Minute men, yeomen, and the mobilization for secession in the South Carolina upcountry.

IN THE FALL OF 1860, LIMESTONE SPRINGS WAS AN UNDISTINGUISHED village in the far upper piedmont of South Carolina, in sight of the Blue Ridge foothills and only a few miles distant from the North Carolina border. The village itself was home to a female academy and a few shops; the surrounding countryside was hilly and dotted with small farms rather than the slave plantations that characterized much of agriculture in antebellum South Carolina. Remote as the area may have been, at least some white residents were determined not to be left behind as the state moved toward secession in the final months of 1860. In early November, after returns in the national elections made clear that Abraham Lincoln would be the next president, a group of men at Limestone Springs set about organizing a volunteer military company under the name of the "Southern Rights Guards." Members of the company were on hand at a secessionist rally on November 16, parading under a flag emblazoned with a lone star and the word "SECESSION!" A committee of organizers explained their purpose in a letter to Governor William H. Gist. "This Section of our Dist. (+ indeed we might add, our whole Dist.) is far behind the Central + Coast Dists. in the doctrine of 'States Rights,' +, more especially, in that of 'separate action' on the part of our State," they wrote. "We are endeavoring to take advantage of the present extraordinary circumstances to arouse our Sec[tion] to a sense of our true position." (1)

Historians have long recognized the existence of organizations like the Limestone Springs Southern Rights Guards, but scholars have seldom subjected those groups to close or systematic scrutiny, or acknowledged the crucial importance that secessionists attached to them. Many accounts of South Carolina's path to disunion quote William Gilmore Simms's memorable assertion that the secession movement was "a complete landsturm, a general rising of the people." Few have noted, however, the evidence that Simms himself offered as proof of that claim. "In this district of Barnwell, which can send 3000 men into the field there is not one who is not a secessionist & preparing his arms," wrote Simms, who had made a "call for Minute Men" at a secessionist rally in late October. "The old men of 60 are forming companies. Never was such enthusiasm seen, from seaboard to the mountains." Pronouncing the movement "a perfect landsturm" a few days later, Simms asserted that "Twenty thousand men are now armed in S.C. and there are squads of Minute Men in every precinct." (2)

This article examines the vital role that Minute Man companies played in the mobilization for secession by focusing on the upper piedmont of South Carolina, a white-majority region where radicalism had met with only limited success before 1860. The Limestone Springs Southern Rights Guards was one of twenty-seven volunteer companies known to have organized in support of secession in the upper piedmont during the final months of that year. These groups represented the culmination of a long tradition of paramilitarism in antebellum southern politics. Drilling and parading at secessionist rallies, they offered supporters of disunion a chance to participate actively in the movement and served to intimidate any who were not like minded. For secessionists such as William Gilmore Simms, anxious to claim popular legitimacy for their cause, these groups also provided self-evident proof of the popularity of secession. A closer look at how those organizations operated--and who participated in them--challenges the view that "[y]eoman joined planter to make a revolution" on behalf of secession in South Carolina and suggests the need to rethink the wider analysis of politics and ideology on which that interpretation is based. (3)

During the past twenty years, historians of South Carolina have contributed greatly to a historiography that makes the study of the yeomanry--small farmers who owned land and perhaps a few slaves--central to understanding electoral politics and political ideology in the antebellum South. In South Carolina, to be sure, the planter class probably wielded greater political power than in any other state in the union, due to the nearly statewide extent of the plantation belt and a political structure that was the most undemocratic, even for white men, in the antebellum United States. Lacy K. Ford Jr. and Stephanie McCurry have argued that South Carolina nonetheless possessed a vibrant political culture marked by the widespread participation of yeoman voters, who far outnumbered the planter elite. An ideology of proslavery or slave-labor republicanism provided grounds for an accommodation between yeoman and planter and united them in the defense of slavery, an institution that members of both classes saw as essential to their privileges as citizens, property owners, and heads of household. Both McCurry, in her study of the South Carolina Low-country, and Ford, in his study of the upcountry, view the secession crisis as confirming the strength of proslavery republicanism and the yeomanry's support for the politics of slavery. In McCurry's words, "yeoman farmers not only supported the cause of secession and dis,4 union, they made it their own." (4)

Such assertions about yeoman support for secession in South Carolina have two difficulties--one evidentiary, the other conceptual. For other southern states, historians have used returns from the elections to state conventions to measure support for secession, attempting to correlate support for candidates of different stripes with variables regarding slave ownership and other social, economic, and political characteristics. These attempts have proved problematic even where the returns are available, and historians have used them to support contradictory conclusions. (5) Such analysis is not possible for South Carolina, where in most districts supporters of immediate secession ran unopposed in the December 6 elections for the state convention. The lack of organized opposition demonstrated the wide support for secession among the state's political leaders but was hardly proof of popular enthusiasm for the cause.

This is where the evidence regarding Minute Man companies is especially useful. The men who organized and joined these groups represent the most enthusiastic and active grassroots supporters of secession. And the evidence indicates that even in the upper piedmont of South Carolina--an area with a majority of non-slaveholders--the mobilization for secession was squarely in the hands of the slave-owning minority. Within the region, Minute Man companies appeared first and most frequently in areas of the countryside with high percentages of slaveholders in the white population and less frequently if at all in areas where non-slave-owning whites were most numerous. About three-quarters of identified Minute Men came from slaveholding households, more than double the incidence of such households in the population as a whole. More particularly, the membership rolls of these companies suggest a split among the yeomanry along lines of slave ownership, as slaveholding yeomen participated at levels far exceeding those of their non-slave-owning counterparts.

These findings point to a conceptual problem with the thesis emphasizing proslavery republicanism. The contribution of that historiography has been to explore the place of small farmers in a society dominated, economically and politically, by slave-owning planters and to emphasize the significance of slavery for political discourse and relations among white men of different classes. But the task of exploring that significance is made more difficult by constructing the yeomanry as a category that includes both non-slave-owning and slave-owning small farmers and by failing to differentiate between the two in discussing their response to the politics of slavery. The implication of this approach--odd for a historiography that has tended to emphasize class and material relations--is that the actual ownership of slaves had no bearing on how white men responded to a movement whose leaders unabashedly put the defense of slavery at its center. Evidence from the upper piedmont suggests that some yeomen did indeed participate in that movement and make it their own, but they tended to be those who owned the human property in question. In joining the Minute Man companies of the upper piedmont, slave-owning yeomen took their place alongside the larger slaveholders among their neighbors; non-slave-owning yeomen played little part in the movement and, in that respect, pursued a course similar to that of laborers, tenants, and other poor white men who owned neither land nor slaves. (6)

The relative abstention of non-slave owners from the mobilization for secession, finally, suggests the need to appreciate the limits as well as the power of proslavery ideology. Events from the fall of 1860 provide little evidence of widespread Unionism among the non-slave-owning majority of the upper piedmont, and certainly not of opposition to slavery. But non-slave-owning white men could accept the premises of proslavery doctrine without rushing to embrace the secessionist conclusion. Their failure to do so in the state where radical doctrine had received the fullest airing and faced the fewest structural obstacles could hardly bode well for the ability of secessionists to obtain substantial support among non-slave owners elsewhere in the South.

In a state dominated more thoroughly by plantation slavery than any other in the Union, the upper piedmont of antebellum South Carolina stood out as something of an anomaly. The region lies in the state's far northwestern corner, where the broad piedmont plain of the Atlantic seaboard meets the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains; in 1860 it consisted of five districts (as South Carolina then called the civil divisions that later became counties)--York, Spartanburg, Greenville, Pickens, and Anderson. On the eve of the Civil War, slaves composed almost 60 percent of the population of South Carolina, and plantation agriculture extended to nearly every part of the state. The upper piedmont, however, remained a white-majority region where small farms rather than plantations predominated and staple production continued to be limited. To be sure, the extent of slave ownership and plantation agriculture varied considerably with the topography and quality of soil within the region; thus, only about one in six white families in mountainous Pickens owned slaves in 1860, compared to three-fifths or more of those in some of the flatter and richer lands of York District. Such variations notwithstanding, through the end of the antebellum era the upper piedmont remained a redoubt of that broad category of farmers whom historians conventionally label as yeomen--landowning farmers who tilled their fields with the labor of white family members and perhaps a few slaves. (7)

