SOUTHERN SLAVE ECONOMY

SOUTHERN SLAVE ECONOMY

The past few chapters we spent a good deal of time looking at the growth of America from a northern perspective, the effects of industry and commerce on changing society, compounded by expansion across the continent.  We’ve addressed southern economy primarily from the political vantage and northern reactions.  However, it is extremely important that you understand the development of the South from the unique southern mentality that nurtured the “peculiar institution” of slavery.  Your textbook points out that by the start of the Civil War in 1860, 90% of the 4 million slaves in the South worked on plantations and farms, and that they made up half of the total population in the lower south, where the most cotton was produced.  This amounted to 90% of all the cotton produced anywhere in the country.  With its warm climate, wet springs and summers, and relatively dry autumns, the Lower South was especially suited to the cultivation of cotton.  It required neither expensive irrigation canals nor costly machinery.  It could be grown profitably on any scale.  A cotton farmer did not even need to own a gin; commercial gins were available.  And although cotton cultivation on a modest level did not require slaves, large-scale cotton growing and slavery seemed to grow together.  As the southern slave population practically doubled between 1810 and 1830, so did the cotton industry. Owning slaves made it possible to harvest vast tracts of cotton speedily — this was crucial when sudden rainstorms at harvest time could devastate the cotton crop.

When people talk about the lower South, they’re referring to the bottom seven states in the Union — South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas.  Many parts of the upper South were already moving away from the necessity of slave labor, because they were forced to become more diversified in their agriculture.  Centuries of overuse of the land for tobacco and cotton had exhausted its fertility.  The farm families in these states could either leave the land and move west, or stay and diversify their production.  Thus, these older states — Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee — shifted to growing grains like corn and wheat.  Because these crops required less labor than tobacco, slave owners began to sell some of their slaves.  Remember, that the international slave trade ended in 1808, persuant to the agreement when the Constitution was first ratified.  As the lower South, made up of newer territories with rich, fertile land for cotton farming, created a greater demand for slave labor, the value of slaves increased considerably.  Slave owners in the upper South who no longer needed their slaves could sell them further South at a handsome profit.  In 1844, a prime field hand sold for $600.  When the cotton boom started in 1849, it raised the price of slaves by 1860 to $1,800.  Between 1790 and 1860, perhaps a million or more slaves were herded across state lines in the Old South.

Despite the changing agricultural economy that reduced the need for slaves in the upper South, they still identified with the lower southern states, because many of them had done the same thing themselves before their land played out.  Now, there was a huge business in interstate slave trade.  In fact, Virginia considered itself a “negro raising state” for other states, because that state produced enough surplus slaves to sell 6,000 a year to states further south.  In addition, all white southerners benefitted from the 3/5s clause of the Constitution, which enabled them to count slaves as a basis for congressional representation.  There was no distinction between upper and lower South with respect to justifying slavery.    And all southerners felt the sting of abolitionist criticism against slavery.  So, both areas of the South essentially relied on slaves — the upper South as slave traders, and the lower South for cotton production.

The economic growth and migration southwestward changed the geographic distribution of slaves.  There are a pair of maps in your text that reflect the spread of slave labor.  Although most slaves worked on plantations and medium-sized farms, they could be found in all segments of the southern economy.  In 1850, approximately 75% of all slaves were used for agricultural labor.  Of the remaining 1/4, about 15% were domestic servants and the rest (about 300,000) were put to work in other labors.  Some were lumberjacks and turpentine producers in Carolina and Georgia forests; some were made to mine for gold, coal and salt in Virginia and Kentucky; others stoked the boilers and worked as deckhands on Mississippi River steamships.  There were slaves who worked on road crews and railroad construction gangs in Georgia and Louisiana; some were in cotton mills in Alabama; and still others were tobacco and iron workers in factories in Virginia.

Nevertheless, there was a strong dependence on northern markets for manufactured goods that were not being produced in the South.  We’ve talked about this one-sided cash crop economy that made it so profitable to southerners that they could not even consider expending funds or land to establish manufacturing plants in the south.  At a time when the North was rapidly urbanizing, the South remained predominantly rural.  The South accounted for only 10% of the nation’s manufacturing.  And though some southerners pleaded for industrialization to reduce the South’s dependency on the North, it did little to change the general picture.  In the southern mind, industrialization might disrupt the paternalistic plantation way of managing slaves.  Slaves who worked in factories could not be disciplined so easily, and if they made money from working overtime, they might learn to take care of themselves and eliminate what many white slave owners considered a necessary dependence upon their white masters.  Besides, any effort to build a manufacturing site in the South would require considerable capital.  Planters would have to sell slaves to raise the funds, and they had little incentive to do that.  As long as southern cotton farmers believed in the profitability of their crop, they could not be convinced to change what they were already successful at.

Your textbook also mentions the aspect of education in the South.  The fact that few whites received formal educations, and blacks were prohibited from learning to read or write, kept the majority of the southern population in a backward mentality.  Southerners flatly rejected the idea of compulsory education, and they were reluctant to tax property to support education.  The idea of educating slaves in any kind of school became increasingly abhorrent to southern legislatures; indeed, lawmakers made it a crime even to teach slaves to read.  The middle class and poor whites of the South remained unconvinced of the need for public education as well.  They were agricultural, self-sufficient and independent, and had little need to conduct complex commercial transactions or have to deal with urban people.  Limited education tends also to limit one’s vision — the ability to see more than one alternative to the future.  And in the South, they restricted themselves to a tunnel vision that offered only one route — the single-cash crop produced by slaves.  When you combine that circumstance with the long-cherished Code of  Dueling in the South, where one challenges another to fight to heal an insult, it will make for a volatile environment that eventually puts the South on the path to war.  Why did they need an educated white work force, when they already had a black one that they were determined to keep illiterate in order to keep ideas about freedom out of their heads?

SOUTHERN WHITE SOCIETY

There were three main groups in the South’s social structure — the planters, the middle-level slaveholders and the yeomen or family farmers.

Historians usually classify as planters those who owned twenty or more slaves.  Your textbook points out that they made up about 12% of the slaveholding population and only 4% of the total population in the South.  We have a strongly romanticized view of the Southern planter from novels and motion pictures like Gone With the Wind.  And while the grand southern mansion was a reality to a very few planters, it was not the typical story.  The wealth of most planters consisted primarily in the value of their slaves rather than in such finery as expensive furniture and silver plate.  Planters could convert their wealth into cash for purchasing luxuries only by selling slaves.  But then, a planter who sold his slaves ceased to be a planter and relinquished his prestigious social status.  Therefore, most planters preferred to hang on to their slaveholding operation, even if it meant scrimping on their lifestyles.  Because they were constantly concerned with profits, they were always searching for more and better land, organized their slaves into specialized work gangs for maximum efficiency and struggled to make their plantations self-sufficient in food.  With the rise and fall of cotton prices, planters incurred enormous debt, and this fate spurred them on to greater determination for profits.  It was an unrelenting circle that revolved around the quantity of slaves that could produce the most cotton.

For plantation women, it was an isolated existence.  They were surrounded by slaves, in a self-sufficient community that offered little companionship with other white women.  Indeed, in the plantation economy, wives had even less leisure than their husbands.  Aside from raising their own children, plantation mistresses supervised house slaves, made carpets and clothes, looked after outlying buildings like smokehouses and dairies, and planted garden fruits and vegetables.  They were responsible for nursing all of the sick, black and white, on the plantation.  On many plantations, they handled the distribution of food stores, as well as the account books in the absence of their husbands.  Many southern women actually opposed slavery because they were oppressed, too, and they saw no benefit for themselves through the system.  Perhaps their greatest sorrow was the presence of the mulatto children, who stood as daily reminders of their husbands’ infidelity.  Insisting on sexual purity for white women, southern men followed a looser standard for themselves.

In 1860, 88% of all slaveholders owned fewer than 20 slaves, and most of these possessed fewer than 10 slaves.  But they often aspired to planter status, and thus slaveholding was the best means to earning enough profit to move them up the social scale.  The typical middle-level slaveholder worked a small family farm of about 100 acres with 8 or 9 slaves, perhaps members of the same family.  They defended the institution of slavery as fiercely as the planter class because it gave them a sense of superiority over at least one group, and a sense of kinship with upperclass white planters.

