-July 18, 1864 (2016) All the Fighting They Want: The Atlanta Campaign from Peachtree Creek to the City’s Surrender, July 18-September 2, 1864 (2017) 100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign (2019) (with Jack W. Melton, Jr.) 100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Charleston in the War (2020) Texas Brigadier to the Fall of Atlanta: John Bell Hood (2019) Into Tennessee and Failure: John Bell Hood (2020) (with Bill Hendrick) The Atlanta Daily Intelligencer Covers the Civil War (2022)