For much of the antebellum era, white residents of the upper piedmont appeared to be dubious allies of the radical planter-politicians who controlled state politics. The region emerged as an area of strong Unionist sentiment during the nullification crisis of 1832-1833, when the state's political leaders defied President Andrew Jackson and declared their intention to nullify enforcement of federal tariffs within the state's borders. (8) The 1832 state legislative elections, which were dominated by the question of nullification, put radicals on notice regarding their weak support in the upper piedmont. Nullifiers won a clear-cut victory only in the electoral district of Pendleton, an area that included the plantation of chief nullifier John C. Calhoun. The nullifier ticket in York District won by fewer than 60 votes out of almost 2,200 cast, and Unionists triumphed by margins of more than two-to-one in Spartanburg and Greenville Districts. A mountainous area of upper Greenville District earned the nickname the "Dark Corner" from nullifiers, who called it a place "in which the light of Nullification would not shine," and the region as a whole acquired a reputation for Unionism that persisted long after the immediate crisis was defused in 1833. (9)

Upcountry residents again demonstrated no great enthusiasm for radicalism during the first secession crisis of 1850-1852. Even as leading planter-politicians in the state made loud threats of disunion in response to federal restrictions on slavery in the territories, many voters in the upper piedmont turned a deaf ear to the controversy. W. K. Easley, the secessionist editor of the Pickens Keowee Courier, complained of an "indifference or disposition of neutrality existing in the minds of some, based upon the supposition, that as they own none of that particular kind of property to be affected by the conflicting interest of the North and South, they are not really parties to the contest...." The issue was put to rest for the moment in October 1851, when voters rejected separate secession in an election for delegates to a regional Southern Congress. While the opponents of separate secession received about 60 percent of all votes cast statewide, a closer look at the regional pattern of voting reveals the distance that separated the upper piedmont from the heart of radicalism in the Lowcountry and lower piedmont. Separate secessionists easily carried the Seventh Congressional District in the lower part of the state, but they won only 26 percent of votes cast in the Second District, which included much of the upper piedmont. In Pickens the opponents of immediate secession won an overwhelming 90 percent of all votes. (10)

Although South Carolina's first showdowns with federal authority did not lead to a decisive rupture, each provided radicals a chance to develop the means of mobilizing support for their cause. And in each crisis, those means included distinctly paramilitary elements. One nullifier memorably wrote that South Carolina seemed to have been transformed into "a great talking and eating machine" by the contest over nullification in 1832. Much of that talking and eating took place at the militia musters that were integral to the state's political culture and at which uniformed officers exhorted their soldiers in behalf of one side or the other. (11) After Andrew Jackson denounced nullification as treason and threatened to use military force, Governor Robert Y. Hayne called for the formation of corps of volunteer troops independent of the established militia, as well as "a body of Mounted Minute Men" in every district of the state to be ready "to repair at a moment's warning to any point which may be designated by the Governor in any emergency." Nullifiers threw themselves into organizing these companies, while Unionists in a number of areas formed their own societies and declared their intention to defy any call from the governor on the regularly constituted militia. The contest over the loyalties of the state militia continued for more than a year after the resolution of the nullification issue, as nullifiers promoted and Unionists challenged a "test oath" that would have required militia officers to swear paramount allegiance to the state of South Carolina. (12)

During the first secession crisis, southern rights advocates turned to a different means of political mobilization. In the winter and spring of 1849, as controversy loomed over the territories acquired in the Mexican War, white men throughout the state organized local groups to oppose federal restrictions on slavery. With radicals in the lead, more than a hundred delegates from those groups convened at Columbia in May to denounce the "unconstitutional and mischievous interference with our domestic slavery and the rights of slaveholders" and to form a Central State Committee of Vigilance and Safety. Since the rise of an organized abolitionist movement during the 1830s, southern slave owners had resorted to vigilantism against traveling northerners and native white men suspected of antislavery actions or even sentiments. The 1849 body sought to combine that sort of vigilantism with a propaganda function, urging local groups "to spread useful information before the people, and to detect and bring to justice all offenders against our peace and institutions." Leading planter-politicians in the state thus saw these local committees as a means not only to disseminate proslavery, southern rights doctrines but also to enforce public conformity to them. (13)

The upper piedmont had been slow to participate in the movement to form committees of vigilance and safety--the area sent only four delegates to the May meeting at Columbia--but vigilantes swung into action during the summer of 1849. At Pendleton a group of men raided the post office and burned what they claimed were abolitionist writings. Members of a Committee of Safety at Yorkville demanded that a visiting pill salesman leave town after they supposedly found incriminating papers in his possession. Proslavery vigilantism continued into 1850. In eastern York District, a white man accused of making "sundry abolitionist statements" was first ordered to leave the area and then tarred and feathered when he reappeared several weeks later. Secessionists at Greenville threatened to tar and feather several Unionist leaders and to destroy the printing press of the Southern Patriot, a newly founded Unionist newspaper. Through this and other acts of vigilantism, radicals intimidated opponents and provided proof of their own claims about the threat posed to the South by the North. (14)

In the context of a planter-led movement that equated southern rights with the protection of slavery, vigilantes in the upper piedmont were prepared to see any challenge to slaveholders' political power as an attack on slavery itself. That point received powerful demonstration in June 1849 when the Committee of Vigilance and Safety at Spartanburg seized a northern traveler named John M. Barrett. After the vigilantes examined papers in Barrett's possession and mail held for him at the local post office, he was lodged in jail and indicted on a charge of "circulating incendiary + abolition papers." Although press reports throughout the state denounced Barrett as an abolitionist emissary, the pamphlet he was charged with circulating--a printed "Address to the Citizens of South Carolina"--made no mention of abolition and gave only passing support to the exclusion of slavery from the western territories. Instead, it sought to appeal to the non-slave-owning majority of the upper piedmont by condemning the "iron despotism" wielded within the state by "masters of overgrown plantations," who were "resolved to rend the union of these States rather than not preserve their own supremacy." At a moment of national crisis over slavery, the furor over Barrett's case--which reached the floor of the U.S. Senate in a speech by A. P. Butler--laid bare long-standing worries among the state's planter-politicians about the loyalties of non-slave-owning white men.

By the fall of 1860, South Carolina radicals found circumstances for their cause more propitious than a decade before. From elsewhere in the South came encouraging signs that other states would secede in the event of Abraham Lincoln's election. Within South Carolina, secession received broad support from the state's political leaders--including a range of upcountry politicians who had opposed separate secession a decade earlier. Notable in this regard was the course of influential former congressman James L. Orr. A leader in the movement against separate secession in 1851, Orr in July 1860 denounced the Republican Party for making "open, undisguised, and declared war upon our social institutions," and he stated that if Lincoln won election "the honor and safety of the South ... will require the prompt secession of the slaveholding States from the Union." Some disagreement remained over whether South Carolina should secede separately or in cooperation with other southern states, but few politicians wished to make that question a sticking point. Instead, in the elections for the state legislature in October, those on both sides agreed in excoriating Lincoln and the "black Republicans" and in promising forceful resistance. (16)

If most of the upcountry's political leaders had fallen into line with the secessionists, a number of observers continued to worry about the political loyalties of the non-slave-owning majority in the upper piedmont. At the extreme, those worries found expression in a renewed wave of proslavery vigilantism. That wave had begun in late 1859, following John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, and surged again with the approach of state and national elections; during September and October 1860 at least eight vigilance committees organized or were active in the upper piedmont. Vigilantes continued to target northern travelers, but white residents of the upper piedmont came in for increasing scrutiny as well. In late 1859 vigilantes seized several copies of Hinton Rowan Helper's controversial antislavery book, The Impending Crisis of the South, from a white man named Harold Wyllys, whom they turned over to the sheriff of Greenville District. "[N]o man who will give aid to its circulation should be permitted to go at large in our community," fumed the chair of the vigilance committee, "but ... should be kept in a safe place until he can be tried & hung." (17) At Rock Hill, in eastern York District, vigilantes seized a white man "on suspicion of being an Abolitionist" in October 1860; when the evidence against him was found "not sufficient to convict him," he was turned over to the sheriff on a charge of bigamy. (18) At nearby Fort Mill, the chairman of another committee wrote a neighbor who had been accused of making antislavery statements. "You are branded with the name, of being an Abolitionist; and that from your own declaration," wrote Robert Fullwood. "I feel surprised at you, and sorry, that you, a man, born and raised under our Institutions, should make ... assertions, which may endanger you[r] life." Noting that the man was not in custody, Fullwood advised him to "make what use you please of my views. I feel well assured, that the Committee will not do any thing for your good." (19)