75% of southern whites owned no slaves at all.  Many were Scots-Irish and lived in the foothills of the mountains, generally working poorer land than the large planters.  They did not need to be near commercial centers because they were largely self-sufficient.  In many ways the yeoman farmers were the solid backbone of the South.  While the planters looked for greater profit, the yeoman farmer sought only a way of life that would allow him to remain independent.   It’s almost inconceivable to realize that only ¼ of whites in the south owned slaves, and yet they were all ready to defend it. 

Your textbook points out that the reason most yeoman farmers supported southern slavery was because of their fear of blacks.  They did not want to be on an equal standing with blacks; they worried that they might have to compete with them for land or jobs; and, like the middle-level slaveholders, they enjoyed the status of being superior to slaves.  One of them, an Alabama farmer, was asked by a northern visitor what he thought about emancipating the slaves, and he replied:

Well, I’ll tell you what I think on it; I’d like it if we could get rid of ’em to you’all.  I  wouldn’t like to hev ’em freed, if they was gwine to hang ’round [here]. . . . It wouldn’t do no good to free ’em, and let ’em hang ’round, because they is so monstrous lazy; if they hadn’t got nobody to take keer on ’em, you see, they wouldn’t do nothin’ but juss nat’rally laze ’round, and steal, and pilfer, and no man couldn’t live, you see, war they was.  And this ere’s the other [thing].  Now suppose they was free, you see they’d all think themselves just as good as we, of course they would, if they was free.  Now, just suppose you had a family of children, how would you like to hev a niggar steppin’ up to your darter?  Of course you wouldn’t, and that’s the reason I wouldn’t like to hev ’em free; but I tell you, I don’t think it’s right to hev ’em slaves so; that’s the fac — taant right to keep ’em as they is.

So there were moral misgivings among white southerners themselves.  Defenders of the institution declared that they “must satisfy them that slavery is itself right, that it is not a sin against God.”  Time and again they insisted that the slavemaster was “enlightened,” “humane,” and “Christian,” and that the slave was “submissive,” “docile,” “happy,” “conscious of his own inferiority and proud of being owned & governed by a superior.”  But many masters had doubts about the morality of their peculiar institution.  One white Virginian confessed:  “This, sir, is a Christian community.  Southerners read in their Bibles, `Do unto all men as you would have them do unto you’; and this golden rule and slavery are hard to reconcile.”

Nevertheless, southerners claimed a variety of justifications for slavery.  The biblical justification was based on the curse of Canaan, the son of Ham, who was condemned to eternal servitude.  Various places in the Old and New Testament admonished servants to obey their masters; so, slavery had existed throughout all of history.  Religious stories such as these were also used as sermons in the churches that some white masters forced their slaves to attend.  The constitutional justification for slavery was, of course, the 3/5s clause of the Constitution.  It identified slaves as 3/5s of a person for purposes of representation; it protected overseas slave trade for 20 years; and it mandated the return of runaway slaves.  The scientific justification was that blacks were an inherently inferior race, “deficient in reason, judgment and forecast.”  If you recall, this was the reasoning of early slave traders who first brought Africans to the colonies.  Masters tried to brainwash their slaves into believing they were racially inferior and racially suited for bondage.  Kept illiterate and ignorant, they were told they were incapable of caring for themselves.  Then there was the sociological justification that white slave masters provided a paternalistic guidance for their slaves, protected them as children unable to cope in the civilized adult world.  To many white southerners, slaves were childlike, irresponsible, lazy, affectionate and happy.  “Slaves never become men or women,” a traveler in the South commented.  Slavemasters frequently referred to adult blacks as “boys” and “girls.”

In reality, of course, the entire Western world was ideologically opposed to southern slavery.  They were holding what Thomas Jefferson had called the “wolf by the ears,” because they lived in constant dread of slave insurrection.  Therefore masters felt compelled to justify their peculiar institution as a “positive good.”  If they could show that their slaves were happy children, satisfied with their condition, then perhaps they could defend themselves against their moral critics.

SOUTHERN SLAVE SOCIETY

Slaves were allowed to form family units despite the law against it, because white masters felt it increased stability among black slaves.  Many couples managed to have affectionate, lasting relationships.  The slave family provided a support system for each other and, as it grew, helped slaves to make sense out of their lives.  However, they often had to witness punishments made to members of their family.  And the greatest fear was the separation of families, when slave owners chose to sell off slaves for reasons of financial need or profit.  Even though white masters permitted marriage among their slaves, there was no legal protection for slave families and black women in particular often had to see their children sold off.  White masters dissolved 1/3 of all slave families.  Your textbook mentions that slave families formed kinship networks, which provided a sense of unity to broken families as well as those who managed to stay together.  These kinship networks created the framework by which African traditions were passed down from one generation to the next, despite the odds against such continuity.

Slaves worked 10-14 hour days, usually in the fields or in the Big House.  In addition to field hands and house servants, slaves did most of the artisan work, became skilled carpenters, blacksmiths, stonemasons, weavers, mechanics and millers.  On most plantations there was a work system that provided an incentive for slaves who worked harder to complete their duties and they finish early.  However, many slaves used the system for their own purposes in quiet resistance to their masters.  Some would break tools or burn crops to slow the work.  Others might steal or destroy animals, self-inflict injuries to free themselves from field work entirely.  Some even poisoned their masters.  More active forms of slave resistance included running away, perhaps only for a few days, long enough to escape a whipping or bargain for better treatment.  A few slaves persuaded their masters to free them in their wills and some even purchased their own freedom by hiring out to do extra work at night.

Armed revolt was rare because of the severity and intensity of white response.  Nate Turner’s Rebellion was the worst incident of slave revolt.  It occurred in Virginia in 1831.  Turner was an exception to the slave world, much like Frederick Douglass.  He learned to read and write early.  Many people thought he was too intelligent to be raised as a slave.  He became interested in religion and studied the bible closely.  After a time he began to have religious fantasies and was ultimately recognized as a Baptist preacher, though he was never ordained.  This gave Turner a level of self-esteem and independence, because he ranged Southampton County in Virginia performing slave religious services.  He married a slave on his master’s plantation, but at the master’s death, they were each sold to different owners, adding painful separation of his family to his burden of slave life.  And as he became more embittered, his fantasies became more intense.  When a later master died, the 9-year-old son became his master, which further humiliated his status as a slave.  Ultimately, he had a vision that led him to start the rebellion.  Your textbook mentions that 60 whites were massacred on the Turner rampage that lasted several days.  It does not mention that more than 120 innocent slaves were killed in retaliation.  Out of panic, many parts of the South had mobilized their militias, chasing down imaginary insurgents and executing innocent blacks.  The slave codes were revised in many southern states to restrict blacks so stringently that they could never mount another revolt.  They all but eliminated slave schools, slave religious meetings and slave preachers.  Slave discipline became tighter on every plantation.

They curtailed the rights of free blacks, as well.  Free blacks represented a constant reminder of freedom to slaves and they feared reenslavement themselves.  Most were poor, laboring as farmhands and day laborers.  In the cities, their conditions were even poorer, working in factories.  They were barred from many trades.  They could not vote, bear arms, buy liquor, assemble, speak in public, form societies, or testify against whites in court.

This reaction to Turner’s Rebellion caused the South to become a closed, martial society determined more than ever to preserve its slave-based civilization at whatever cost.  They clung to those justifications for slavery that were developed by southern planters and politicians.

However, for most blacks in both North and South, Nat Turner came to symbolize terror and violent retribution, a hero who broke his chains and murdered white people because slavery had murdered blacks.

Your textbook offers an excellent discussion of slave religion as it evolved on the southern plantation.  It said that for slaves, religion helped them to endure bondage and hold on to a sense of inner worth.  It gave them a release from hardship and suffering.  Their religious worship often included ceremonial dances, which allowed them to display a freedom of spirit, and they developed spiritual songs, which gave them an outlet for their imprisonment, a chance to create and control a world of their own.  They often told of a chosen people held captive in bondage that would some day be delivered.  The songs expressed the sadness of broken families and the burdens of work.  Perhaps you’ve heard the words to some of their spirituals:

“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long, long way from home.”

and, “We need not always weep and mourn, Let my people go; and wear these slavery chains forlorn, let my people go.  Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt’s land.  Tell ole Pharoah, Let my people go.”

