ABSTRACT
The secession crisis was probably the last time that white southerners were open and honest in acknowledging slavery's centrality to their way of life. Without the secession of upper South states North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, the ranks of Confederate armies would be dangerously thin, unable to stop the inevitable tidal wave of Union blue that would crest over the Mason-Dixon Line. The fear of the Republican administration gaining control of the Federal government animates all three addresses. The need to defend slavery and racial prerogative fueled their condemnations of Lincoln. ‘What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession' asked Henry Benning. A world without the ‘peculiar institution' was not unfathomable to these men. They had no trouble in imagining a cataclysm of Old Testament proportions, a society convulsed in racial warfare in which white people would be subjected to the worst horrors and humiliations of subjugation.