Though abolitionism, strictly speaking, was probably rare among white men in the upper piedmont, political leaders also found worrisome--and much more widespread--an apparent lack of enthusiasm for secession. Many voters seemed to remain unmoved even as vigilantes proceeded with their handiwork in September and October and politicians took the stump to rail against the menace of black Republicanism. Of special concern in this regard was Pickens District, where slave owners constituted a smaller percentage of the white population than anywhere else in the state. In early September the secessionist editor of the Pickens Keowee Courier complained that "Disunion is a grave movement, and we are astonished to see with what perfect indifference it is looked upon by the people at large." The following month Congressman John D. Ashmore spoke at Pickens Court House and "appealed to the people to awake from their lethargy" regarding the threat posed by Lincoln. Neither of these observers--and few if any others--believed the upcountry electorate to be strongly Unionist in sentiment, but they were clearly concerned by the "indifference" of many voters even as the fall progressed and the prospect of Lincoln's election became more certain. (20)

Those concerns persisted as state legislators gathered at Columbia in early November. After selecting a slate of presidential electors, the general assembly remained in session to await the results of the national elections. When confirmation of Lincoln's victory arrived, legislators began crafting plans for a convention to consider South Carolina's separation from the Union. No opposition to secession emerged in the legislature; the only major point of disagreement came over the timing of the convention, and on this question two issues were paramount. One concerned South Carolina's relation to other southern states. Although most legislators predicted that other slaveholding states would secede as well, they disagreed over whether South Carolina should seize leadership of the movement by acting alone and quickly, or delay action until the new year to allow coordination with other states. (21)

Several upcountry legislators voiced a second rationale for delaying the election when they sought time "to lay the issue more fully before the people." When radicals proposed a December date for calling the convention, W. C. Black, a representative from the non-slaveholder-dominated western portion of York District, announced that he could not support the measure. Many voters, he said, "were not so thoroughly posted up as to the events transpiring around them," and further time was "absolutely necessary" to bring them "up to the point." His argument drew disdain from the representatives of plantation districts where radicalism had much deeper roots. A. P. Aldrich of Barnwell District scoffed at the suggestion that "there is a necessity of Bringing ... people up to the point, to educate them in this great cause. To educate them! Why sir, have they not been educated from the time of 1828, to the time of the present moment? If they are not educated now, the cause is desperate, the cause is lost." In other circumstances, conceded John Cunningham of Charleston, "it might have been proper to allow the upper districts till ... January to canvass and be informed." But with other states looking to South Carolina to lead, delay could not be tolerated. "Far better that we lose York District than that we lose Alabama," he concluded. The legislature set the elections for December 6 and the meeting of the convention for December 17. (22)

With little time left to bring voters "up to the point," secessionists in the upper piedmont, as throughout the state, launched an intensive campaign to mobilize support and claim the mantle of popular legitimacy for their cause. Minute Man companies were central to that effort. The first such organization in the state appears to have been formed in Columbia in early October, on the eve of elections to the state legislature. Calling themselves the "Minute Men for the Defence of Southern Rights," the members anticipated "the election of a Black Republican to the Presidency" and pledged themselves to defend "our section, ourselves, and our dearest interests, which must fall in the event of the triumph of Northern fanaticism." The formation of the Columbia Minute Men was widely reported in the press, and its members took steps to encourage the organization of similar groups throughout the state. Its example was not widely emulated in the upper piedmont, however, until the first week of November, after the state legislature had begun debating the convention bill and Governor William H. Gist had called for the raising of ten thousand volunteers ready to march "upon the shortest notice." In the final months of the year, more than two dozen Minute Man companies appeared in the upper piedmont. (23)

These companies were a regular feature at the rallies and mass meetings sponsored by secessionists. The planners of a district-wide rally at Spartanburg formed a Minute Man company, whose members staged a torchlight procession after speeches from convention candidates and secessionist leaders from elsewhere in the state. Likewise, a secessionist rally at Pendleton featured a parade by the Fort Hill Guards, a company named after John C. Calhoun's nearby plantation. Frequently, the call to form a Minute Man company itself provided the occasion for a meeting. A correspondent from the Cross Anchor neighborhood of rural Spartanburg District reported that a "large and enthusiastic meeting" was held there "for the purpose of organizing a company of 'Minute Men.'" After "several short but spirited speeches," a call was made for volunteers, which resulted in the enrollment of about sixty men, who performed "various evolutions" for those in attendance. In eastern York District, A. B. Springs, one of the district's wealthiest planters and a candidate for the secession convention, chaired a gathering to form the Alston Riflemen. The assembly featured a round of six speeches and the passage of resolutions favoring immediate secession, after which those in attendance proceeded to organize a Minute Man company. (24)

Secessionists threw themselves into this frenzy of organizing as a means not just to win the December 6 elections--the outcome of which was never seriously in doubt--but also to "make the state a unit," as Congressman John Ashmore put it. Such calls for unity were a staple of secessionist discourse and had a number of sources. They were born in part of the nagging certainty that enthusiasm for secession remained weak in the upper piedmont, even after Lincoln's election; writing of plans for a "great demonstration" at Pendleton in late November, Ashmore conceded that in Pickens District, "we have more tender footed voters than anywhere else." He and other upcountry politicians, many of them late converts to the cause of immediate secession, wished to demonstrate their bona tides--as secessionists and political leaders--with a strong showing in their region. Moreover, Carolina secessionists had an eye on developments beyond their state's borders, hoping through quick and unanimous action "to give vitality and impulse to the" secession movement throughout the South. The ideological imperatives of southern rights doctrine also fueled the demand for unity. For decades southern separatism had been founded squarely on the defense of slavery, but not narrowly in the self-interest of slaveholders. Radical ideologues had gone to great lengths to identify the political and economic needs of the South as a region with those of the planter class, and a strong showing in the convention elections would stand as an endorsement of that claim. Whatever the anti-democratic tendencies of planter ideology and of South Carolina's political system, that state's planter-politicians felt compelled to portray secession as a popular movement. (25)

Interpreted in this light, meetings like the "great demonstration" at Pendleton must be understood not just as a means to rally support but literally as demonstrations--that is, displays of the popular support that secessionists wished to claim. Minute Men contributed in a powerful and tangible way to those displays, and secessionists seized upon the example of these companies as proof of the popular enthusiasm for the cause. The Charleston Daily Courier quoted with satisfaction a letter from Pendleton: "Old men, and boys barely in their teens, from the seaboard to the mountains, the whole State are Minute Men, armed with revolvers and rifles. If you can catch a Yankee, ask him to guess what the Southern people will do." At Greenville, Minute Men feted the district's convention delegates with a torchlight parade featuring a series of illuminated transparencies bearing such slogans as "WE HAIL WITH JOY 'THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT."' A local secessionist reported that at least 175 men marched in the parade and offered it as proof that Greenville's standing as the "'old banner Submission District' of the State" was buried once and for all. (26)

If Minute Man companies were part of a calculated campaign by secessionists, the groups undeniably met an enthusiastic response among at least some white men in the upper piedmont. To understand their appeal, it is important to examine how the formation of these companies operated in the context of the mobilization for secession. Most Minute Man companies were organized at public meetings like one held in the Slabtown community of northern Anderson District. A group of fifteen men from the area arranged the meeting, publicizing it by word of mouth and in a newspaper notice proclaiming "HUZZA! FOR A SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY!!!" On the appointed day, candidates for the secession convention and other speakers were on hand to address the crowd. After the speeches, according to a newspaper report, "a call was made for Minute Men, when a rush was made for the stand, and grey-headed fathers and the younger men all pressing forward to have their names enrolled." In a cultural grammar familiar in a society steeped in evangelical religion and revivalism, the call for volunteers at this and other meetings represented a chance for individual white men to step forward and declare their commitment to the cause and thus to break out of the largely passive role to which the audience was otherwise assigned at these gatherings. (27)

Most of the companies formed in this way had little military value, as even their organizers acknowledged. The company at Greenville, for example, adopted a system of military ranks, but one member wrote privately that it was "scarcely" a military organization but rather "an association to promote action should the South demand it at the hands of her Citizens." The Minute Man company at Spartanburg eschewed military organization altogether and used the titles of "president" and "vice presidents" for its officers. Many companies made little effort to arm their members or train them in military tactics, and others encountered difficulty when they did. "Minute men in the country unless brought together with great frequency lose their ardor, and promptness," grumbled Archibald Whyte, who helped organize two volunteer companies at Rock Hill, in a heavily slaveholding area of eastern York District. The members of the Rock Hill Minute Men had "no arms, except revolvers," Whyte observed, while the second company, a cavalry unit called the York Rangers, was "greatly disorganized." The captain of the Rangers had accepted the position "in expectation of going into camp service: but few of the company expected or are prepared for such service." Some refused even to drill. (28)