Or what about, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.”

Frederick Douglass wrote that the “songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart.”  But they also expressed joy, triumph and deliverance.  Sometimes slaves gathered simply for music, to play fiddles, drums and other instruments fashioned by local artists to imitate West African models.  Some musicians were so talented that whites invited them to perform at ceremonies and parties.  But most played for the slave community, for weddings, funerals, holiday celebrations, all occasions for communal gathering.  I may have mentioned that my area of research is America’s folk dance history.  Well, many black musicians were also square dance callers for both their own celebrations, as well as parties in the Big House for the white planters.

The role of music in births, weddings, funerals, and other milestones of family life suggests that the family was central to life in the slave quarters.  As the slaves gathered together at the end of the working day, parents passed on to their children the family story, language patterns and words, recipes, folktales, religious and musical traditions.  In this way they preserved cultural tradition and enhanced the identity and self-esteem of parents and children alike.

Although slave owners had an interest in keeping their slaves healthy by providing adequate care, slaves led sickly lives.  Home was a crude, one-room log cabin with a dirt floor; some such houses were well made, but most were full of cracks and holes.  Mosquitoes came in at night, making sleep difficult in the summer months.

Frederick Douglass wrote of his experience:  “There were no beds given the slaves, unless one coarse blanket be considered such, and none but the men and women had these. . . [but] they found less difficulty from the want of beds, than from the want of time to sleep; for when their day’s work in the field is done, the most of them having their washing, mending, and cooking to do, and having few or none of the ordinary facilities for doing either of these, very many of their sleeping hours are consumed in preparing for the field the coming day; . . . and when this is done, . . . drop down side by side on one common bed . . . and here they sleep till they are summoned to the field by the driver’s horn.”

Another slave described the routine of a workday:  “The hands are required to be in the cotton field as soon as it is light in the morning, and, with the exception of ten or fifteen minutes, which is given to them at noon to swallow their allowance of cold bacon, they are not permitted to be a moment idle until it is too dark to see, and when the moon is full, they often times labor till the middle of the night.”

To manage this enslaved labor force, masters used various methods of discipline and control.  They sometimes used kindness.  “Now I contend that the surest and best method of managing negroes, is to love them,” a Georgia planter explained.  “We know . . . that if we love our horse, we will treat him well, and if we treat him well, he will become gentle, docile and obedient . . . and if this treatment has this effect upon all the animal creation . . . why will it not have the same effect upon slaves?”  But masters also believed that strict discipline was essential and that power had to be based on fear.  A South Carolina Senator James Hammond owned more than 300 slaves, and he fully understood the need for absolute submission of a slave to his master.  “We have to rely more and more on the power of fear.  We are determined to continue [the] masters.”

Studies on the adequacy of slave diet disagree, some showing that the food most slaves ate was deficient in calories and vitamins, others claiming that slaves had more energy than most free whites in the general population and therefore must have had adequate nutrition.  However, most slaves rarely enjoyed fresh meat, dairy products, fruits or vegetables.  To make up for these deficiencies, they sometimes stole from the master’s kitchen, gardens or barnyard.  Inadequate diet led some slaves to become dirt eaters, which gave them worms, swollen skin, puffy eyelids and pale palms.  Others suffered from skin disorders, cracked lips and sore eyes.  Many came down with diseases indicative of vitamin deficiency, such as rickets, beri-beri and scurvy.

The relatively frequent incidence of whippings and other physical punishments aggravated the poor physical condition of the slaves.  The slave William Wells Brown reported that on his plantation the whip was used “very frequently and freely” for inadequate or uncompleted work, stealing, running away and even insolence and lying.  Whippings ranged from 10 to 100 strokes of the lash.  Former slaves describe a good owner as one who did not “whip too much” and a bad owner as one who “whipped till he’d bloodied you and blistered you.”  Other forms of punishment included isolation and confinement in stocks and jails during leisure hours, or slaves might be put in chains, muzzles, have their lash wounds salted, suffer branding, burning, or even castration.  Nothing testifies better to the physical brutality of slavery than the advertisements for runaways that slaveholders printed in newspapers.  In searching for the best way to describe the physical characteristics of a missing slave, slave owners revealed their own cruelty.  One Mississippi slave was reported to have “large raised scars in the small of his back and on his abdomen nearly as large as a person’s finger.”  Another missing slave woman from Georgia was described as “considerably marked by the whip.”  Slaves who were branded were even easier to identify.  One advertisement read that the slave was “burnt with a hot iron on the left side of her face.”

FREE BLACKS IN SOCIETY

Your textbook points out that while there were 4 million blacks bound in slavery in America, there were at least a half million who were not.  More than half of the free blacks lived in the South (as much as 85% in 1860 were in the Upper South).  1/3 of southern free blacks lived in cities such as Baltimore, Richmond, Charleston and New Orleans.  Because it took a long time to buy their freedom, they tended to be older, more literate and more skilled than other blacks.  A great many were light-skinned women.  By 1860, over 40% of free blacks were mulattoes, an indication of preferential treatment that may have been bestowed by white slaveowners who had become kin to them as a result of their indiscretions.

I already mentioned that free blacks were barred from many trades.  They could not vote, bear arms, assemble, speak in public.  But however threatening free blacks were to southern white society, whites were even more afraid of contact between free blacks and slaves.  Black ghettos were created, partly because most blacks preferred to live together, and partly because whites would not allow the intermingling.  And, as in the slave quarters of the plantation, blacks in cities developed a strong sense of identity and community life.  Free blacks and slaves often worked together in factories and fields, attended the same churches and places of entertainment, and sometimes even married.

In part because free blacks were becoming more of a “people,” they faced a crisis of extinction in the 1850s.  Growing propserity and the worsening conflict between North and South over slavery in the territories caused many white southerners to be even more concerned than usual with the presence of free blacks in their midst.  North Carolina whites complained in 1852 that free blacks were “a perfect nuisance” because they attempted to equalize themselves with the white population.  Pressures increased in the late 1850s either to deport the free blacks or to enslave them.  But those concerns were preempted by the coming of civil war.

THE GROWING DISCONTENT

In this chapter we’ll be concerned most specifically with a 15-year period of time from 1846 to 1861.  I’ve outlined a time line that will guide us through the problems and disagreements that brought us to civil war.  Keep track of these events, for they are each significant in helping you understand the ultimate cause.

We have to begin with the new territories acquired from Mexico.  Of course, the territorial agreements were not even accomplished until the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848.  But the Congress was already exploring ways to deal with slavery in the new territories long before they became part of the United States.  Your textbook points out that our leaders looked to the Constitution for an answer, but there was no guidance with respect to new states admitted to the Union.

While Texas most definitely wanted to enter the Union as a slave state, California and New Mexico were split on the issue.  The land itself in New Mexico was too dry for cotton farming, and was not attractive to slaveholders who sought profitable new land.  Because it was growing slowly in population, the issue of whether it became a slave or free state was still a long way off.  If Texas’ boundary with New Mexico could be moved further westward, it would insure a larger slaveholding population in Texas.  As far as California was concerned, gold was discovered there in 1848.  The result was that the population in the territory soared to 100,000 almost overnight.  Zachary Taylor was President by then, and he thought that if he pulled California in as a state immediately he might avoid the political battle over whether it should be slave or free.  Once it became a state, he thought it could decide for itself whether it would become slave or free.  But that rationale wouldn’t wash with the southern politicians.  They threatened to secede from the Union if California was brought in as a free state.

Back in 1846, Congressman David Wilmot proposed to attach a rider to the appropriations bill that would pay for the Mexican War.  He wanted it declared that no territories acquired from Mexico could permit slavery or involuntary servitude from its citizens.  He suggested this Proviso as a means of slowing down the increase of slave states in the Union.  Wilmot was from Pennsylvania.  Like many Northerners, he was abolitionist in his thinking, and while he supported President Polk in his expansionist ideas for expanding the boundaries of the United States, he did not think it should be at a cost of increasing the number of slave states in the Union.  With northerners predominating in the House of Representatives, the Wilmot Proviso had no trouble passing the House.  However, Southerners in the Senate successfully stopped it from passing in the Senate, so the Proviso was defeated.  But the message it sent to Southerners increased their awareness that northerners were determined to thwart the growth of slavery in new territories.

