Visiting Our Past: Thomas Clingman, leading Buncombe secessionist, was all business

Thomas Lanier Clingman was a champion arguer. When he came to Buncombe from Surry County in 1836, his friends promoted him to spokesperson for their causes — mainly, Western North Carolina business interests.

In 1839, the 27-year-old went to Columbia, S.C., to represent mountain stockholders in the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad. Christopher G. Memminger — future Confederate Secretary of the Treasury and Flat Rock resident — wielded his power as South Carolina finance chair to switch the connector route from the French Broad River to Georgia.

North Carolina had defaulted on its obligations, Memminger said. To Clingman, this was not only an economic blow (another railroad project — from Wilmington to the mountains — had been torpedoed by parochial infighting a couple of years before); it was an insult.

Clingman rebutted the factual claim and then went at the issue of bad faith. "I regard South Carolina as a noble State," he said. "I trust she will remain so. But remember you may lose in an hour what it has taken 50 years to acquire. Put it to your own hearts to say how much her honor is worth."

Memminger had his way. The railroad through Georgia began running in 1842. For a series of painful reasons, Western North Carolina did not get a railroad until 1880.

When, in 1840, State Senator William Shephard, of Pasquotank, shot down Clingman's bill to build a Raleigh-to-Asheville turnpike — mainly because Shephard had been passed over for a U.S. Senate vacancy — Clingman did his parry and thrust thing.

He cited the record to deflect Shephard's claim of western favoritism (Shephard called anything west of Rocky Mount "the west"). Regarding the root problem, party disregard of Shephard, Clingman noted confusion about Shephard's Whig loyalty. "If not a fence man, precisely ... he always seemed so near it, as to be able to leap it."

In 1843, Clingman became a freshman U.S. Congressman. "Only a month after taking his seat in Congress," Thomas Jeffrey writes in his biography of the man, "Clingman won widespread notoriety by his controversial vote against the gag rule." He was alone among Southerners in opposing the repression of bills seeking to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia.

Clingman said the bill unnecessarily gave Abolitionists righteous power. If the bills were allowed to go through, they'd never pass, he asserted, because they would lead to disunion, and "there is too much good sense at the North" to allow such a consequence over "10 miles square."

A generation earlier, Congressman Felix Walker, "speaking for Buncombe," did what we now call a filibuster in support of slavery in Missouri. "Bunkum" became a catchphrase. In the 1850s, Clingman supported "filibustering" — but it had a different meaning than it does now. It referred to piracy, often condoned by governments to enable unauthorized invasions.

Clingman was a manifest destiny man. It was good business, as with the canal that the U.S. and Great Britain both wanted to build through Nicaragua. And it was good for the South, because in Latin America, an economy supported by slavery could be pursued.

Clingman made a speech to the U.S. Senate, which he had joined in 1858 as a Democrat, attacking Great Britain for its filibustering (remember India, he said), and saying that the United States will not be bound by the Bulwer-Clayton Treaty, by which the two countries had promised to act in consort.

The conclusion of Clingman's speech reads: "Let the Government, then, do its duty, and we are again free, and the path of destiny is open before us. (Here the hammer fell.)"

Rob Neufeld wrote the weekly "Visiting Our Past" column for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. This column originally was published Jan. 17, 2010.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Visiting Our Past: Clingman, Buncombe secessionist, was all business