In January 1861, Virginia State Senator John Herbert Claiborne faced a political challenge in the sixth district he represented. Many of his constituents opposed secession from the United States, yet they were also deeply uncertain about the country’s future after the tumultuous developments of the previous two months. In November 1860, Abraham Lincoln had been elected president, prompting South Carolina to secede in December. By early January, four more states—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Georgia—had followed.
Claiborne had no doubts about the direction the nation was heading. As a staunch Virginia supporter of slavery who favored the state over the federal government, he held a hierarchical worldview that considered slavery an economic necessity and a biblical requirement. A well-educated physician, he owned eighteen enslaved people and real and personal property valued at $43,000 in 1860, equivalent to roughly $1. 7 million today.
On January 20, 1861, just two weeks after five states had seceded, Claiborne took his case for secession directly to the people through the public press. In a published address, he appealed to his fellow citizens with frank words about the subject absorbing public attention. He expressed a sincere desire, which he believed a sacred duty, to contribute something toward bridging the divide separating many of their best citizens and to pour calming oil on the troubled waters of political strife. He lamented that divisions among a people united by interest, honor, and common destiny were unfortunate and often disastrous, especially at a time of public danger when unity of thought and harmony of action were vital for preserving what people held sacred.
Claiborne described the nation as standing face to face with an enemy, one that was relentless, intoxicated by its first victory, and determined to press its triumph to the end. Rather than uniting their fractured forces and making a final stand on their common soil, he argued, they stood scattered, doubting one another and debating abstractions, while their watchful enemy mocked their hesitation and prepared for a final attack. He asked what the sources of their disagreements were, whether they could be settled, and urged people to reason together, cast aside bitterness and party prejudice, and come as men of one blood to preserve their old commonwealth with all its dignity and glorious history. The enemy Claiborne identified was a political party that had grown slowly but steadily over forty years and had finally won the ballot boxes of the country, poised to take power.
He argued that this party would govern according to the policies it had pursued and the principles it had announced, principles he considered subversive of Southern interests and destructive of property, particularly the institution of slavery that he believed constituted the state’s strength and contributed greatly to its prosperity and wealth. He insisted that this institution was worth fighting for, that a just cause made a person thrice armed, while one whose conscience was corrupted by injustice was naked even if clothed in steel. Claiborne then launched into a lengthy indictment of the Republican Party, tracing its history from the adoption of the federal Constitution through the Louisiana Purchase and the admission of California. He accused the party of seizing public property unlawfully, preventing slaveholders from enjoying the benefits of lands won by Southern valor, and declaring that the vast territories to the west would never be trod by a slave owner.
He recalled the recent raid of John Brown, who less than eighteen months earlier had opened an arsenal in a border region and sent an outlaw band to incite rebellion, spread terror, and threaten the lives of slaveholders. When a jury of free men had sentenced the raiders to the gallows, Claiborne noted, cries of indignation arose from the North, and John Brown was voted the crown of martyrdom. He accused the Republican Party of stealing Southern property under the guise of law, refusing to return it, building prisons for those who sought to recover it, and killing Southern citizens for merely pursuing their rights. He charged that Northern leaders had protected criminals and traitors who fled to them, refusing to surrender them to the demands of Southern authorities.
He quoted the party’s stated goal that the conflict would not end until all states were free or all were slave, until Charleston and New Orleans became legitimate markets for trade or New York and Boston became markets for human souls and bodies. He noted that the party’s chief spokesman had called the federal Constitution a covenant with hell and an agreement with the devil. Claiborne then detailed the consequences of Republican control in the states where the party already held power. In eleven states, he said, they had boldly nullified the fugitive slave law and ignored the Constitution.
In four states, they had prevented the use of jails, courts, and public buildings to assist the slaveholder. In seven states, they had provided means of defense for the fugitive, and in three states they had declared the fugitive entirely free. Meanwhile, the penalties borne by the slaveholder and officials seeking to enforce constitutional guarantees were onerous and oppressive, including fines and imprisonment of up to fifteen years. He asked whether it was logical to assume the party would not pursue similar policies when it gained control of the federal government.
