You could look no further than Georgia's Governor Joseph E. Brown, because that man is absolutely not what the Confederate government wanted or expected from a state governor.

Brown was Georgia's 42nd governor and began his rule in 1857. He stayed in the position through secession and the war. He left just after the conflict ended, in June 1865. Like many young prominent men in the antebellum period, he had charisma and practiced law, which led to political office. He first began in the Georgia Senate, then was a state circuit court judge, and then achieved governorship - all within about 8 years.

He absolutely wanted to see Georgia secede. Even before Lincoln's election, Brown encouraged the state legislature to redirect funds to the militia in case of coming conflict. In December 1860, after the election, he wrote a long explanation of his position. Brown said that although Lincoln was just a "mote" (a piece of dust in the wind), he represented "fanatical abolition sentiment... the principles of which are deadly hostile to the institution of Slavery, and openly at war with the fundamental doctrines of the Constitution of the United States." Brown heatedly encouraged the South to resist Northern tyranny by any means necessary. And so, once South Carolina seceded as Brown suspected it might, Georgia left as well, with him firmly in place as governor.

In February 1861, the provisional Confederate executive was elected, with the intent of having formal elections in November. The President and Vice President never changed throughout the war: Jefferson Davis and Alexander H. Stephens. And it is Davis that Brown butted heads with for the next four years.

Ultimately, Brown began a classic power struggle against the Confederacy's executive branch where he refused to comply with many orders, which in time helped weaken the war effort. He believed Davis was power-hungry and passing legislation in secret, and that he intended to strip the states of their rights just like the U.S. federal government. So he did not obey requests. In particular, in April 1862, Brown detested the Conscription Act, which drafted Southern men but did not allow much flexibility for them, militia officers, or state officials. Brown considered them state troops, not the Confederacy's, and he wanted them to be able to choose their own company, officers, etc. Instead, the Confederacy was now deciding those things, and Brown was furious at the intervention. He continued to refuse any Georgia aid to the conscription process and even stated that if an enrollment/recruitment man (sent by the executive) attempted to conscript a state officer, then he would arrested. Although Davis and Brown allowed the situation to go fairly public by publishing segments of their correspondence about the issue, Brown never thought he was in the wrong and worked to defy Davis on many fronts, including the impressments of goods and slave laborers, the seizure of one of Georgia's main railroads (the Western and Atlantic Railroad), and the Confederacy's tax policies.

One historian has said that Brown was the "the first and most persistent critic" of Confederate centralized military and civil power. Experts often portray Brown as a evident reason that the Confederacy lost the war - because he did not cooperate with Davis and instead challenged him. Their correspondence (now available to us all) was sometimes even revealed Brown's disrespect and perhaps contempt for Davis and his office - so we know this wasn't a public show of strength but rather a private power struggle. Other governors followed Brown's lead and, towards the end of the war, they too began to refuse requests, ultimately bringing the Confederacy further to his knees.

Two Confederate governors were unusually powerful - or at least, active on the home front and forceful in asserting themselves against the central government. One was Joseph E. Brown of Georgia, and the second was Zebulon Baird Vance of North Carolina.

Brown, born in 1821, was a mountaineer from North Georgia, the son of a poor farmer, and a self-made man in much the same vein as Abraham Lincoln. After securing a limited education, he taught school for a time, and became a lawyer by 1847. A former whig, he became a power in Democratic politics, backed by a constituency of poor whites, especially from his North Georgia homeland. After terms as a state circuit court judge, he became governor in 1857, and led Georgia out of the Union.

His reasons for doing this were largely rooted in a desire to preserve slavery and white supremacy. His writings make this very clear, especially his open letter to the people of Georgia penned on 7 December 1860. But there are two caveats to this. First, as will be shown conclusively later in this post, Brown was an earnest and committed defender of his notion of states’ rights. Second, as noted above, Brown's constituency was largely the poor and non slaveholders of the uplands, and his defense of slavery and white supremacy was made, he said, on their behalf, and in populist terms. Besides advocating the constitutionality of slavery and the abstract rights of slave owners not to be arbitrarily deprived of property, he made three pragmatic arguments. One, that in order to abolish slavery, compensation would have to be made to the slave owners, and the burden of this massive tax would rest most heavily on the poor white farmers, as one could hardly tax the slave owners to pay their own reimbursement. Two, that having been set free, the slaves would have nowhere to go, as the northern states would not permit such an influx (indeed, some in the midwest had made laws prohibiting black immigration), and to colonize 4.5 million people to Africa or Central America would be both impractical and ruinously expensive. Three, having nowhere to go, blacks remaining in the south would hire out their labor at very low wages, ruining poor whites and enriching their former masters. He follows this up with a great deal of racist and white supremacist invective, but his message is clear: with slavery gone, the poor whites would be degraded, and thus his stark animosity to abolition.

