John B. Jones was a rare man in Philadelphia. In the spring of 1861, he thought he may be arrested for being a Confederate sympathizer. After all, he had been the editor of that city’s weekly newspaper, the Southern Monitor, which was supportive of the South. In April 1861, he left his home—arriving in Richmond, Virginia three days later. His diary from those days in Richmond reflected some of the conventional wisdom of the time—much of which has been long forgotten—about how the Confederacy may have taken shape not as a group of states but as an empire. He also wrote about some unconventional wisdom of the time: how the North was not just preparing for an immediate war; it was preparing for a complete and ruthless victory.
States were beginning to break away from the Union, and Jones wrote of how the states comprising the nascent Confederacy may come to join it; or, alternatively, how the Confederacy may entirely subsume those states. Some southerners thought “to obliterate State lines[] and merge them all into an indivisible nation or empire, else there may be incessant conflicts between the different sovereignties themselves, and between them and the General Government.” If this came to fruition, it would indeed be an ironic result of the “revolution” ignited by—according to many southerners—the doctrine of states’ rights.
Regardless, Jones harbored doubts as to the Confederates’ “ability to maintain the old cumbrous, complicated, and expensive form of government” with its “national executive,” Congress, governors, lieutenant-governors, secretaries of State, and legislatures. In his view, to adopt a Confederate constitution modeled after its northern counterpart would have been a mistake; it would have meant a government that too much resembled that “of the Yankees, to whom we have bid adieu forever in disgust.”
Whether that adieu would last forever was yet to be established. There was going to be a conflict to decide that, and many in the South did not yet appreciate what that conflict would ask of them. Jones was capable of enlightening them.
He met with former Virginia governor Henry A. Wise and advised him of the news that Abraham Lincoln had called for 70,000 men to join the military. Wise “opened his eyes very widely and said, emphatically, ‘I don’t believe it.’” In Jones’ view, the “greatest statesmen of the South ha[d] no conception of the real purposes of the men [then] in power in the United States”; those men were preparing to wage an immediate war. When Jones told Wise that the 70,000 recruits would be supplementing an “army of 700,000, he was quite incredulous.”
Jones went on to tell Wise that the northern states then meant to “blockade our ports, and endeavor to cut off our supplies.” With “their superior numbers, and under the pretext of saving the Union and annihilating slavery, they would invade us like the army-worm, which enters the green fields in countless numbers.” Those Yankees’ real purpose “was to enjoy our soil and climate by means of confiscation.” It would be a prolonged fight; and if there was any relent, it was just then—as Wise and Jones were meeting.
Wise could not believe what he was hearing. He “had no idea that the Yankees would dare to enter upon such enterprises in the face of an enlightened world.” It seemed to Wise that the wider world—one way or another—would not permit the South to fall to the Yankees. And even if it did, Wise could have held out hope that the South would repel the invaders. But, Jones wrote, he knew those Yankees better than Wise; “[a]nd it will be found that they will learn how to fight, and will not be afraid to fight.”
Last Best Hope of Earth 
Leave a comment