Whatever the ultimate military value of these companies, their paramilitary style of organizing was of great significance because it made tangible a number of elements of the secessionist appeal. Historians have emphasized how the advocates of disunion deployed the language of honor in their cause, labeling their opponents "submissionists" and appealing to the courage and manhood of those whom they sought to enlist. Military companies used that same language, often hewing to the formula used by the Minute Men of Columbia, whose members, echoing the Declaration of Independence, pledged "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor" to the defense of southern rights. (29) In a society that laid heavy stress on white men's ritual performance of honor, enrolling in these companies allowed individual men to demonstrate their valor and readiness to meet their obligations as citizens and household heads. Conversely, failing to form or enroll in such companies could be cast as a stain on the honor of a community or individual. Noting that the Cross Anchor Minute Men of Spartanburg District included several men "between the ages of fifty and sixty, and one whose head was whitened with the snow of seventy years," one observer demanded, "Young men how can you stand back when you see the aged and venerable fathers in our land enlisted in this noble cause?" A resident of northern Anderson District felt sure that the formation of a Minute Man company there had demonstrated his community's valor. "Say to the other portions of our District--say to the middle Districts--say to our brethren on the seaboard, that no where in all of gallant Carolina will there be found any truer, braver soldiers than under the mountains of the Blue Ridge." (30)

The Minute Man companies also resonated with a number of historical precedents that secessionists wished to invoke in their behalf. By appropriating the name "Minute Men," these groups associated their cause with that of the American Revolution, a connection repeatedly drawn by secessionists who asserted that they wished only to protect the "rights, nobly fought for--nobly bought by the blood of our Revolutionary fathers." The Minute Men of 1860 also explicitly linked their organizations and cause with the nullification movement of the early 1830s, when similar groups had mobilized in defense of South Carolina. In the towns of the upper piedmont and elsewhere throughout the state, Minute Men adopted as their badge the blue cockade worn by nullifiers thirty years before. One upcountry paper reprinted with delight a letter from a former nullifier, who sought to enlist in a Minute Man company "in memory of 1832." "I was then a minute man," he wrote. "[M]y gun was No. 77.... I am ready to shoulder the same gun in defence of South Carolina." (31)

Through their paramilitary mode of organizing, Minute Men heightened the sense of threat posed by the North to the South, and they contributed to a political climate in which dissent constituted not a difference of opinion but an act of treason. The spectacle of armed men marching in favor of secession could hardly have had an encouraging effect on opponents of the movement; not content with such displays, some Minute Men went further. Members of the Columbia group threatened to hang Lemuel Boozer from neighboring Lexington District, an opponent of separate secession, if he ran for the state convention. A Minute Man at Greenville reported an act of vigilantism in which he may or may not have personally taken part. After allegations that a Jewish merchant had attempted to bribe "indiscreet persons" to hiss during speeches by several secessionists, young men in the town "shaved one half of his head, and the opposite half his beard (much like Aarons) and after making him swear most solemnly to leave town in three days turned him loose." "[S]ome other Jews" in town were also given notice to leave, "and they have acted upon the suggestion," the Minute Man reported with satisfaction. Perhaps describing the same attack, a newspaper report noted that secessionists at Greenville rode one of their opponents on a rail "for the 'especial benefit of the undecided"' in the upcoming convention elections. The victim "went on his way rejoicing" after his release, "which was a decided piece of good fortune for him," wrote the anonymous correspondent. "A fence rail is better than a hempen rope, any how." (32)

Such acts had long been the stock-in-trade of proslavery vigilantes, and the paramilitary groups of November and December 1860 drew on those precedents, in a few cases styling themselves a "Vigilant Society" or "Vigilance Committee." In a number of respects, however, these organizations responded to the particular circumstances of late 1860 and attempted to instill a political consciousness beyond that reflected in much of the vigilantism of prior years. Vigilantes understood their actions in the context of the larger sectional conflict over slavery, but the remedies they pursued were typically local ones: interrogating, punishing, and expelling suspicious persons "for the purpose of protecting our homes, families and property, and for the general welfare of the community," as one committee put it. Minute Men drew on the same rhetoric about the protection of home and property but linked it to a wider political goal--the defense not just of local communities but also of "Southern rights"--and a different remedy-immediate secession. To that end, they worked openly and explicitly in the movement to lead South Carolina out of the Union and establish a separate southern nation). (33)

Given the importance of Minute Man companies in the mobilization for secession, we can learn much about the appeal of that movement by examining the membership of these groups. Minute Men, to be sure, were not the only supporters of secession in the upper piedmont, but they represented some of the leading and most enthusiastic champions of that cause. An analysis of these companies reveals that, in a majority non-slave-owning region, slave owners provided the bulk of the leadership and members of these organizations. Non-slave-owning white men, and non-slave-owning yeomen specifically, played a relatively minor role in the movement for secession in the upper piedmont of South Carolina.

In demonstrating those patterns, it is worth noting, first, where Minute Man companies did--and did not--appear in the upper piedmont. Table 1 summarizes levels of slaveholding and the formation of Minute Man companies in each district. Although non-slave owners predominated in the region as a whole, the extent of slaveholding varied considerably among the districts of the upper piedmont, and indeed within each district. Minute Man companies appeared first and in the greatest numbers in areas where slaveholding was widespread. These developments are exemplified by patterns in York District, which had the highest incidence of slaveholding in the upper piedmont. The membership of Minute Man companies in York, as a percentage of adult white men, exceeded that of any other district in the region, and the number of organizations formed there--seven--equaled that in Spartanburg, where the white population was almost two-thirds larger. Within York, moreover, all of those companies were organized in the southern and eastern sections of the district, where slave owners and especially large slaveholdings were most numerous. The first Minute Man company to appear in the district assembled at Rock Hill, a neighborhood where more than half of all white households owned slaves. By contrast, no company formed in the northwestern corner of the district, where fewer than 30 percent of white households owned slaves. (34)

Elsewhere in the upper piedmont as well, residents of areas with low levels of slaveholding did not rush to form Minute Man companies. Prior to the December 6 elections, only one paramilitary organization appeared in Pickens District, and that company formed in an area where the incidence of slaveholding was about 50 percent higher than for the district as a whole. (35) Secessionists in Greenville District, a stronghold of Unionist sentiment since the nullification crisis, organized only two Minute Man companies through December 6--one in the town of Greenville and the other in an area of moderate slaveholding in the central part of the district. (36) Significantly, several other attempts to form Minute Man companies in the two districts apparently failed prior to the convention elections. In northeastern Greenville District, one of the would-be organizers of a Minute Man company called on young men to enroll their names "in defence of their altars and their homes, and the honor of their beloved State." "[L]et not the First Regiment," he beseeched, "be last in patriotism and devotion to the rights and honor of South Carolina." That appeal notwithstanding, the effort failed. Some of the organizers joined in a second attempt that met with only a little more success, enrolling just seventeen volunteers. (37)

A more precise portrait of who led and joined the mobilization for secession in the upper piedmont can be gleaned from the membership rolls of Minute Man companies (see Table 2). Altogether, the names of more than 370 men involved in these organizations--out of a total of perhaps 1,500 members--are available from newspapers, personal papers, and government archives. Almost 90 percent of those 370 members could be identified in census records that provide information about occupation and property holding. In some cases, several members of the same family joined a Minute Man company; therefore, the 332 individual names located in the census records were drawn from a total of 292 households. Roughly three-quarters of those identified were household heads, while the remainder consisted primarily of teenage and adult sons living with their parents or single men boarding at a hotel or with a family. (38)

Analysis of these findings reveals that slave owners spearheaded the secession movement in the upper piedmont and that non-slaveholders played a conspicuously minor role. Although organizers and officers were marginally older and wealthier than the rank and file, slave owners preponderated in both groups. In this majority non-slave-owning region, roughly three-quarters of all Minute Men resided in slave-owning households. The overrepresentation of slave owners was particularly evident in Pickens District, where slave-owning households provided more than 60 percent of identified Minute Men but accounted for fewer than 20 percent of all white households. Owners of large numbers of slaves were especially active in these companies. About 13 percent of all Minute Men belonged to families owning twenty or more slaves, even though such households accounted for only about 3 percent of those in the upper piedmont. The majority of Minute Men came from the households of smaller slave owners. The median holding was eight slaves--smaller than plantation households but still larger than the median of five in the region's slaveholding population as a whole. The mobilization for secession was squarely in the hands of the upper piedmont's slave-owning minority.