In addition to Mexican territorial issues, there were ongoing problems with the Fugitive Slave Law.  Few northerners were abiding by the law that required them to return escaped slaves to their owners in the south.  Their abolitionist-minded thinking forced them to recognize personal liberties over slaveholders’ rights.  So Southerners were pushing for stronger laws for apprehending and returning escaped slaves.  At the same time, Northerners had gotten to the point where they could no longer sanction the slave trade in the nation’s capital.  Remember that Washington, D.C. was within the state of Maryland, part of the South, and therefore, slavery was still permitted there.  Even though it was in the upper South and, for the most part, did not utilize slaves to the extent they were used in the lower South, they were selling their slaves further South, just like in other states of the upper South.  We talked about this profitable new enterprise devised by those states.  So Northerners were demanding an end to the slave trade in the District of Columbia.

So here we are at the end of the 1840s, and Americans are dealing with what some have called the five “bleeding wounds” of the Union:

1. Settlers in New Mexico and California were split on the issue of slave or free status.

2. The dispute over Texas’ exact boundary with New Mexico remained unsettled.

3. Southerners threatened to secede if California was brought into the Union as a free state.

4. The Fugitive Slave Law was being undermined in the northern states and southern states wanted stronger enforcement.

5. Northerners wanted to end slave trade in the District of Columbia.

A step toward treating these wounds was taken by Henry Clay — the great compromiser (Missouri Compromise in 1820).  His plan, the Compromise of 1850, brought peace in Congress for almost four years.  The solution to the five bleeding wounds was as follows:

1. California would be admitted into the Union as a free state.

2. New Mexico and the new territory of Utah would be organized as territories and the issue of slavery would be settled by popular sovereignty — that is, the people in the territory could vote on their status one way or the other, regardless of the 36’30” parallel.

3. Texas would relinquish claim to part of New Mexico territory in exchange for the national government assuming $10 million of it remaining debt after the war.

4. A new Fugitive Slave Act would place the full power of the national government behind the apprehension of runaway slaves.

5. Slave trade was abolished in Washington, D.C.

In the end, the North came out ahead in the deal.  We have mentioned before the fact that the issue of slavery was forever tied to cotton plantations.  And if a farmer did not grow cotton, he didn’t have slaves.  As time would show, the citizens of New Mexico, Utah and California did not become cotton farmers, and their enthusiasm for becoming slave states in the Union never materialized.

NATIONAL RESPONSES TO SLAVE ISSUES

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe published in 1852.  Your textbook offers a good discussion of the book, and how it tells the story of a slave family, torn apart as various members are sold off, not unlike the stories Frederick Douglass had been reporting in the North since his escape to freedom more than a dozen years earlier.  The success of her book brought the issue of slavery to the attention of thousands, and served as an absorbing indictment of the horrors of slavery and its immoral impact on both northerners and southerners.  While northerners cheered over the story; southerners were outraged.  Despite its appearance as a fictional story, it did more than any other publication of the decade to reach a broad public and stir the abolitionists cause among many in the north, who previously had no opinion on slavery, but happened to read books.  When they read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, even though a piece of fiction, they still developed a whole new understanding of what slavery might be like.  At the same time, it convinced southerners that northerners simply did not understand their way of life.  They became more inward in their practices; refused to send their sons to college in the North; and began to believe that they really were an independent country.

In 1854, the issue was the Kansas-Nebraska bill, a plan to organize the Nebraska Territory.  The North wanted to build a transcontinental railroad.  Such a plan would require the railroad to pass through a large unorganized territory that included Indian lands, where there was no law enforcement to protect the railroad.  The thinking of northerners in Congress was that it was safer for the railroad to pass through organized territories that provided some form of government protection.  Stephen Douglas was a big promoter of the northern railroad, partly because he owned stock in the Illinois-Central Railroad.  He also happened to be chairman of the Committee on New Territories.  So Douglas introduced a bill to organize the Nebraska territory.  But, he had to give southerners some reason to vote for the bill, such as the possibility that it might become a slave state.  Therefore, when he wrote the bill, he proposed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (in order to remove the 36’30” dividing line between slave and free states).  He also proposed dividing the territory into Kansas and Nebraska and leaving the question of slavery to be settled by popular sovereignty.  In his mind, he was sure that you couldn’t grow cotton in those territories, so the people settling there would not need slaves.  The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 opened the way for proslavery and antislavery forces to meet physically and to compete over whether Kansas would become a slave or free state.  Members of both political sides flooded into the area to set up rival governments.  Your textbook refers to the LeCompton government, one of the coalitions that brought pro-slavery voters to the territory and devised its own constitution.  While the political battles were going on in Congress, civilians were arguing over two separate governments in the territory.  Secret societies sprang up in the Missouri counties adjacent to Kansas, determined to stop those who favored keeping Kansas a slave-free state.  They established a proslavery legislature in Lecompton, Kansas, while another coalition set up a Free-Soil government in Topeka.  In May 1856, prosouthern mobs entered Lawrence, Kansas and destroyed the offices of the Free-Soil newspaper, fired cannon at the town’s hotel and looted homes and shops.  Three days later, John Brown led a a small New England band of abolitionists to the Pottawatomie Creek settlement south of Lawrence, where they murdered five proslavery residents.  Meanwhile, back in Washington, a proslavery Congressman by the name of Preston Brooks attacked an abolitionist Senator named Charles Sumner, almost beating him to death.  He claimed to be defending his honor, a retaliation for an inflamatory speech Sumner had delivered in the Congress earlier about the crimes committed in Kansas by prosouthern forces.  All of these events were evidence of a small scale version of circumstances that would eventually lead the entire nation to war.  And as a result of the conflicts in Kansas between 1854 through 1856, the territory was known as “Bleeding Kansas.”

With the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Stephen Douglas had not bargained for the North’s outrage at the thought of ignoring the Missouri Compromise.  They saw the bill as a criminal betrayal of precious rights and a plot by Douglas to promote his own ambitions to be President.  As a result, northern Whigs and anti-slavery Democrats in the north joined together to form the Republican Party.  It was a political party designed with one specific goal — to stop the expansion of slavery.  Republican forces managed to unite abolitionists with the moderates who only opposed the spread of slavery, not the existence of it in the South.  They brought together the anti-Catholic segments and those who wanted a stronger federal government to promote commercial and industrial development.  These four groups in northern and western society made them strong enough to participate in the 1956 presidential campaign.  Though their candidate, John C. Fremont was not successful, he made a strong showing in the election, losing to James Buchanan by only 60 electoral votes.  So the stage is set for this new political party to gain enough strength and support to get their candidate elected in 1860 – Abraham Lincoln.

Your textbook takes time to bring up the American Party that materialized in the mid-1850s.  Also known as the Know-Nothings, the American Party was a party of the middle and lower classes, workers who worried about their jobs and wages, and farmers and small-town Americans who worried about changes in their lives.  They kept their party policies a secret, and when anyone asked them about their organization, they simply responded, “I know nothing,” hence the adaptation of their name.  In their perspective, Roman Catholicism was more feared than slavery, though they opposed both.  To the average, hard-working Protestant American, the influx of Irish immigrants who poured into the cities and followed the railroads westward spoke unfamiliar languages, wore funny clothes, drank alcohol too freely and increased the crime and poverty in most areas.  Even worse, they attended Catholic churches, where the Latin mass and eucharistic rituals offended those used to Protestant worship.  Catholic immigrants opposed the school system, which permitted daily readings of the Protestant version of the Bible, because it forced Catholic children to learn Protestant teachings.  These immigrants seemed content with a lower standard of living and were willing to work for lower wages and in worse conditions than American workers.  And worst of all, many of them preferred the Democratic party.  The Know-Nothings somehow associated their anti-Catholic fears to the idea that immigrants would be more loyal to the pope in Rome than the President of the United States.  Some were even fanatical enough to claim that the Pope was preparing to move the Vatican out of Italy to settle in the Mississippi Valley.  By 1855, the Know-Nothings controlled all of the New England states except Vermont and Maine and even made gains in Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and Texas.  It was incredible that they made such headway, when their principles were basically un-American.  Fortunately, their history was a brief one, as they turned out to be merely a flash in the political pan.  Many voters could not rationalize the idea of fighting the oppression of black people, while at the same time degrading some classes of white people.  Northerners began to view the whole Know-Nothing movement as a southern conspiracy to distract attention from the main issue of slavery.  And those Know-Nothings who made it to political office were unable to stop immigration or suppress Catholicism, and soon began to look like just another bunch of bumbling politicians.  Thought prophets of hatred and bigotry would thrust themselves onto the national scene in the future, the brief success of the Know-Nothings in the 1850s was the most serious threat to basic American values that has ever been witnessed.  Ironically, when their party failed, it was a huge vote of the public in favor of human decency instead.

