Other thoughts on a citizen’s loyalty.

At this stage of maturity the sections of the United States were predominately rural and the inhabitants largely yeoman farmers with limited access to areas outside the vision of their fence lines. Thus, it was natural for people to align themselves with those politicians and authorities most familiar to them and to swear allegiance to their state government over that of the far distance central government in Washington.

Southerners knew little beyond their own fence lines.

“’State sovereignty’ was hardly a Southern concept. New England politicians had discussed leaving the Union during the War of 1812-a time when South Carolina’s leaders had been fervently nationalistic. Most states in fact, had at one time or another, toyed with the notion. Virtually all of America’s politicians, North and South, assumed that a citizen owned his state a greater loyalty than he owed to the federal government. Except for a postal service, most people had little connection to the national government; important things like education and roads and crime were handled locally.”
(Allegiance - Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War, David Detzer, Harcourt, Inc., Uncorrected Proof, 2001, p. 13)

The key to the whole question now lay in the people’s concept of their dual loyalties to the state and to the Federal Union. Though they professed love and loyalty for the Union, they lived in a time when the states were not considered mere appendages of the central government, but, conversely, were regarded as the creators of the central government. The government at Washington was far away and it did not greatly manifest its power. The state was close at hand, readily identifiable, and bound to the people in countless homey and everyday ways. When the last wrench occurred, when the ultimate choice was demanded, the state, and not the Union, held the loyalty of the people. “We do not think there can be any doubt as to the duty of patriots at this crisis--it is to follow the destiny of the State and abide its fate, be it for weal or be it for woe. We are . . . Mississippian[s]. Out State has spoken. It has taken its stand . . . It has declared its independence . . . We did not approve it. But it is not for any citizen of the State, to set . . . himself against the ACT of the State . . . It is enough for us to know that Mississippi, our State, our government has taken its position. We stand ready to defend her rights and to share her fate.”
[Vicksburg Weekly Whig, Jan. 16, 1861, Vicksburg, A People at War, 1860-1865, Peter F. Walker, University of
North Carolina Press, 1960, pp. 31-33]