In discussing the yeomanry's response to secession, historians typically have not distinguished between those who owned slaves and those who did not. in the Minute Man companies of the upper piedmont, however, slave-owning yeomen appear to have played a far greater role than their non-slave-owning counterparts, outnumbering them by more than two to one. This relative preponderance of slave owners is all the more striking because among yeomen in the upper piedmont as a whole, non-slave owners outnumbered slave owners by a factor of two or three to one. In York, where slaveholding was more widespread in the white population, the number of yeomen in a sample of the 1860 population census was more equally split between slaveholders and non-slaveholders (see Table 3). But the rolls of the district's Minute Man companies reveal almost three times as many slave-owning as slaveless yeomen--the latter, indeed, were even outnumbered among the ranks of Minute Men by members of planter households. (39)

A closer look at several of these paramilitary groups helps bring into focus the role of different classes in the mobilization for secession. Table 4 provides information about three companies. For all three, names of all members and not just the leaders are available, which gives a more complete picture of who participated in them. Each of the three, moreover, drew much of its membership from discrete areas that can be identified in census records, which in turn makes it possible to compare the membership of the group to the population from which it was drawn. In particular, it is possible to calculate a "rate of participation" for different classes--that is, the percentage of households from which at least one member participated in the local paramilitary group. (40) Although the three companies formed at different times and in areas with significantly different levels of slaveholding, all confirm the preponderance of slave owners among Minute Men.

One of the first military companies to appear in the upper piedmont was the Turkey Creek Minute Men, a group organized in an area of south-central York District, where about 70 percent of all white households included slaves. In early November, as the state legislature finalized plans for the secession convention, white men in the area met to form "a company of 'Minute men'" to "arm, drill and prepare for active service." Thirty-four of the thirty-eight members can be identified in census records. All but tour came from slave-owning households, half of them with ten or more slaves. Nine of the members resided in the households of slave-owning yeomen; none came from the non-slave-owning yeomanry. In the immediate area in which most of the members lived, 25 percent of all households that owned slaves, but only 6 percent of those that did not, contributed at least one member to the Turkey Creek Minute Men. (41)

Thirty miles away, in eastern Spartanburg District, a group of men gathered on December 1, 1860, to form a paramilitary organization called the "Webster's Store Vigilance Committee." The name notwithstanding, the group had more in common with the area's Minute Man companies than with most vigilance committees. Although those in attendance approved a statement complaining "that patrol duty is entirely too much neglected in our community," they took no steps to organize patrols or investigate suspicious persons. Instead, they devoted their energy to mobilizing support for separate state secession. Several nominees for the secession convention addressed the gathering, which then approved a series of resolutions declaring that "we are in favor of immediate State Secession" and pledging "our lives, our fortunes, and our most sacred honor, to stand by our beloved State." (42)

Slave owners led the Webster's Store Vigilance Committee and predominated among its members. Of those members who could be identified, almost 80 percent came from slave-owning households--about double the ratio of such households in the area's population. More than one-third of all slave-owning households in the immediate vicinity of Webster's Store had at least one member who joined the group, compared to fewer than 10 percent of non-slave-owning households. Among yeomen more particularly, the level of participation among slave-owning yeomen was double that of their non-slave-owning counterparts.

One of the few paramilitary companies to appear in a low slave-owning area of the upper piedmont was the Cherokee Vigilant Society, formed in a section of northeastern Spartanburg District where three-quarters of households owned no slaves. (43) A number of features set this group apart from many of its counterparts. One was the relatively late timing of its appearance in South Carolina's course to secession. The society was not formed until December 22, two days after the state convention had passed the ordinance of secession; at that point, the committee was left only to endorse "the action of our State [as] ... expedient, wise, and prompt." Moreover, in contrast to the radicalism of the moment, the group's organizers sounded a cautious and even discordant note in suggesting the course they believed the state should pursue. Although affirming that "South Carolina after once leaving the Union, never should accept any compromises from the non-slaveholding States," those present at the meeting put themselves on record as disapproving "any action of the people exceeding the powers of the Convention to seize any of the Federal ports, until failing to regain them by peaceable means." (44)

In at least one respect the Cherokee Vigilant Society resembled other paramilitary groups in the upper piedmont: slave owners provided the bulk of its leaders and members. More than 60 percent of the members who could be identified in census records lived in slave-owning households. This was a lower percentage of slave owners than in some other companies, but it was nonetheless almost triple the percentage of slaveholders in the immediate vicinity of Cherokee Springs. Although non-slave-owning yeomen accounted for close to half of white households in the area, they played a relatively minor role in the vigilant society; only about 13 percent of such households contributed at least one member to the group, compared to 50 percent of the area's slave-owning yeomanry. In this case as in others, slave-owning and non-slave-owning yeomen diverged sharply in their part in the mobilization for secession.

Two weeks before the formation of the Cherokee Vigilant Society, secessionist candidates had swept to victory throughout the upper piedmont in elections for the state secession convention. By no means, however, did the results demonstrate a groundswell of popular support for disunion. For the region as a whole, turnout was down perhaps 45 percent from that in the congressional and state elections two months earlier; in Anderson, Pickens, and Spartanburg Districts, fewer than half of eligible voters cast ballots. The decline was due in part to the absence of a choice at the polls. Only in Greenville District did Unionists offer an opposition ticket (and there the effort was last minute and poorly organized); elsewhere, voters could choose only among rival secessionists who contended for the honor of serving in the convention. The lack of voter participation was striking for an era when turnout regularly reached levels of 75 percent or more and for an election that would inaugurate what secessionists portrayed as the most important event in American political history since the Revolution. The editor of the Anderson Intelligencer, one of the few secessionists to publicly acknowledge the "small vote" on December 6, confidently asserted that "[f]rom our knowledge of facts as they exist, it is entirely safe to presume that one-half of those who refrained from voting are in favor of secession." The activity of Minute Man companies--widely trumpeted in the pages of newspapers like the Intelligencer--helped lay the groundwork for that presumption and put secessionists in a position to claim a popular mandate even in the face of an anemic turnout. (45)

With the convention's declaration of secession on December 20, the mission of the state's Minute Man companies was essentially complete. Most disappeared from the historical record after the beginning of 1861, when political leaders in the state turned their attention to new tasks, attempting to negotiate the state's relation with the federal government and other slaveholding states, and to create new military units to repel any "armed force ... employed against the State." Minute Man companies figured little in those plans for defense--only seven of the twenty-seven paramilitary groups organized in late 1860 appear to have entered the state's new military force in the early months of 1861. (46)

Short lived as they were, Minute Man companies nonetheless played an important role in the movement for secession, and they provide valuable evidence to assess the claim that "[y]eoman joined planter to make a revolution." A good place to start is by examining the terms in which historians have posed their discussion and, in particular, how they have defined yeomen as a class. Ford's and McCurry's works on South Carolina are part of a wider historiography on the southern yeomanry that dates to the 1970s, when a number of broad-ranging intellectual interests--about the market economy, the transition to capitalism, and republican political ideology in the Anglo-Atlantic world--inspired historians to take a closer look at the place of small farmers in a slave society. Although hardly identical in every point of their analysis, works on the yeomanry have generally shared a locus on small farmers' status as property owners and heads of productive households, and have explored how these circumstances underlay their attachment to the political values of independence and liberty at the center of republican thought. The contribution of this scholarship has been to emphasize the importance of slavery to the lives of the southern plain folk and of republicanism to politics in the Old South. Interpretively it represents a leap in sophistication over an older historiography about class relations among white men that revolved primarily around attempts to label the Old South either aristocratic or democratic. (47)

Even while emphasizing the importance of slavery for those white men who did not own slaves, however, this scholarship has paradoxically obscured its importance for many of those who did. Although differing on exactly where to draw the boundary, most works on the yeomanry have defined that class as including small farmers who owned slaves as well as those who did not. Slave owners, indeed, accounted for a substantial part of the yeomanry in the areas of South Carolina studied by Ford and McCurry--around 40 percent by each author's definition. Although they and other historians have been careful to note differences between slaveholding and non-slaveholding yeomen in addressing certain economic issues, such as crop production and market involvement, discussions of politics have typically ignored that distinction, treating the yeomanry as a single, undifferentiated class. To be sure, both segments of the yeomanry likely shared political values rooted in their material circumstances as petty producers and had certain grievances in common against planters' disproportionate power in government. Nonetheless, in confronting the proslavery politics of southern radicalism, slave-owning yeomen brought with them not just a generalized commitment to republican values but also a direct economic stake in the peculiar institution, as well as a personal and daily experience of it, that their non-slave-owning counterparts did not possess. Slaveholding yeomen in the upper piedmont responded with enthusiasm to a secession movement that identified the interest of the South with slavery and cast disunion as the only means to protect it. In making the cause of secession their own, they acted in concert with the larger slaveholders in the region and parted company with non-slave-owning yeomen. (48)