As arguments over the legal status of slavery in new territories continued throughout the decade, one particular case of a slave reached the Supreme Court in 1857.  In Dred Scott v. Sandford, a slave made another attempt to sue for his freedom.  You may recall that the story of Mum Bett, the Massachusetts slave who successfully sued for her freedom in Massachusetts back in 1781.  The brown page inset in your chapter explains that Dred Scott filed suit in federal court in Missouri in 1846.  He claimed that while he was a slave, his white master had taken him into Minnesota, Wisconsin and other territories north of the Missouri Compromise line into areas designated as free from slavery.  When his master died, he contended that he had lived more years in free territory than in slave territory, and therefore he should be free.  Unfortunately for Scott, the Supreme Court had a majority of southern judges, and the decision was 7 to 2 against his claim.  The court said first that Scott was not a citizen, because no black who was a descendant of a slave was a citizen, and therefore, he had no right to sue in federal court.  Thus, the Supreme Court was declaring that all blacks — free or slave — if they were descended from a slave, were not citizens.  Secondly, the Supreme Court decided that Congress did not have the power to prohibit slavery in any federal territory, since slaves were property and they were protected as such under the 5th Amendment.  The 5th Amendment states that a person’s property cannot be taken from him except by due process of law — in this case, the southerner’s property was the slave.  Thus, Dred Scott was not free just because he lived in a territory north of the 36’30” line.  In effect, this decision invalidated the Missouri Compromise, which was observed from 1820 until its repeal with the Compromise of 1850.

The implications of this decision went far beyond the Scotts’ personal freedom.  The arguments about black citizenship insulted and infuriated many northerners.  It particularly concerned them because slavery might now be permitted in the existing free states of the North.  What the Dred Scott decision really did was to incite northerners that there was a government conspiracy to impose slavery everywhere.

The issue of slavery in the territories continued to be fueled with every political campaign.  In Illinois, two candidates running for the Senate, brought national attention again to the subject, when their views were heard in a series of public debates.  Stephen Douglas ran against the little-known Abraham Lincoln, and in 1858, the Lincoln-Douglas debates brought the issue home to a broader voting public.  Lincoln set a solemn tone when he stated that the American nation was in a crisis, that “A House divided against itself cannot stand.”  He believed that the government could not endure, “half slave and half free,” that it had to become “all one thing or all the other.”  He opposed the Dred Scott decision, and staked out a moral position against slavery.  Douglas’ answer to Lincoln on the question of slavery in the territories became known as the “Freeport Doctrine,” because it was made at the debate held in Freeport, Illinois.  He answered that residents in a new territory could keep slavery out of the area by not passing any laws for its protection.  So a slaveholder would not want to risk taking his expensive property to a place where there were no laws to protect his right to such property.  His moral indifference to slavery became clear.  He was enough of a white supremist to want white people to be able to create whatever type of society they wanted.  Even though Douglas ultimately won the senatorial election, the Lincoln-Douglas debates were the first occasion of taking both sides of political issues to the people all over the state of Illinois, and the publicity of the event spread far beyond Illinois.  It was enough to convince Republicans that they could build a large coalition of voters who supported their anti-slavery stance for moral reasons, and Abraham Lincoln would be the man to lead their party in the next presidential election.

In 1859, John Brown reared is misdirected head again to protest slavery.  Brown was a brooding religious zealot.  Three years earlier he incited the massacre at Pottowatamie Creek in Kansas.  This time he lead a group of 21 men to attack a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia.  He hoped that his effort would provoke a general uprising of slaves throughout the Upper South.  Your text points out that he wanted to arm the slaves and start a guerilla war in the South.  Although he succeeded in taking the arsenal, federal troops soon overcame him.  Nearly half his men were killed, including two of his own sons.  Brown was captured, tried and hanged for treason.  Captured correspondence left by Brown revealed that he had extensive ties to northern abolitionists.  Many northerners mourned the execution of Brown.  Ralph Waldo Emerson said that Brown turned the gallows into a cross, and William Lloyd Garrison promoted Brown’s idea for slave insurrections throughout the South.  In the wake of Brown’s raid and throughout 1860, rumors flew around the South of many slave plots.  Most Southerners interpreted the evidence linking Brown to abolitionists as just the tip of an iceberg, and concluded that the abolitionists themselves were agents of the Republican Party.  In the final analysis, southerners were convinced that not just John Brown, but all Republicans hated the South for its “peculiar institution.”  Southerners increasingly spoke of secession from the United States as the only recourse that was left to them.

Fueling this line of southern thinking was the publication of Hinton Helper’s pamphlet entitled Impending Crisis of the South.  Your text mentions that it encouraged the nonslaveholding whites of the South to rise up against the planter class.  You can imagine that wealthy southerners interpreted this in a similar context to the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, perhaps even worse, since their fears were compounded by 1860 with all of the events that had occurred since 1852.  Because Republican candidates for office often quoted from Helper’s book, they associated this new threat of revolt by the South’s lower white classes as coming from the Republican Party.

ELECTION OF 1860

The crowning blow to the South’s heightened resentment of the Republican Party was for Abraham Lincoln to win the election in 1860.  Your text points out that he was not even on the ballot in the Southern states; however, in numbers alone, he won the election fair and square with northern and western support.  There’s a little map in your text on p.418 that shows you the breakdown among the candidates.  Part of the reason for the success of the Republican Party in 1860 was because of the split of voters created by the number of candidates running for office.  The Democrats were split over platform demands.  Southern Democrats wanted a guarantee that slavery could continue; northern Democrats would only commit to keeping popular sovereignty in each state.  So there were northern and southern Democratic candidates to support each platform.  There was even a Constitutional Union Party organized by the border states who feared a war brought on by either side, but only succeded in diluting the votes further.  Lincoln ran on a platform that the South had a constitutional right to preserve slavery, but he demanded that Congress prohibit its extension.  Lincoln’s election struck most of the white South as a calculated northern insult.  Remember my comments earlier about the code of dueling in the South as a means of protecting one’s honor.  Few Southerners believed that Lincoln would fulfill his promise to protect slavery in the South.  On December 20, 1860, a South Carolina convention voted unanimously in favor of secession, and by February 1, 1861, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas had followed.

Ultimately, it was the clash of cultural values among people who simply comprehended each of the events in the 1850s from a different perspective.  Your text points out how the Northern understanding was based on the Protestant work ethic, that all men are equal and must work hard to achieve salvation.  They could not comprehend the Southern way of forcing others to do the work for them.  As the North continued to industrialize, create prosperity for a growing number of citizens, it was difficult for those Americans to understand the mentality of the plantation system, where life consisted of raising cotton, and only a few prospered, while many others were poor or slaves.  With secession, the disagreement was therefore an issue of the rights of states to live the way they wanted to live.  In the Southern mind, it had nothing to do with their peculiar institution.  You will find many occasions where Confederates refer simply to the War of Southern Secession, indicating their understanding that it was a states’ rights cause.  And, indeed, President Lincoln treated it as a revolt by states in the Union, no different than President Washington reacted when the Pennsylvania farmers staged the Whiskey Rebellion.  Regardless, for Americans, the human cost of the Civil War was the most devastating event in our history.  620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers lost their lives, more than all other U.S. wars combined.  The Civil War was fought because great issues about which Americans were willing to fight and die, issues whose resolution profoundly transformed and redefined the United States.  And we’ll deal with those events in the next chapter.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Abraham Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address:  “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.  The government will not assail you….You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to `preserve, protect and defend’ it.”  Lincoln thought secession was illegal, and he was willing to use force to defend Federal law and the Union.  Not unlike President Jackson, who only 30 years earlier had asked Congress for military power to deal with South Carolina over the nullification issue, Lincoln believed the Union was constitutionally perpetual and indisolvable.  As he rose to deliver his inaugural address on March 4, 1860, he faced a tense and divided nation.  Federal troops, fearing a Confederate attack on the nation’s capital, were everywhere.  Lincoln asserted his unequivocal intention to enforce the laws of the land.  He reminded the nation that the “only substantial dispute” was that “one section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended.”

