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This chapter maps the religious landscape of the late colonial Upper South, examining the patterns of religious practice of the state-established Church of England, which opened the door for competition from the small dissenting sect of the Baptists. While Baptist churches grew exponentially, the Church of England labored to gain the lay adherence necessary even to support existing churches, let alone create new ones. The Anglican Church's difficulty in keeping pace with the population of the Upper South opened the door for competing sects to recruit unchurched populations. This contest between established and dissenting churches introduced a new and compelling definition of “church” and religiosity that would ultimately reshape the religious landscape in the region and alter the concept of the state's place in the religious realm.

This chapter argues that in the Baptists' ongoing efforts to mark the boundaries between the sacred and the secular realms, slavery came to be the defining issue — one that would determine the extent of, and limits to, Baptists' reach. As Baptists sought to preserve the unity of their churches in the early 19th century, they sacrificed their authority over slavery and yielded it to the civil realm. In doing so, they helped to define the boundaries of religion and the new nation-state.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of American's reorganization of the relationship and boundaries between the religious and civil realms, on both national and local levels, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It then describes how Baptist churches consistently exercised authority over all aspects of their members' lives, including marriage, slavery, business practices, child rearing, and leisure activities. In doing so, they extended religious influence into traditionally secular arenas, expanding the reach of the sacred realm. An overview of the succeeding chapters is presented.

Chapter Four examines the mutually irreconcilable explanations of current reality that took shape during the five months that followed the presidential election. Its focus is the three most consequential groupings—the prosecession Deep South, the Republican North, and the conditionally pro-Union Upper South. Secessionists insisted that “Black Republicans” planned to unleash slave rebels and revolutionize the white Southern social order. They promised that a new Southern nation could avert the danger, and that the North never would fight to preserve the Union. Most Republicans refused to take the secession movement seriously. They found it impossible to comprehend the reality of Southern estrangement or to entertain the possibility of an extensive mass panic that the Deep South’s leaders could not control. The Upper South’s would-be Unionists attempted to find a formula to resolve the impasse. But by insisting that the federal government renounce any use of force against the seceding states, the Unionists actually provided them cover. The outbreak of war in April 1861 revealed that opinion leaders both North and South had misunderstood and misconceived the situation they faced.

This chapter presents James G. Birney's statement of the status of slavery in the Upper South. In one of his first public appearances, at the second annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1835, Birney told his audience that, contrary to popular opinion, slavery was not any milder in the Upper South than in the Lower South, nor less harsh than in the past. Slavery was changing, however, and according to Birney, the number of “coffles of slaves traversing the country to a market” was increasing daily, and “the system now growing into practice is for the farming states to supply those farther south with slaves, just as regularly and systematically the slave coast of Africa used to supply the colonists of Brazil or St. Domingo.”

Conventional wisdom disparages President James Buchanan for allowing the secession movement to incubate and doing nothing to stop it. But Joseph Holt of Kentucky, Secretary of War during Buchanan’s last two months in office, has long been considered a resolute Unionist who bravely resisted the disunion tide. This essay explores an intriguing anomaly: Holt’s course closely paralleled that of his oft-criticized chief. The two stood ready to use armed force to defend Fort Sumter, but both still hoped to preserve the peace and keep the Upper South in the Union. Once fighting began, however, Holt and Buchanan both fully supported the Union war effort. The affinity between Holt and Buchanan is the central idea that holds this essay together. That affinity belies the persistent stereotype that damns Buchanan as a southern dupe or a quasi-traitor.

The failure to gain the states of the Upper South when they held their secession elections in February 1861 was a major setback for the cause of secession. The seven states of the original Confederacy needed the manufacturing and white manpower of the Upper South, either to convince the North of the futility of military coercion or to be competitive should war break out. Both for its prestige and size, Virginia was the pivotal state that had to be won. As an institution, slavery was stagnant or declining across most of the Upper South, and levels of slave ownership and slaves in the population were roughly half of those in the Lower South. Secessionist appeals for the immediate need to leave the Union to protect slavery failed to gain any majority support. The conservative Whig Party was still very competitive and warned that the cotton Confederacy would push for free trade and the African slave trade, both of which would undermine the more diversified economies in the Upper South. Its leaders rallied non-slaveholders under the banner of conditional Unionism, a commitment to remain in the Union so long as concessions on slavery were granted and the North refrained from any military action against the states that had seceded. Aware of their distinctly minority status and the vulnerability of their slaves given the proximity of the free-labor Northern states, most of the slaveholders in the border slave states clung to the Union as the safest defender of their slave property.