These findings, in turn, suggest the need to reexamine the significance of republicanism for politics in the Old South. Many historians have used that concept as a means to address the long-standing question of planters' hegemony: that is, the ability of a small class of wealthy slave owners to secure their interests through the consent rather than coercion of other classes in white society. Republican ideology clearly constituted part of the grammar of politics during the antebellum era, providing a means by which members of the slaveholding elite sought to win support among the southern plain folk and legitimate the proslavery agenda. Among works on the yeomanry, Ford and McCurry go perhaps the furthest in arguing for planters' success, contending that small farmers in South Carolina embraced a proslavery variant of republicanism that ultimately propelled them into the movement for secession. This interpretation has been challenged by Manisha Sinha, who persuasively demonstrates that proslavery politics in South Carolina was led by the planter class and originated in its political and ideological needs. Focused as she is on the leaders of the movement, however, Sinha is less well situated to assess whether white men of other classes endorsed the radical agenda. Indeed, while there is no denying the anti-democratic tendencies of some of South Carolina's planter-politicians, the campaign for secession makes clear that they felt the need to mobilize wider support and that they were acutely anxious to portray the movement for disunion as a popular revolution. (49)

Minute Man companies, as we have seen, provided secessionists a valuable means of making such claims. Rather than taking those representations at face value, historians would do well to scrutinize the activities and membership of those groups in specific southern locales. The evidence regarding Minute Men in the upper piedmont of South Carolina illustrates the balance of coercion and consent--of intimidation and popular participation--that went into secessionists' victory. The paramilitary style of organizing adopted by Minute Men had long been integral to the practice of proslavery politics, serving as a means to limit the bounds of public discourse and to underscore the threat of slavery's opponents. Although Minute Man companies in the upper piedmont clearly lent the movement a popular character, they demonstrated at the same time the unevenness of its appeal, as the enthusiasm of slave owners for these groups went largely unmatched among the non-slave-owning white majority.

Even in South Carolina, then, it would seem that republicanism provided a more limited and fragile basis for the politics of slavery than historians have appreciated. To be sure, the non-slave owners of the upper piedmont did little to oppose secession or its frankly proslavery objectives--the events of late 1860 revealed no great store of Unionism, and certainly not of antislavery sentiment, among members of the region's white majority. Their role, in other words, was less to make a revolution than to acquiesce in it. That acquiescence signaled a basic acceptance, perhaps, of the proslavery premises of the secessionist argument but not a full and enthusiastic endorsement of the case that radicals had spent three decades articulating. For secessionist leaders, that was enough in late 1860, and it permitted them to move forward with their plan to lead a core of slave states out of the Union. In historical perspective, however, it stands as a strikingly modest accomplishment and a testament to the limits on planters' hegemony in a state where political and economic circumstances were most disposed to their success.

TABLE 1
OVERVIEW OF MINUTE MAN COMPANIES BY DISTRICT

                                   Members as   Percentage of
                                   Percentage   Slave-Owning
                                   of Adult     Households in
             Companies   Members   White Men    District

York          7           339      13%          47%
Anderson      6           362      11           40
Spartanburg   7           404      10           30
Greenville    4           207       6           30
Pickens       3           165       5           18
Total        27          1477

This count of Minute Man companies was compiled chiefly from
newspaper reports and supplemented by information from
collections of personal papers, along with correspondence
in Muster and Pay Rolls of Confederate Military Units. South
Carolina, entry 18, RG 109. The count includes all groups
formed between mid-October and the end of December 1860 that
were identified as "Minute Man" companies in contemporary
reports and/or that declared their support for secession and
pledged themselves to defend South Carolina in the event of
a military confrontation with the federal government. Included
are two groups that called themselves "vigilance" or "vigilant"
organizations but met the other criteria above: excluded are
two other vigilance committees that focused solely on policing
internal threats to the slave regime. Also excluded are several
preexisting volunteer military companies, mostly in the towns
of the upper piedmont, that declared their support for secession
during the October-December period.

The number of members is based on both reported and estimated
figures. For eighteen of the twenty-seven companies, newspapers
and other sources either list the names of members or report
the total membership, often in round or general figures--e.g.,
"about sixty." Membership in those companies averaged fifty-five
men. For the other nine companies (one in York and two in each
of the other four districts), sources do not note the number
of members, and I used the average figure above as an estimate
of their  membership.

The final two columns draw on figures from the published reports
of the 1860 federal census. "Members as percentage of adult white
men" is calculated by dividing the number of members by the number
of white men aged twenty and older: "percentage of slave-owning
households in district" is calculated by dividing the number of
slave owners by the number of free families.

TABLE 2
PROFILE OF MINUTE MEN

                                      Other
                 Oticers/Organizers   Members     Total

Number
  Total          229                  144         373
  Identified     206 (90%)            126 (88%)   332 (89%)
Median age        35                   32          33
Household head   167 (81%)             76 (60%)   243 (73%)
Member of        155 (75%)             91 (72%)   246 (74%)
  slave-owning
  household
Median slaves      8                    6.5         8
  owned

"Officers and organizers" includes named officers a, well as men
identified as playing some role in organizing these groups--by
signing a call to form a company, for example, or by chairing
the meeting at which it was organized.

TABLE 3
CLASS PROFILE OF MINUTE MEN AND WHITE HOUSEHOLDS IN YORK DISTRICT

                                             Minute   Population
                                             Men      Sample

Overseers                                      4.9%     4.5%
Landless farmers, laborers and artisans       10.8     27.1
Landowning farmers and artisans (0 slaves)     7.8     22.3
Landowning farmers and artisans
  (1-5 slaves)                                22.5     15.5
Landless farmers (1-5 slaves)                  2.0      3.4
Farmers (6-9 slaves)                          14.7      7.6
Farmers (10-19 slaves)                        14.7      8.6
Planters (20 or more slaves)                  14.7      3.4
Professional/trade (0 slaves)                  2.0      2.1
Professional/trade (1-9 slaves)                4.9      2.7
Professional/trade (10 or more slaves)         1.0      2.7
TOTAL                                        100%     100%
N                                            102      291

Figures in the second column represent the results of a one-in-seven
sample of households drawn from the population schedule of the 1860
federal manuscript census. Only households with adult white men are
included. Chi square: 75.6, 10 d.f., p < .001.

Several categories in the above table combine figures for artisans
with those for farmers. In addition to simplifying the presentation,
this decision is consistent with how historians have viewed the role
of artisans as petty producers in the rural society of the slave
South--especially since many of the more prosperous artisans in the
countryside operated farms in addition to pursuing craft occupations.
In any event, the number of artisans is small enough that it does
not affect the general magnitude of the percentages involved.

TABLE 4
PROFILE OF INDIVIDUAL COMPANIES

                                      Webster's Store   Cherokee
                       Turkey Creek   Vigilance         Vigilant
                       Minute Men     Committee         Society

Members
  Identified           34             28                23
  Total                38 (89%)       32 (88%)          28 (82%)

Percentage of
  Slave-owning         71%            43%               21%
    households
    in vicinity
  Members from         88%            79%               61%
    slave-owning
    households

Rate of participation
    (by household)
  Non-slave owners      6% (2/34)      9% (5/57)         7% (4/57)
  Slave owners         25% (21/85)    37% (16/43)       47% (7/15)
  Non-slave-owning      0% (0/5)      11% (2/18)        13% (4/32)
    yeomen
  Slave-owning         19% (7/36)     22% (4/18)        50% (4/8)
    yeomen

The vicinity for each company, along with the number of identified
members drawn from that area, is as follows:

Turkey Creek        McConnellsville and     27/34 identified
  Minute Men          Sandersville P.O.s,     members in 23
                      York District           different households
Webster's Store     Moultrie and Pacolet    24/28 identified
  Vigilance           P.O.s. Spartanburg      members in 21
  Committee           District                different households

Cherokee Vigilant   Damascus P.O.,          11/23 identified
  Society             Spartanburg             members in 11
                      District                different households

(1) Spartanburg Carolina Spartan, November 22, 1860 (first and second quotations): M. S. McArthur et al. to Wm. H. Gist, November 12, 1860, Muster and Pay Rolls of Confederate Military Units, South Carolina, entry 18, War Department Collection of Confederate Records, Record Group 109, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; hereinafter cited as RG 109 (third and fourth quotations). On the village of Limestone Springs (in what is now Cherokee County), see Bobby Gilmer Moss, The Old Iron District: A Study of the Development of Cherokee County--1750-1897 (Clinton, S.C., 1972), 103-7, 205-7: and J. B. O. Landrum, History of Spartanburg County (1900: reprint. Spartanburg. S.C., 1960), 59. For their comments on early versions of this essay, I wish to thank Elizabeth Hone, Barbara J. Fields, Vernon Burton. Susan O'Donovan, Jane Turner Censer, my colleagues in the History Department Colloquium at the Catholic University of America, and the anonymous readers for the Journal of Southern History.