The President who invested a lifetime during the five long years of his service, was the son of a Kentucky frontiersman.  When he was seven, the family moved to Indiana and then further west, to southern Illinois.  As a boy, he received almost no formal schooling, but he had a good mind and was extremely ambitious.  He made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm, splitting rails for fences, and keeping a store in New Salem, Illinois.  He was a captain in the Black Hawk War, when the Sac and Fox Indians were driven out of Illinois territory.  He spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and rode the circuit of courts for many years.  After 1848, his political career had petered out, and he seemed fated to pass his remaining years as a typical small-town lawyer-politician.

Even during this period Lincoln displayed many remarkable characteristics.  His personality was enormously complex.  Like Washington and Jefferson, he was a tall man, 6’4″, but unlike his respected predecessors, his rough, bawdy sense of humor and his endless fund of stories and tall tales made him a legend first in Illinois and then in Washington during his brief service in the House.  He was also admired in Illinois as a powerful and expert axman and a champion wrestler.  He was thoroughly at home with the toughs and in the more genteel society of party politicos.  But in a society where most men drank heavily, he never touched liquor of any sort.  In a region swept by repeated waves of religious revivalism, Lincoln managed to be at once a man of calm spirituality and a skeptic without appearing offensive to conventional believers.  He was a party wheel horse, a corporation lawyer, even a railroad lobbyist, but his reputation for integrity was outstanding.  It is actually true that from the time he first ran for office in the 1830s he was known to his friends as “Honest Abe.”

The controversy over slavery was a particular concern of Lincoln’s.  He had always tried to take a realistic view of the problem.  He had even represented slaveowners seeking to reclaim runaways in Illinois.  It was the Kansas-Nebraska bill that led him to see the moral issue more clearly, that slavery was inherently an evil institution.  However, unlike most northern free-soil supporters, Lincoln did not blame the southerners for slavery.  He said they were just what he might be in the same situation.  He read widely on the problem, spent many hours trying to think it through.  And when he began making speeches on the subject, he quickly stood out in the crowd of politicos who were expounding on the horrors of the slave practice.  The fairness and moderation of Lincoln’s attitude, combined with his moral conviction, won him many admirers, particularly among citizens who were trying to reconcile their low opinion of Negroes and their patriotic desire to avoid an issue that threatened to break up the Union.  Your text points out that when the Civil War began, Lincoln had less experience for serving as a wartime president than any previous chief executive.  He’d never served as a governor, senator, cabinet officer, vice-president or high-ranking military officer.  Nevertheless, his distinctive style of leadership and cautious reserve had the dual benefit of leaving open his lines of cummunication with both wings of the party and dissolving much of his opposition.

Northerners did not deny the right of revolution in principle — the United States was founded on that right.  But as Lincoln wrote in 1861, “the right of revolution is never a legal right.”  It can be a “moral right, when exercised for a morally justifiable cause.  When exercised without such a cause, revolution is no right, but simply a wicked exercise of physical power.  Some Northerners looked upon southern secession as a complaint, just because the South lost this election.  Keep in mind that from 1789 to 1861, a Southern slaveholder was President of the United States 2/3s of the time.  And 2/3s of all the Speakers of the House and Presidents Pro Tem of the Senate had also been Southerners.  20 of the 35 Supreme Court justices during that period were from the South as well.  So the institutions and ideology of a plantation society and a caste system which harbored slavery had dominated the country before 1861.  Despite all of that influence, all of that leadership, they could not escape the moral issues of slavery.

THE CONFEDERACY

By coincidence, Jefferson Davis was born only 100 miles from Lincoln’s birthplace in Kentucky.  However, while Lincoln’s father had migrated north to live as a farmer in Indiana and Illinois, Davis family moved south to Mississippi and became cotton planters.  Davis grew up in comfortable circumstances, went to Transylvania University, and after graduating from West Point, fought in the Mexican War.  He was a former Secretary of War under U.S. President Franklin Pierce, and had served as a United States senator.  He possessed experience, honesty, courage and what one officer described as “a jaw sawed in steel.”  He was tall and distinguished-looking, and appeared every inch the aristocratic southerner.  In contrast to Lincoln, however, Davis had a knack for making enemies.  He would much rather have led the army than the government.  Since the founding of the United States, the South had produced a disproportionate share of the nation’s strong presidents:  Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson and Polk, all from states south of the Mason-Dixon line.  Now President Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy came to the head of this tenuous new government.

I believe I mentioned that the southern position at the outset of the war was that it was a War of Southern Secession.  Mississippi’s Resolutions on Secession perhaps explained it best, stating that the federal government failed to support all of her states, including those states that tolerate slavery.  The fact of the matter was that slavery existed long before statehood, and southerners felt that by excluding slavery from new territories, the government failed to support slavery in those states that presently practiced it.  They were insulted by those who supported abolitionism, and they felt the federal government encouraged slave rebellion and theft of southern “property.”  But even Northerners acknowledged that position in 1861.  There were four slaves states that remained loyal to the Union and the Democratic minorities in free states would not allow the war for the Union to be termed a war against slavery.

So by the time of Lincoln’s inauguration, seven states had separated themselves from the United States:  South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas.  A convention of southern delegates held in Alabama in February 1861 produced the Confederate States of America, which formed a provisional government and drafted its own constitution.  In understanding the Southern perspective, it is also important to remember that this new government welcomed any non-slave free states who might wish to join the Confederacy.  So the South merely wanted to establish a country where they could maintain their state liberties without interference from a government that did not respect their slave practices.  Any free state that desired similar liberties was invited to join this cause.

There was a last-minute proposal from Congress called the “Crittenden plan” to extend the Missouri Compromise line and amend the Constitution to prohibit the federal government from regulating or abolishing slavery in the states.  This might have appeased the South and avoided the war.  However, President Lincoln unequivocally rejected the proposal.  The moral issue of slavery had been the platform upon which the people elected Lincoln, and compromise was not a consideration.

STATUS OF THE BORDER STATES

Most of the border states adopted a wait-and-see attitude.  Those along the upper South border could provide natural protection to the South, access to its river traffic and vital resources.  A major railroad link ran through Maryland and western Virginia.  Tennessee was the region’s principal source of grain; Virginia was the center of the South’s largest ironworks.  Missouri provided the road to Kansas and the West and was located so that it controlled the Mississippi River traffic.  Success for the Confederacy would depend in large part on how the border states chose sides.  For the North, every border state that elected to remain loyal to the United States was a psychological triumph for the idea of Union.

Ultimately, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina joined the Confederacy.  Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland and Delaware chose to stay with the Union.  Decisions by each of the states created civil strife among their citizens, particularly in Maryland, where the national capital was located.  Maryland was torn by slave-owning tobacco and wheat farmers in the southern part of the state and small farmers, mostly German heritage who opposed slavery, in the western and northern parts of the state.  Lincoln immediately brought additional federal troops into Maryland to protect the capital, but not before would-be secessionists burned the railroad bridges connecting Baltimore to the North and to the South.  Washington, D.C. found itself cut off from the rest of the Union, an island in the middle of hostile territory, until Union troops were able to arrest enough southern sympathizers to regain control of the state.

However, Lincoln was more cautious with the remainder of the border states.  He had to deal with slavery prudently, so as not to anger border states that might decide to join the Confederacy.

