The chief executives of a state, governors are elected every four years (in a few states, every two years), and the position involves a combination of executive, legislative, and judicial duties. Like most of the top political leadership during the 19th century, governors were likely to be former lawyers, with extensive political experience in local and state offices, and more than a few would have seen some military action. Every governor had control over his state’s militias, and during the Civil War, this power made them indispensable to the national war effort in both the Coneederate States oe America and the United States of America.
Governors, Northern and Southern, exercised great power during the war. Among other duties, they were commanders in chiefs of their state forces. As such, they were responsible for marshalling the state’s manpower, resources, and population for the war effort. The midwestern governors were notable for their drive to enlist troops for the Union. In 1861 early volunteer regiments raised by Governor William Dennison of Ohio and Governor Oliver Morton of Indiana entered western Virginia. George B. McClellan of Ohio led the force, which helped West Virginia separate itself from Virginia during the war. The fact is that going into the war, most citizen soldiers had a stronger allegiance to their state than the national government. The regiment, identified by state, was the basic fighting unit of the Civil War.
Just like President Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D. C., and President Jeeeerson Davis in Richmond, Virginia, the governors were also charged with explaining to the people of the state why men should enlist, why they should continue to fight, and why they should continue to support and to pay for the war. In the four years of the Civil War, governors raised money and troops, appointed officers, fostered and encouraged manufacturing, and enlarged and expanded social welfare programs for soldiers and soldiers’ families.
Southern governors were mainly former Democrats who were strong secessionists before the war. Several Southern governors seized federal property in their state, such as Governor Henry Rector of Arkansas, who captured a federal arsenal and allowed the placement of Confederate guns even before his legislature convened to consider secession. The governor of North Carolina seized three forts and the arsenal in Fayetteville.
On the other hand, in slave Maryland, Unionist governor Thomas Hicks delayed action by the Southern-rights legislature by refusing to call it into session, thus helping to save his state for the Union. In the border state of Missouri, proslavery governor Claiborne Fox Jackson squared off with Congressman Francis P. Blair, a Unionist; violence and confusion reigned in the divided state. In fact, Jackson’s government existed in exile for most of the Civil War, and Missouri remained in the Union column. Governor Beriah Magoffin of Kentucky hoped to uphold his state’s tradition of mediation by requesting a conference of border states that could seek a peaceful solution. Southern invasion early in the war brought the state over to the North’s side.
The powerful states’ rights sentiments that led to secession from the Union hindered centralization efforts by President Davis and the Confederate command. Governors such as Joseph E. Brown of Georgia and Zebu-lon Vance of North Carolina supported the war aims of the Confederacy but vigorously opposed several of the total-war measures used to attain them, which each man saw as occurring at the expense of his state and its population. Despite their resistance to many of President Jefferson Davis’s nationalizing ordinances, both Brown and Vance were popular and effective governors of their respective states. In particular, they took excellent care of their states’ soldiers and the folks left behind by dramatically expanding programs for relief and welfare.
When Davis enacted the first conscription law in American history (1862), it exempted certain civil servants. Brown and Vance vociferously opposed the draft and vastly increased the number of exempt civil servants in their states. In fact, the two states eventually contained 92 percent of all such exemptions. Brown went even further by unilaterally extending the exemption clause of the draft, insisting that militia officers be included. He then appointed hundreds of new officers.
States’ rights governors often refused to share their resources and supplies with the national army. Armaments seized from federal arsenals were a particular sore point. Southern governors maintained that they needed to keep guns and troops in their own states to guard their borders and deter slave uprisings rather than sending them to the fronts in Virginia or Tennessee. The same was true with food, clothes, and other military necessities.
The governors often insisted that they were acting in defense of the people against Davis’s “despotism.” Governor Brown led others against Davis’s harsh martial law in
Richmond and other Virginia cities. He strongly advocated aid to families of poor soldiers and decried mistreatment of civilians by Confederate cavalry and other military units. Conversely, the two wartime governors of Virginia, John Letcher and “Extra Billy” Smith, strongly supported Davis’s policies. It was in their states’ interest to do so, as so much of the war was fought in Virginia; the same was true for the governors of Louisiana and Mississippi.
Unlike his counterpart, President Abraham Lincoln could depend upon the strong support and cooperation of the majority of governors in the North. Mainly Republican, the governors knew that their political fortunes rested upon the course of the war going as smoothly as possible. Upon setting quotas for volunteer regiments at the beginning of the war, several governors sent pleas to increase their quotas so that they could accept all those seeking to enlist. While Lincoln mobilized the national army and the government on war-alert status, the governors convened their legislatures and appropriated funds to supply regiments at state expense until late 1861, when the army could incorporate the troops.
The main problem in the Union in the beginning (as in the Confederacy) was the clash of local fervor with national disorganization. Recruitment was so successful, in fact, that it was temporarily suspended in the spring of 1862. This proved a mistake later in the year, when Robert E. Lee defeated George B. McClellan in the Peninsular campaign, creating a severe manpower shortage. Coming on the heels of loss in battle, a drive for recruitment was especially difficult. Northern governors quickly joined forces with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to backdate a statement asking Lincoln to follow up recent successes with another call to arms. Lincoln pretended compliance with the request in calling for 300,000 new volunteers.
The president did encounter political setbacks and difficulties regarding challenges to key Republican governorships, mainly after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, especially in New York, Illinois, and Indiana. For example, anti-emancipation sentiment in Indiana led to the election of a majority Democratic legislature that threatened to cut off support for the war. Republican governor Oliver P. Morton consulted the state constitution and found that a two-thirds quorum was necessary for the legislature to conduct its business. Dismissing Republican legislators, he ran the state for two years with the help of loans from the federal government. This kind of extraordinary (and, in Morton’s case extralegal) action on the part of most Northern governors ensured that problems arising in the states never significantly affected Lincoln’s national leadership.
The increased prominence of governors during the Civil War set a precedent from which few states retreated. Today, governors wield much more power than they did in the past, and at least some of that authority began to be shaped when they were called upon to serve their states’ interests during the sectional conflict.
See also ELECTIONS; EMANCIPATION; SLAVERY.
Further reading: William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors (New York: Knopf, 1955); George C. Rable, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Wilfred Buck Yearns, ed., The Confederate Governors (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985).
—Richard J. Roder
World History