(2) W. Gilmore Simms to James Lawson, [ca. November 10, 1860], and Simms to Lawson, November 20, 1860, in Mary C. Simms Oliphant, Alfred Taylor Odell, and T. C. Duncan Eaves, eds., The Letters of William Gilmore Simms (6 vols.; Columbia, S.C., 1952-1982), IV, 261 (first, second, and fourth quotations), 267-68 (third. filth, and sixth quotations). On Simms's call for the formation of a Minute Man company, see ibid., 268n254.

(3) The quotation is from Lacy K. Ford Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (New York, 1988), 372. On the practices of militancy that surrounded antebellum southern politics, see John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800-1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1956); for a discussion of the broader national context of antebellum political violence, see David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828-1861: Toward Civil War (New York, 1998). Steven Hahn links the paramilitary practices of the antebellum South to Reconstruction-era politics, white and black, in A Nation Under Out Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 266 71.

(4) Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York, 1995), 278. Although McCurry and Ford share a focus on relations between planters and yeomen, and on republicanism as the link between the two groups, it should be emphasized that their accounts diverge in a number of ways. McCurry stresses the exclusive and hierarchical character of proslavery republicanism and of South Carolina's political culture, in contrast to Ford's more egalitarian depiction. McCurry also puts greater emphasis on the significance of paramilitarism for antebellum politics, and in particular she offers a valuable discussion of the activity of vigilance committees in the South Carolina Lowcountry during 1859-1860. Both she and Ford acknowledge the organization of Minute Man companies during the final months of 1860, but neither attempts to examine the membership or activity of those groups in a comprehensive way.

(5) Works that examine the 1860 1861 convention elections and the relationship between levels of slaveholding and support for immediate secession include Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Basis of Politics (1960; reprint. New York, 1963), 372-84: Ralph A. Wooster, The Secession Conventions of the South (Princeton, 1962): William L. Barney, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860 (Princeton, 1974): Michael P. Johnson. Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia (Baton Rouge, 1977); Peyton McCrary, Clark Miller, and Dale Baum. "Class and Party in the Secession Crisis: Voting Behavior in the Deep South, 1856-1861," Journal Of Interdisciplinary History, 8 (Winter 1978), 429-57; James M. Woods. Rebellion and Realignment: Arkansas's Road to Secession (Fayetteville, Ark., 1987); Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill, 1989): Anthony Gene Carey, Parties, Slavery, and the Union in Antebellum Georgia (Athens, Ga., 1997): and Dale Baum, The Shattering of Texas Unionism: Politics in the Lone Star State During the Civil War Era (Baton Rouge, 1998).

(6) Historians have used somewhat different criteria for classifying farmers as yeomen on the basis of land and slave ownership. I have adopted the standard used by Lacy Ford, who defines a yeoman as a farmer who owned land and no more than five slaves. Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, 59, 71. McCurry categorizes as yeomen those farmers owning no more than 149 improved acres and no more than nine slaves. McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, 47-51.

(7) Stephen A. West, "From Yeoman to Redneck in Upstate South Carolina, 1850-1915" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1998). chap. 1. Ford includes the five districts examined here in the larger upcountry he examines in Origins of Southern Radicalism. Although Ford argues that agriculture had a somewhat more commercialized character in the upper piedmont by the late 1850s, he likewise views the region as lying outside South Carolina's chief plantation belt.

(8) The best work on the nullification crisis remains William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina. 1816 1836 (New York, 1965). See also Chauncey Samuel Boucher, The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina (Chicago, 1916); Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, 119-44; McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, chaps. 4 and 7; and Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill, 2000). chaps. 1-2.

(9) Voting returns taken from Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, 45. On the origins of the name "Dark Corner," see "Speech at Glassy Mountain Church," unidentified newspaper clipping, August 24, 1876, Benjamin Franklin Perry Papers #588 (Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; hereinafter cited as SHC), microfilm at South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

(10) Pickens Keowee Courier, November 30, 1850 (quotation). On the secession crisis of 1850-1852 see Philip M. Hamer, The Secession Movement in South Carolina, 1847-1852 (1918; reprint, New York, 1971); John Barnwell, Love of Order: South Carolina's First Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill. 1982); Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, chap. 5: and Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, chap. 4. Election results are from Barnwell, Love of Order, 198-99.

(11) The quoted phrase is that of Lowcountry nullifier William J. Grayson; see Richard J. Calhoun, ed., Witness to Sorrow: The Antebellum Autobiography of William J. Grayson (Columbia, S.C., 1990), 119. On the mobilization that preceded the fail 1832 elections, see James Brewer Stewart, "'A Great Talking and Eating Machine': Patriarchy, Mobilization and the Dynamics of Nullification in South Carolina," Civil War History, 27 (September 1981), 197-220, especially pp. 216-19; McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, 265-71: and Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, 130-36.

(12) The quoted passage is from a copy of a printed circular by Governor Robert Y. Hayne, dated December 26, 1832, and addressed to Colonel Francis W. Pickens, published in "Letters on the Nullification Movement in South Carolina," American Historical Review, 6 (July 1901), 754. On paramilitary organizing during late I832 early 1833 and the test-oath controversy of 1833-1834, see Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 268-79, 309-21: and Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, 56-59.

(13) The proceedings of the Columbia meeting are reported in the Charleston Courier, May 16-17, 1849. Also see Hamer, Secession Movement in South Carolina, 32-37: Barnwell, Love of Order, 81-83; and Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, 80-81.

(14) Pendleton Messenger, August 17, September 21, and October 5, 1849 (Pendleton post office); Pickens Keowee Courier, August 11, 1849 (pill salesman), September 27, 1850 (tarred and leathered in York); Lillian Adele Kibler, Benjamin F. Perry: South Carolina Unionist (Durham, 1946), 249 50 (threats in Greenville).

(15) State v. John M. Barrett, Roll #17, Spring 1851 term, General Sessions Rolls, Court of General Sessions, Spartanburg District (South Carolina Department of Archives and History. Columbia; hereinafter cited as SCDAH) (all quotations); Congressional Globe, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., 136 (January 10, 1850). "Brutus," the anonymous author, is identified as William Brisbane in Blake McNulty, "William Henry Brisbane: South Carolina Slaveholder and Abolitionist," in Walter J. Fraser Jr. and Winfred B. Moore Jr., eds., The Southern Enigma: Essays on Race, Class, and Folk Culture (Westport, Conn., 1983). 123.

(16) Kibler, Benjamin F. Perry, 323-25 (quotations on p. 324); Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, 229-36.

(17) A. B. Crook to B. F. Perry, December 4, 1859, B. F. Perry Papers (Alabama Department of Archives and History; hereinafter cited as ADAH), microfilm at SCDAH. On the reaction in South Carolina to John Brown's raid, see Steven A. Channing, Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (1970; reprint, New York, 1974), chap. 1.

(18) Yorkville Enquirer, November 1, 1860.

(19) R. H. Fullwood to E. Cra[w?]ford, September 6, 1860. Folder 113, Springs Family Papers #4121, SHC.

(20) Pickens Keowee Courier, September 1 and October 20, 1860.

(21) The legislative debates are reported in Charleston Daily Courier and Charleston Mercury, November 7-12, 1860; see also Charles Edward Cauthen, South Carolina Goes to War, 1860-1865 (Chapel Hill, 1950), 51-62.

(22) Charleston Mercury, November 10 (first quotation) and 12 (sixth quotation). 1860: Charleston Daily Courier, November 12. 1860 (second, third, fourth, fifth, and seventh quotations). Sue also Cauthen, South Carolina Goes to War, 59-60.