BALANCE OF RESOURCES IN NORTH AND SOUTH

Both sides were unprepared for war.  In April 1861, the Union had only a small army of 16,000 men, scattered all over the country, mostly in the West.  1/3 of the officers of the Union army had resigned to join the Confederacy.  The nation had not had a strong president since James K. Polk in the 1840s, and this new President Lincoln seemed more like a country yokel than a political leader.  The federal government had levied no direct taxes on its citizens for decades, and it had never drafted anyone into its army.  The Confederacy was even less prepared, for it had no tax structure, no navy, only two tiny gunpowder factories, and poorly equipped, unconnected railroad lines.  In this war for “states’ rights”, the efforts of both sides in mobilizing for war greatly expanded the powers of the central government.

Advantages

NORTH

Northern white population much larger than in the South

Produced $1.5 billion in manufactured goods each year

Had 1 factory for every southern industrial worker

70% of the railroads were in the North

Produced 17 times as much cotton cloth and woolen goods; 32 times as many firearms and 20 times as much pig iron as the South; therefore, could cloth and arm troops better, and transport them and supplies easier to battle sights

SOUTH

Even though outnumbered, South felt their population was superior, because they were more accustomed to outdoor life and the use of firearms

Their slaves could carry on vital work at home, thus freeing most white males to serve the Confederacy

They held large resources of food, farm animals and cotton that would encourage British and French support for the South

By waging a defensive war, they could tap into regional loyalty and enjoy protected lines of supply and support

South merely had to survive until its enemy tired and gave up.

Disadvantages

NORTH

Irish immigrants feared competition of free black labor;

Feared that southerners were better fighters

Needed time to mobilize for war; needed to raise funds to pay for military necessities because of depleted northern treasury

The Union war extended supply lines into the deep South and made them vulnerable to attack; they were less mobile and secure than southern troops

SOUTH

Depended on the North and Europe for most of its manufactured goods

If Lincoln cut off trade, the South would have to create its industry from scratch.

The railroad system was organized to haul cotton, not troops and supplies.

I pointed out an advantage of the South was the perception that they were better fighters.  They also benefited from superior military leadership.  Both armies relied upon West Pointers for their top commanders.  Since most of these professionals followed the decisions of their home states when the war broke out, about 300 West Pointers became northern generals, about 180 became southern generals.  But among officers of lesser rank, the southerners probably excelled in the first years of the struggle, because a military tradition was strong in the South.  Many young men had attended military academies.  The South was also lucky in its choice of Confederate leadership.  While the northern generals proved to be bungling and indecisive in the early stages of the war, strong leadership in the South allowed them to defeat Union armies that were often greater in size than their own numbers on the battlefield.

STRATEGY OF THE WAR

Regardless of the leadership, the West Point training of generals on both sides favored the war tactics of the French military historian Henri Jomini.  Jomini taught that an army could win victory by placing its infantry attack at the weakest point in the enemy’s defenses.  First, the artillery is set up to bombard enemy lines and prepare the way for the infantry attack.  Unfortunately for both sides, by 1861, bullets and rifle barrels had been greatly improved to increase the range of rifles from 100 yards to 500 yards.  Bullets traveled faster and more accurately across the distance.  So, even as the generals were placing soldiers outside of the 100-yard range according to Jomini’s military strategy, they were still getting a lot of their troops killed.

The war fever produced so many volunteers that neither northern nor southern officials could handle the recruits.  Northern authorities turned aside offers from blacks to serve.  Both sides sent thousands of white would-be soldiers home.  The conviction that the conflict would rapidly come to a glorious conclusion made many eager to enlist.  Lincoln called for 75,000 state militiamen to serve 90-day enlistments and the enlistment term for Confederate soldiers was similar, so neither side expected the war to last very long.

With respect to basic plans for fighting the war, Jefferson Davis decided on a general defensive measure for the Confederate side.  He considered the fact that southern soldiers could fight on their own familiar soil, where they knew the land and how to use it to their advantage, as well as the idea of defending their homeland against invaders.  They could stay close to supply sources and rely on the civilian population for support.

This strategy would force the North to stretch its supply lines and troop reinforcements, fight on less familiar terrain, amidst a population that was antagonistic to their efforts.  However, initially President Lincoln decided to concentrate on Virginia, closest to the north, where federal troops could be easily reinforced and northern support sources would not be far away.  Because Virginia was important to the south, destroying that state’s capability in the southern cause would provide a particular advantage.  In addition, Lincoln decided to march Union troops west, and try to gain an advantage in the southern states that were farthest from the heart of the Confederacy.  It would also permit federal troops to capture access to the Mississippi and therefore, control and cut off western trade with the South as well.  Finally, northern strategy included a coastal blockade to stop trade goods from entering or leaving southern ports.  This type of northern strategy, therefore, was not just a military effort, but a specific plan to cut off any potential economic support that the south would desperately need in order to survive a long war.

These plans changed as the war years dragged on.  When the South switched to an offensive effort, it cost them dearly in casualties they could not afford, so they returned to a defensive/survival strategy.  The North moved more and more to a position of “total” warfare, designed to totally annihilate the South, both militarily and economically.  This would reduce the South to total poverty and hopefully bring about a speedier conclusion to the war.

SOLDIERS OF THE CIVIL WAR

At the outset, the Civil War embodied romantic impulses.  Colorful uniforms, marching music, promises of adventure, and the certainty of quick victory stirred both sides of the conflict.  Instead the war produced death and destruction on a massive scale — there were a million casualties and, as I mentioned earlier, 620,000 of those died.

The Southerners were coming to fight for many reasons.  A Tennessean of Cleburne’s command wrote that he “volunteered to fight in defense of the sunny South, the land of roses,…and for my Melissa, Ma and Sister, and all other fair women….”  Another Tennessean joined the Confederates, though he was opposed to slavery and to secession.  He enlisted only because the Union army had invaded his state.  Many Southerners, of course, fought to protect the “peculiar institution.”  Some Confederates even took selected Negroes along with them as personal body servants when they went to war.  A man who fought at Shiloh later recounted an event he witnessed on the first day of the fight.  As a young Rebel officer and his slave rode into battle, a cannon shot decapitated the young man.  The Negro servant almost immediately caught his master’s horse, and put the lifeless body on it.  Then the black man moved off the battlefield, going slowly to the rear with the remains of his master in the saddle.  The witness to this event was certain the slave was taking his dead master’s body back home for burial.  Some of those who joined the Rebels were in love; others came to pillage and plunder.  And although they were a mixed lot, there was one quality shared by nearly everyone in the Confederate army and a sizeable part of the Union army — they had little if any experience as soldiers.  It has been stated that some historians that “probably 80% of each army had never heard a gun fired in hatred.”  There was never enough time or resources to train the men properly.  General Leonidas Polk, in his official report, stated that one company of artillery, because of “the scarcity of ammunition, had never heard the report of their own guns.”

Meanwhile, in the Union ranks there was a high level of confidence, particularly as the battle victories began to accumulate.  One soldier in the 6th Iowa Infantry reported that they received new Springfield muskets, good clothing, fine camp equipage and wholesale rations, and inspired by music from splendid bands and drum corps, the troops in his regiment were “happy and supremely confident.”  The Union soldiers were not only overconfident.  There were men gathering at some stations who were so inexperienced and naive about war that they seemed to be enjoying a holiday; they enlisted because they thought army life was going to be fun, and it usually took quite a few weeks in camp to realize otherwise.  The Union army, like the Confederate, had many very young soldiers in their ranks.  The youngest of all usually were the drummer boys, among whom was Johnny Clem, 10 years old, who went along with the 22nd Wisconsin Infantry, and whose drum was smashed at Shiloh, where he acquired the nickname of Johnny Shiloh.  He later became still more famous as the drummer boy of Chickamauga and retired from the army a half-century later at the rank of major general.  But then, every war finds some ardent youngsters who want to enlist despite the fact that they are under the military age limit of 18.  Today, such young men simply report to a recruiting station and swears that he is 18.  But the boys of the 1860s felt that to lie to their own government was just plain wrong.  Instead, such boys would scribble the number 18 on a piece of paper and put it on the soles of their shoes.  When the recruiter asked them how old they were, they could truthfully say that they were “over 18.”  The drill sergeants in both armies repeatedly found that among the raw recruits there were men so untaught that they did not know left from right, and could not step off on the left foot as all soldiers were supposed to.  To teach them how to march, the sergeants would tie a wisp of hay to the left foot and a wisp of straw to the right; then once they started marching, the sergeants would chant “hay-foot, straw-foot, hay-foot, straw-foot,” until everybody caught on.

