Anti-Confederate Secessionists in Mississippi?

by Liberty and Power

What did the Confederate States of America do when faced with a possible secession movement? Lake all states, of course, it brutally suppressed it. The rebels in the legendary"Free State of Jones" in Mississippi (the subject of a new book by Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer) may, or may not, have been secessionists in a formal sense but they were against the CSA.

Had Lincoln let a weak Gulf Coast CSA secede in 1861, sans Virginia, North Carolina, Tennesse, and Arkansas, it would have been extremely vulnerable to internal rebellions of this type both by dissident whites and slaves.

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David T. Beito - 7/20/2009

Secession votes had been defeated in the upper south states despite the fact that an anti-slavery president was in the White House. They only made the decision to leave after Fort Sumnter. What makes you think they would have joined the CSA had Fort Sumnter not taken place?

Now....you are right that Lincoln would have had little consitutional basis to challenge subsequent secessions but that doesn't mean that Arkansas, Virginia, North Carolina, etc. would have joined the CSA. Those are two entirely different points.

Ralph Luker - 7/19/2009

David, Your reasoning here is pretty nonsensical. Since Andrew Jackson's presidency, at least, if not Thomas Jefferson's and James Madison's, the federal government had rejected the notion that states had a right to secede from the union. Had Lincoln not challenged the action of South Carolina and the other lower South states in seceding, he would have had no logical *or* constitutional authority to challenge subsequent acts of secession. So, there's no reason to believe that anything he could have done would have limited a Confederate States of America to the lower South.