(23) Charleston Daily Courier, October 15, 1860 (first three quotations); Charleston Mercury. November 6, 1860 (fourth quotation). For more on the Columbia Minute Men see Channing, Crisis of Fear, 269-71; and Cauthen, South Carolina Goes to War, 47.

(24) Spartanburg Express, November 21, 1860 (Spartanburg Minute Men), December 5, 1860 (quotations; Cross Anchor Minute Men); Pickens Keowee Courier, December 1, 1860 (Fort Hill Guards); Yorkville Enquirer, November 29, 1860 (Alston Riflemen).

(25) J. D. Ashmore to William P. Miles, November 15, 1860, William Porcher Miles Papers #508. SHC (first three quotations); Charleston Daily Courier, November 12, 1860 (fourth quotation). On secessionists' anxious calls for unity, see McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, 277-88.

(26) Charleston Daily Courier. November 7, 1860: Greenville Southern Enterprise. December 13, 1860.

(27) Anderson Intelligencer, November 22 and December 6, 1860.

(28) Tho. S. Arthur to B. F. Perry. 2 undated letters [November December 18601, Perry Papers, ADAH (first and second quotations): Spartanburg Carolina Spartan, November 29, 1860 (third and fourth quotations): A. Whyte to A. B. Springs. December 29. 1860. Folder 115. Springs Family Papers (fifth eighth quotations).

(29) Charleston Daily Courier, October 15, 1860 (pledge of Columbia Minute Men). For examples of other companies using the same expression, see Spartanburg Carolina Spartan, December 13, 1860 (Webster's Store Vigilance Committee). and Anderson Intelligencer, December 6, 1860 (Slabtown Volunteers). On secessionists' invocation of a gendered discourse of honor, see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Shameful Submission and Honorable Secession," in his The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace. and War. 1760s 1890s (Chapel Hill. 2001), 177-202.

(30) Spartanburg Express, December 5, 1860 (Cross Anchor Minute Men): Anderson Intelligencer, December 6, 1860 (Slabtown Volunteers).

(31) Spartanburg Express, December 5, 1860 (first quotation): Spartanburg Carolina Spartan. November 29, 1860 (second. third, and fourth quotations).

(32) Cauthen, South Carolina Goes to War, 47 (Boozer): Yorkville Enquirer. December 20. 1860 (first quotation); Will Watson to Aunt Coleman, December 20, 1860. William Dunlap Simpson Papers (Rare Book. Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham. N.C.) (second-fourth quotations): Greenville Southern Enterprise. December 6. 1860 (fifth-eighth quotations).

(33) Yorkville Enquirer, December 13, 1860.

(34) Ibid., November 8, 1860. Here and elsewhere in this essay, figures regarding slave ownership for neighborhoods within each district are calculated from Manuscript Census Returns. Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Schedules I and 4, Population and Slave, National Archives Microfilm Series M-653. Individual pages in the population census list the nearest post office, and I have used this designation to calculate the level of slaveholding in specific locales.

(35) The formation of that company, the Calhoun Mountaineers, at Fair Play is reported in the Pickens Keowee Courier, November 17 and December 1, 1860. About 26 percent of white households in the vicinity of the Fair Play post office owned slaves, compared to 18 percent for the district as a whole. Two additional companies were formed in Pickens between the time of the convention elections and the end of the bear.

(36) Greenville Southern Enterprise. November 1 and December 13, 1860.

(37) Greenville Southern Enterprise, December 6 (quotations), 13, and 20, 1860. The Pickens Keowee Courier, November 17 and December 1, 1860, reported plans to form companies at Walhalla and Colonel Hagood's, both in Pickens District, but the paper carried no later notices indicating that either company was ever organized.

(38) Classifying the roughly 25 percent of Minute Men who were not household heads poses a number of challenges. The 1860 census did not record the relationship of household subordinates to the person listed as head of the household. Where a subordinate bears the same name as the household head and is of an age to be that person's child, the subordinate is categorized according to the presumed parent's land and slave-owning status. Where the names or ages do not justify such an inference, the subordinate is classed according to his own listed occupation and property holding. This category accounted for eleven of the eighty-nine non household heads.

(39) West, "From Yeoman to Redneck in Upstate South Carolina," chap. 1. In Spartanburg District, where the level of slaveholding approximated that for the region, a sample of the 1860 population census yielded three times as many non-slave-owning as slave-owning yeomen.

(40) For the purpose of these calculations, I first located Minute Men in the population schedule of the manuscript census for 1860. noting the one or two post offices where a substantial percentage of each company's members resided. I then calculated the rate of participation by dividing the number of households that contributed at least one member to the company by the total number of households with white men aged 18 or older listed at such post office(s). I am indebted to John Owen Allen for sharing with me his methodology and results in a similar research project.

(41) Yorkville Enquirer, November 15 and December 6, 1860.

(42) Spartanburg Carolina Spartan, December 13, 1860.

(43) Similar to the group at Webster's Store, the organizers called their organization a "vigilant society," but it displayed many of the features of what were elsewhere called Minute Man companies. Although expressing concern about "a great many emissaries of the North passing through our State for the purpose of producing insurrection among our population," the organizers announced no plans to seek those persons out. But in the fashion of many Minute Man companies. the group's members declared thai "when [South Carolina] ... calls upon us we are ready to obey the summons." Spartanburg Carolina Spartan. January 3, 1861.

(44) Spartanburg Carolina Spartan, January 3, 1861.

(45) Anderson Intelligencer, December 13, 1860 (quotation). Turnout was calculated from Anderson Intelligencer, October 18 and December 13, 1860; Spartanburg Carolina Spartan, October 18 and December 13, 1860; Pickens Keowee Courier, October 13 and December 15, 1860: Greenville Southern Enterprise, October 11 and December 13, 1860; and Yorkville Enquirer, October 11 and December 13, 1860. For the region as a whole, turnout in the October elections exceeded 75 percent of the number of voting-aged white men recorded in the federal census of 1860; see Joseph C. G. Kennedy, comp., Population of the United States in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census ... (Washington, D.C., 1864), 448-49.

(46) The quotation is from "An Act to Provide an Armed Military Force," Statutes at Large of South Carolina, Vol. XII (Columbia, S.C., 1874), 726: on the military and diplomatic preparations of early 1861, see Cauthen, South Carolina Goes to War, 79-118. The companies that appear to have enrolled in state service were identified from local newspapers: Alexander S. Salley Jr., comp., South Carolina Troops in Confederate Service (3 vols.; Columbia, S.C., 1913-1930); and Synonym Files, entry 459, RG 109. Individual members of other groups enlisted in state service, but the point to be emphasized here is the transitory character of the Minute Man companies as organizations. A number of historians have distinguished between support for disunion and support for the war that followed, arguing that non-slave owners backed the Confederacy (at least in the early months or years of the war) with far greater enthusiasm than they demonstrated for secession. See, for example, David Williams, Rich Man's War: Class. Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley(Athens, Ga., 1998), chap. 2, especially pp, 53-58. Space does not permit a full consideration of this claim, but it is worth noting that few studies have backed it by systematically examining patterns of enlistment in the Confederate Army. One study that performs such an analysis of Lunenburg County, Virginia a majority slave owning area in the tobacco-growing Southside piedmont--finds that 75 percent of planter households saw at least one member enlist during the first year of the war, compared to only 30 percent of non-slave-owning households. See John Owen Allen, "Tobacco, Slaves, and Secession: Southside Virginia on the Brink of the Great Rebellion" (Ph.D. dissertation, Catholic University of America, 2002).

(47) Quotation is from Ford. Origins of Southern Radicalism, 372. A sampling of other works in this historiography include Eugene D. Genovese, 'Yeoman Farmers in a Slaveholders" Democracy," Agricultural History, 49 (April 1975), 331-42, reprinted in revised form in Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese. Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York, 1983), chap. 9; Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (New York, 1983); Harry L. Watson. "Conflict and Collaboration: Yeomen. Slaveholders, and Politics in the Antebelhun South." Social History, 10 (October 1985), 273-98: and Bradley G. Bond, Political Culture in the Nineteenth Century South: Mississippi, 1830-1900 (Baton Rouge, 1995).

(48) The 40 percent estimate is mine, calculated from figures in Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, 257 (Table 7.10), and McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, 57 (TabLe 2.7). On their somewhat different standards for classifying farmers as yeomen, see above, footnote 6.

(49) Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery.

MR. West is an assistant professor of history at the Catholic University of America.