Vance was also a mountaineer, hailing from Buncombe County, North Carolina. His father was a successful farmer and fairly large-scale slave owner, at least by mountain standards, having possession of two families of slaves, who, with their children, may have numbered as many as 18 at one time. But it should be kept in mind that this was a working mountain farm, not a low country plantation, and the Vances were not absentee owners reliant on overseers to deal with their chattels. Thus we may say, perhaps, that the distance between master and slave was not so great. In any case, the Vances seem to have been fairly benevolent, at least as much so as the owners of human beings can be said to have been benevolent, in that they kept their slaves' families together, and their personal letters reveal a fair degree of affection for them.

Vance's father died when he was fourteen, and the boy was forced to quit his schooling. He came home and, it seems, managed the farm for the intervening years, before determining to attend to law school at age 21. He secured a loan, apparently lacking the ready cash to pay the tuition at the University of North Carolina, and after a year's attendance, returned to Buncombe County, where he went into practice and began a burgeoning political career.

Vance's political career took off surprisingly rapidly, especially considering he was a Whig, a party then in very serious decline and soon to be subsumed by the Republicans. He was county solicitor for Buncombe County less than a year after beginning his practice, and was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1858, at the tender age of 28. This is perhaps not as strange as it might seem. Vance was an excellent speaker, and knew his constituency. His speeches were three-part: "discussion of pertinent issues, partisan attacks on his opponents, and amusing stories and anecdotes." We may see elements of Abraham Lincoln's own oratory reflected in this deliberately home-spun eloquence.

If you've made it thus far, you may be thinking that perhaps Vance and Brown were cut of the same cloth. This illusion is shattered by the test of 1860. In that tumultuous election season, Vance proved his moderate bona fides, campaigning strenuously for John Bell of Tennessee, the so-called "Union Party" candidate, who advocated unionism in exchange for compromise on the issue of slavery. Even after the election of Lincoln, and the secession of the cotton states, Zeb continued to campaign vigorously, throughout the state, for the preservation of the Union. He was no abolitionist, but felt that if anything, secession was more likely to result in the destruction of slavery and the southern economy than remaining loyal members of the Union. The firing on Fort Sumter cut the ground out from under his feet.

For myself, I will say that I was canvassing for the Union with all my strength; I was addressing a large and excited crowd, large numbers of whom were armed, and literally had my arms extended upward in pleading for peace and the Union of our Fathers, when the telegraphic news was announced of the firing on Sumter and [the] President's call for seventy-five thousand volunteers. When my hand came down from that impassioned gesticulation, it fell slowly and sadly by the side of a Secessionist." (Zeb Vance by Gordon B. McKinney, p. 76)

After a brief but fairly distinguished term as the colonel of a North Carolina infantry regiment, Zebulon Vance was elected governor in 1862, and joined Joseph E. Brown as one of the two foremost wartime governors in the Confederacy - indeed, arguably in United States history.

Brown was a Georgian, and viewed his sole and only responsibility to be to the people of that state. That which strengthened and protected Georgia, he embraced, even if it weakened the Confederacy as a whole. He was also a tireless defender of his idea of constitutional rights and limited government. This manifested itself in some positive actions - Brown set up a welfare system for the families of soldiers, and did a great deal to build up Georgia’s military and industrial strength. But it also resulted in a huge amount of political infighting. Thus we see Brown coming into early conflict with Jefferson Davis; indeed, a rancor had developed between the two within the first year of the war. Davis saw, almost certainly correctly, that if the Confederacy were to survive, it was necessary that the nation be put above any entity. If Virginia or Tennessee were threatened, and Georgia or Alabama not, he would draw troops and resources from those states to shore up the buckling defenses. Brown, by contrast, sought to keep as many Georgia troops as possible at home, under state control.

The situation was massively inflamed by the Confederate government‘s, and by extension, Jefferson Davis‘s, most controversial action, the conscription act of 1862. The new commander of the Confederacy’s premier field army, Robert E. Lee, all but begged for it. His ranks were thinned by a summer of hard fighting: on the James Peninsula below Richmond; at Cedar Mountain, Second Manassas, and Chantilly in northern Virginia; and, lastly and most bloodily, at Antietam in Maryland. He saw no way to make good his losses without the threat of conscription to drive halfhearted men to volunteer (and indeed, conscripts made up a small minority of Confederate soldiers, certainly less than 1/5). Davis saw no reasonable path other than to propose it to congress with his blessing.

Brown viewed this as tyranny of the basest kind. He vehemently protested it in private and in public, saying that if he had to be ruled by a tyrant, he would prefer it to be a northern one. But he went beyond this. He actively sought to sabotage it by appointing men to state offices. The law allowed that certain individuals - state officials, officers in the Home Guard, apothecaries, teachers, etc. Brown exploited this to the hilt, and it became a joke throughout the Confederacy that a Georgia Home Guard regiment had dozens of officers commanding one hapless private. His reasoning for doing this was that he wished to preserve Georgia’s capacity for self-defense, but if this was his reasoning, it seems to have backfired, for after the defeat of the Confederate Army of Tennessee at Atlanta, the Georgia Home Guard could do nothing to stop, or even seriously delay, Sherman’s advancing columns.