Civil War for the day

William Freehling has a column in The New York Times about Henry Wise's pistol:

By mid-April of 1861, Virginia’s secession convention had spent two months deadlocked over the question of whether to leave the Union. The disunionists, including Thomas Jefferson’s grandson, George Wythe Randolph, were outnumbered, but they also knew that events could easily tilt the balance in their favor, especially if the federal government took up arms against Virginia’s slave-holding former neighbors. On 15 April , their moment finally arrived: in response to the shelling of Fort Sumter, Abraham Lincoln called up 75,000 troops, including 2,340 Virginians, to subdue the rebellion.
The star of the decisive moment was ex-Governor Henry Wise, Randolph’s secessionist sidekick. On 17 April, with delegates still endlessly talking, the ultra-thin, ultra-fiery Wise seized the convention podium. He announced that, although he no longer had a governor’s authority, he had ordered Virginia militiamen to seize the federal installations at Harpers Ferry Arsenal and Norfolk’s Gosport Naval Yards. If anyone wished to object, warned Wise, as he waved his huge horse pistol with its extra long barrel, they could try to assassinate him.
Wise’s theatrics on behalf of Southern unity may seem natural in hindsight, but they were actually built on a fiction: for indeed, there was no “South” at the time. The slave-owning southern region of the country was more like a crooked three-step ladder. At its base lay the seven states of the Lower South: South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The Lower South was the heart of the black belt, heavy with plantations. In 1860, 46.5 percent of the Lower South’s population was enslaved. The subregion grew almost all the South’s cotton, sugar, and rice. All its states seceded after Lincoln’s election. This was the place that posterity thinks of as “the South”.
Unfortunately for the slaveholders, it was not the only “South”. Above the Lower South lay the Middle South, including Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas. Only 29.2 percent of the Middle South’s population was enslaved and, in vast parts of western Virginia and eastern Tennessee, the mountainous terrain, inhospitable to large-scale agriculture, meant there were even less.
Even fewer slaves lived in the most northerly tier of southern states. The population of the Border South, including Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, was only 13.7 percent enslaved. In fact, Maryland had almost as many free blacks as slaves, while Delaware contained eleven times more free blacks than bondsmen (and only 1,798 slaves). Slavery was rapidly declining in these states; Kentucky’s enslaved population had plunged twenty percent in thirty years. Before the Civil War commenced, the Border South states rejected secession even more resoundingly than did the Middle South states. Here predominated the vast “white belt” South, with most neighborhoods containing few if any slaves, not to mention free blacks. In other words, the issues that dominated political life in the Lower South had less resonance in the Middle South and hardly any at all in Border South, even if people outside the region then and now failed to distinguish among them.
It was the Middle and Border South that mattered most to both the Union and the Confederacy as they prepared for a possible war. Without their people and resources, Jefferson Davis’s armies would be ripe for slaughter. But if all the states left, then even Lincoln conceded that he couldn’t win; among other things, Washington, D.C., would be surrounded by enemy territory. Perhaps the bloodiest possible outcome, though, was a split: with the Middle South largely on Davis’s side and the Border South on Lincoln’s, the two nations would likely suffer years of horrendous warfare before one side could claim victory.
Indecisive Virginia mirrored the divided South. The largest southern state, in geography as well as slave and total population, it harbored three sections roughly equivalent to the three regions of the “South.” The state’s far western counties, comprising western Virginia, contained a Border South percentage of slaves, around five percent. The state’s far eastern sections, the Piedmont and Tidewater, contained a Lower South population ratio, around forty percent slaves. In between these extremes, the Shenandoah Valley sported around a Middle South sjxteen percent slaves.
To Randolph and Wise’s despair, when the Virginia convention met in Richmond on 13 February, no more than a sixth of the delegates favored disunion. In a crucial vote on 4 April, the delegates turned down disunion, 88 to 45. Instead, the majority favored endless debates over ways to repair the Union, with staunch Tidewater disunionists and mountain unionists hurling invective at each other from the wings.
Even after the firing on Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s 15 April proclamation, 45 percent of the delegates wished Virginia voters to chose between secession or a Union-saving southern convention. And then came Henry Wise’s horse pistol. Wise’s weapon, and his thundering speech, didn’t frighten the assembled delegates. Rather, they demonstrated, to a crowd of procrastinators, precisely what was at stake: The issue was no longer whether secession was the best response to Lincoln’s election; the question, Wise said, was whether Virginians wished to kill fellow Southerners or detested Yankees. Almost immediately after, the delegation voted 88 to 55 to recommend only disunion to the voters.
In other words, it was not only slavery that drove Virginians, many of them reluctantly, out of the Union. It was also the belief that Lincoln had no right to coerce seceding citizens or to force war on a state. We must not submit, declared one of the Virginia ex-Unionists who converted after Lincoln’s proclamation, “to a tyrannical and overbearing foe that desires to make slaves of you and me”. He spoke for many a reluctant prewar Confederate who became a passionate rebel soldier to protect his homeland (and not just black slavery) from the “invaders”.
The dual obligation to protect black slavery and white freedom swiftly impelled the other Middle South states to follow Virginia’s lead. But would the eastern Tennesseans, the western Virginians, and the Border South go along? In these quarters, Wise’s horse pistol could seem the unacceptable threat to white liberty. The Civil War had started. But the secession crisis decisions, so vital to who would win the war, had yet to run their course.