Claiborne questioned whether the South should cowardly submit to the rule of this party. He invoked former President Millard Fillmore, who had said that four years earlier the South would not and should not have accepted the election of a sectional candidate for the presidency. He pointed out that the president-elect himself had declared the country must be all slave or all free, and that Lincoln would ensure it was not all slave, so the South must ensure it was not all free. He asked whether Virginia would surrender three hundred million dollars in slave property on the basis of such an opinion.
He also raised the fate of the enslaved people, the helpless and faithful servants of their families, the servants of their fathers and mothers, asking whether they would be subjected to the curse of freedom and cruelly cut off from the care and protection of their owners. He declared that he could not abandon these dependent people to the false mercies of abolitionists, and that when the hypocritical abolitionists of the North fed the hungry at their doors and clothed the naked, then he would listen more patiently to their sentimental sermons about the sin of slavery. Having presented the case for action, Claiborne acknowledged that critics might say the South should resist encroachments on its rights within the Union. He dismissed this possibility, arguing that the Union as it had existed was already gone.
Five states had severed their connection with the federal government and reclaimed their sovereignty. Five stars had been erased from the sky of the flag, and the motto of the republic announced the decline of its glory. Virginia still retained its representatives in Congress, he noted, but the withdrawal of their colleagues from the seceded states left them a growing minority, soon powerless to achieve any good through parliamentary methods. He warned that resistance by arms within the Union would lead only to crushing defeat and punishment for treason.
Instead, he urged his constituents to withdraw their representatives from Washington, raise their flag, and declare their independence through an ordinance of secession to be adopted by a sovereign convention of the people. Claiborne noted that the Virginia General Assembly had already called for such a convention to meet in Richmond on February 13. He also mentioned that the assembly had appointed a commission of five distinguished citizens to travel to Washington with what was presumed to be Virginia’s final ultimatum, and that all other states had been invited to appoint similar commissions to meet in Washington on February 4 to hear mutual complaints and settle common grievances. If these efforts failed to produce a plan for settling territorial differences, Claiborne said, it would fall upon the people to decide whether to continue attempting to solve the matter within the Union or to open new systems of negotiation outside it and assert what was rightfully theirs.
Despite his hope for peace, Claiborne warned his constituents as a guardian placed in an advanced position that he saw every reason to fear the worst. He declared his firm conviction that the party in power would not yield any principle or abandon any demand. He told them that without a promise of compensation for the past or a guarantee for the future, they would be called to vote on whether Virginia should adhere to the North or the South, whether she should establish her own government and trust in new alliances or submit to Republican rule. In that unfortunate event, he said, his ballot was already prepared.
He expressed the hope that they would cast their fortunes together, with Virginia as their first concern. He pledged his love, his life, and everything he owned to her, as the land of his birth, the home of his fathers, and the resting place of his dead. He concluded by describing a Southern union as a fraternal band of states whose interests were Virginia’s, whose people were her sons, and whose destiny was her destiny. He would be the last to turn her away from it, he said, but the broken covenants, misplaced trust, and the ongoing revolution should teach them lessons of caution in any future union with other governments.
He reminded them that Virginia had once voluntarily ceded a vast empire in the Northwest to a nation that had filled it with her enemies, and that they now held in their hands, in exchange for that great legacy, a defiled flag and the threat of enslavement. He urged them to weigh the price well before releasing their deed to another purchaser, and to let God help them make a better bargain in the future. Claiborne’s address was a forceful attempt to shape public opinion, but the immediate outcome was not what he hoped. Less than three months later, on April 4, 1861, after multiple meetings and formal organizations concerning secession in February and March, Virginia voted against secession.
However, after the bombardment of Fort Sumter and President Lincoln’s call for troops to suppress the rebellion, Claiborne got what he wanted. Virginia seceded in May 1861. As for Claiborne himself, he used his medical training to become a surgeon in the Confederate States Army. He organized a hospital in Petersburg, his home region, and was captured by Union forces on April 7, 1865, just two days before the Battle of Appomattox.
He lived to the age of seventy-six, without regretting the past, and died in 1905. A year before his death, his memoirs were published under the title “Seventy-Five Years in Old Virginia. ” His personal journey from state senator to Confederate surgeon reflected the larger transition of the state itself, which had hesitated at the brink of secession before committing fully to the Confederate cause, carrying with it the consequences of that decision for years to come.
