Date
2-29-2024
Department
College of Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)
Chair
John Devanny
Keywords
Herschel Johnson, Cooperationist, Secession, States Rights
Disciplines
History
Recommended Citation
Brown, William Coleman, "Herschel V. Johnson: The States Rights Unionist" (2024). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 5236.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/5236
Abstract
This research explores the political career of Herschel Vespasian Johnson of Georgia. He was a Southern man who believed in the Jeffersonian tradition of limited government and states’ rights. He loved his country and was against his home state, Georgia, seceding from the Union because he believed secession would destroy the South. As a result, Johnson ruined his reputation, not because he opposed secession, but because he sacrificed himself by attaching his name to Stephen Douglas in 1860 in a desperate attempt to unite the nation. Even though Johnson fought to keep the Union together for most of his political career, he did not believe secession was unconstitutional. He would later support the Confederacy after he failed to stop secession. This made him a Cooperationist who wanted to preserve the Union. Still, he did so with the realization that the South was a political minority section that needed constitutional assurances from the Federal Government. His story brings complexity to the modern understanding of the secession movement. The Southern states did not leave the Union united together in a common cause but rather through individual and complex political processes. Usually, three factional groups emerged in response to secession: those that supported it, those that opposed it, and those that opposed it in practicality but supported it in principle. Johnson falls into the ladder of these categories. A particular emphasis will be placed on national and state issues to explain how Georgia seceded from the Union. Secession was never assured to prevail as many Southerners, such as Johnson, wanted to maintain the Union through cooperation. His story is a tale of struggle, defeat, perception of how secession transpired, and how the war changed the nation.