Chapter Nine explores the range of opinion among Republicans in the US House in early 1861. Hard-liners led by Thaddeus Stevens and Owen Lovejoy disavowed all intention of attacking slavery in the states where it existed but argued that it would be wrong to offer concessions in the face of secessionist recklessness; the Constitution should be “obeyed rather than amended.” By contrast, conciliatory Republicans denied that the constitutional amendment would appease secessionists. It would instead strengthen those Southerners who had done the most to challenge disunion, and who had thereby kept secession from engulfing the eight slave states of the Upper South.

This chapter explores the numerous intrinsic flaws of the Army of Tennessee beginning with the hiring of unqualified officers, inadequate training for troops, and insufficient organization. The chapter also addresses the problem of sectionalism in the army. The Army of Tennessee drew soldiers from three different regions in the western front—the Upper South, Lower South, and Highlands. Soldiers from different regions were often hostile to each other because of perceived cultural and ideological differences. Lastly, the Confederacy put the Army of Tennessee at a disadvantage by poorly navigating the strategic and political issues concerning the defense of rivers permeating the western theater.

This chapter analyzes one of slavery′s most unfortunate aspects, the separation of family and kinfolk. In their dream to regain what they had lost in the Upper South, elite planter families and less well-to-do farmers sought honor, independence, and wealth by forcibly uprooting their bondservants and moving them to the Lower South, where cheap, fertile land could be found in which to grow cotton and other cash crops. By separating family members and destroying the slave family in order to realize their own dreams and hopes, however, Florida slaveholders set the stage for bondservant flight aimed at reunion with kinfolk and loved ones. It is worth noting that relocation involving separation of loved ones and kinfolk did not touch enslaved Floridians only at the outset of the territorial era in 1821 and the years immediately following.

A month of anxious waiting came to an end in early April 1861 when Lincoln’s decision to send a relief expedition to Fort Sumter shattered an uneasy peace between the Union and the Confederacy and precipitated war and the last phase of secession. Just after delivering his Inaugural Address on March 4, 1861, in which he denounced secession as anarchy and pledged to hold federal properties as yet unseized in the South but not to initiate hostilities against the seceded states, Lincoln learned from Major Anderson that Fort Sumter would run out of supplies in about forty days. Whether to resupply the fort or order its evacuation was the defining issue of his first month in office. Against the advice of Republican conservatives led by William H. Seward, who were convinced that Southerners would voluntarily choose to reenter the Union in a matter of months if Lincoln refrained from any act that could touch off a war, Lincoln finally ordered a relief expedition but stipulated that no troops or ammunition would be sent in unless the Confederacy fired upon the expedition or the fort. On the orders of Jefferson Davis, Confederate artillery opened fire on the morning of April 12. On learning of the fort’s surrender, Lincoln called on all the states for militia troops to put down what he defined as a rebellion. Southerners viewed his troop call as a declaration of war to invade their homeland and end slavery. Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina in the Upper South quickly seceded, but the border slave states, a key to future Union offensive operations, held firm in the Union.

This chapter focuses on Governor John W. Ellis's diary entry regarding the pervasive fear that had preoccupied his thoughts since South Carolina seceded from the Union nearly two months earlier. “Coercion is all the talk. Whether that will be the policy of the incoming administration &c &c,” Ellis wrote. The despised word even came out of the mouth of Ellis's babe. “Sitting at dinner to day our little daughter Mary about 20 months old overheard this word ‘coercion’ and pronounced it quite distinctly, and of course, we thought, very sweetly,” Ellis recounted. “But alas! How ignorant of its terrible meaning.” The North Carolina governor, along with many other inhabitants of the Upper South states, adopted a watch-and-wait attitude in the days before the firing at Fort Sumter.

This chapter treats the Far West, the Upper South, and the Midwest in the mid-to-late 1850s as a laboratory for a variety of lynching violence that would become widespread in the postbellum era. The cultural conflict over the direction of criminal justice took on particular intensity at midcentury, as a result of reformers' success in modifying criminal law, increasing attention to and concerns about perceived threats to sectional identity, and the challenges posed by the rapid growth of a novel, multicultural social landscape with the American incorporation of California and the ensuing Gold Rush. Within these dynamic southern, midwestern, and western cultural and legal contexts, lynchers performed collective violence that protested the administration of criminal justice, particularly the adjudication of homicide cases.