Many Union soldiers left records in letters, diaries and memoirs revealing why they fought.  And though most said they did so “for the Union,” like the Confederates, the Federals had their share of soldiers seeking glory, adventure and plunder.  One historian has suggested that “the typical soldier, Northern or Southern, had no clear idea why he was fighting.”  It must have seemed to him, especially when he left for war as many did, with the hometown looking on, bands playing, girls waving, and small boys watching with awe and envy, that he fought for something splendid and glorious.  The cheers told him so.  It assured him of his own individual worth and greatness.  Perhaps the most concrete thing for which the soldier fought, mentioned over and over by members on both sides, was “his country.”  One of the most frequent concerns mentioned in Civil War diaries was the fear that the war would be over before the ardent young recruits could get into it.

Regardless of why they were in the army, many troopers found that army life on the whole was dull, monotonous and unpleasant.  There was too much drill and routine, rain and mud.  The volunteer soldiers of the American Civil War used a clumsy muzzle-loading rifle, lived chiefly on salt pork and hardtack, and retained to the very end a loose-jointed, informal attitude toward the army they were in.  Discipline was difficult to enforce, particularly since most regiments were recruited locally, and everybody more or less knew everybody else.  Many men had very little understanding of the requirements of military service.  A homesick boy often saw nothing wrong in leaving the army and going home to see the folks for a time.  A man from a farm might slip off to go home and put in a crop.  He didn’t think of himself as a deserter, because he meant to return in time for any fighting that was coming up.  There was one story told on the 6th New York regiment, that it contained so many bowery toughs that the rest of the army said a man had to be able to show that he had done time in prison in order to get into that regiment!  When they prepared to leave for the South, their colonel started off by telling his regiment they were going to a land of wealthy plantation owners, where each Southerner had riches of which he could be stripped; and he took out his own gold watch and held it up for all to see, remarking that any deserving soldier could easily get one like it, once they got down to plantation-land.  Half an hour later, when the colonel reached for his watch to check the time, it, too, was gone.

The standard weapon in the Civil War was the rifled Springfield, a muzzle-loading weapon that fired a conical lead .54-caliber bullet.  It took a good man to get off more than two shots a minute.  And when he fired, the bullet had an effective range of nearly a mile.  Infantries still moved and fought in formations, according to the traditional military training preached by Jomini, only now they could be hit by bullets when they were still a mile off.  Military tactics had not been adjusted to the new rifles, and so many direct frontal assaults were merely forms of mass suicide.  Because it took the high command a long time to revise battle tactics to fit the new weaponry, Civil War armies racked up casualties of at least 25% in most confrontations.  At Gettysburg, it amounted to 1/3 of all the men fighting, and some of the regiments there lost as much as 80% of their ranks.

The Civil War armies enlisted no men as cooks.  One army legend told how company officers usually detailed the least valuable soldiers to this job, on the theory that they would do less harm in the cook shack than anywhere else.  One soldier write home that “a company cook is a most peculiar being:  he generally knows less about cooking than any other man in the company.  Not being able to learn the drills, and too dirty to appear on troop inspections, he is sent to the cook house to get him out of the ranks.”

The same skills applied to the hospital care for the wounded in both armies.  The surgeons were good men by the standards of the day, considering there was no understanding about germs and being antiseptic.  It was common practice for a surgeon to sharpen his scalpel on the sole of his shoe just before operating.  The hospital attendants and stretcher-bearers were chosen in the same manner as the company cooks.  Officers selected the most worthless men he had simply because he wanted to get rid of men who could not be counted on in combat.  As a result, sick or wounded men often got atrocious care.  From the beginning of the war to its bloody end, approximately twice as many Civil War soldiers died of disease as died in action.  Typhoid, dysentery and pneumonia were the main diseases.

I mentioned earlier that many soldiers on both sides were not really sure what they were fighting for.  Northern soldiers had very little feeling about the issues of slavery, for example.  They thought they were fighting to save the Union.  But in their southern battles, they sought to destroy all southern property as well, and by helping slaves to escape, Northerners weakened the South’s economic capability.  So slavery itself was severely weakened in the South long before the war came to an end.

BATTLES OF THE CIVIL WAR

Of course, before the war officially began, the Confederates had already seized most United States property in the Deep South.  Lincoln was not terribly concerned with reclaiming those federal properties.  However, Fort Sumter in South Carolina and Fort Pickens on the Florida coast were still controlled by federal armies, and Lincoln could not abandon them.  He didn’t want to start the fighting first, so he took a moderate step of sending a naval expedition to supply the garrisons that had been cut off by land.  It was just enough to infuriate the Confederates, who took the first shots of the Civil War when they fired on Fort Sumter April 12, 1861.  The federal army held out against the attack for two days, before surrendering, and the war was now officially on.  President Lincoln was furious that the Confederates had fired at his supply ships, so he took a punishing step, when he initiated a coastal blockade of the entire US coastline, making it impossible for the Confederates to continue normal trading with Europe.

During the first summer of the Civil War, 30,000 federal troops attacked Confederate forces at Manassas, Virginia, on the banks of Bull Run creek.  It was just about 20 miles from Washington, D.C. and a number of sightseers had come out to watch the battle.  The federal troops thought they had the Rebels on the run, until Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson managed to lead a counterattack that took the green Northern recruits completely off guard.  They hurriedly retreated back toward Washington, abandoning their arms, tumbling through lines of supply wagons, and trampling over the sightseers.  The Confederates, however, missed their chance to turn the Bull Run victory into a capture of Washington, as well.  Once they had chased the Federal Army off the battlefield, they failed to pursue them all the way into the capitol.  They were too disorganized to follow through.  It was an early example of how the generals on both sides would often take a step back following a battle, missing a golden opportunity to strike a serious blow,

After this fiasco, President Lincoln placed General George B. McClellan in command of the federal army.  In the spring of 1862, McClellan began making plans to attack Richmond.  It was only a few hundred miles south of the nation’s capitol — both were in Virginia, and once war had begun, it was a little too close for comfort for northerners.  Meanwhile in the West, a cigar-smoking West Pointer by the name of Ulysses S. Grant invaded Tennessee, capturing Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, along the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers.  He marched his troops further west into Mississippi, where Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston met him at Shiloh with 40,000 rebels.  They attacked the Union troops before dawn on April 6, and though they had the advantage at the end of the first day of fighting, the federal troops were reinforced and forced the Confederates to fall back over the next two days.  In this case, the Union troops failed to follow through and destroy the enemy.  Grant was too shook up after the unexpected attack, and the Confederates were able to escape before further fighting occurred.  Nevertheless, the staggering casualties at Shiloh made it one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, and unnerved both the North and the South.  Of the 63,000 soldiers who converged at Shiloh, Union losses exceeded 13,000 and Confederate losses were 10,699, including their own valuable commander, General Johnston.  As time would show, the Confederacy could not afford to lose very many of their generals.  People on both sides stopped thinking of the war as a romantic test of courage and military guile.  They began to develop a new respect, and a new hatred, for each other.

I mentioned that McClellan was making plans to attack Richmond, Virginia about the same time.  He decided to turn it into a penninsula campaign, and come in at Chesapeake Bay, capture Yorktown first, then proceed upriver toward Richmond.  However, McClellan was like most Northern generals, trained military men who suffered from an excess of caution.  When he was within 25 miles of Richmond, he delayed the march of 80,000 federal troops to wait for more reinforcements.  While he was waiting, the rebels caught part of his troops at the Chickahominy River.  This small attack, the Battle of Seven Pines, resulted in over 10,000 casualties.  It was enough to cause Lincoln to replace McClellan with a new commanding general, General Ambrose Burnside, who called off the campaign before they could advance on Richmond.  [Lincoln’s subsequent generals included Joe Hooker and General Meade. ]  Another valuable Union opportunity was lost.  There was a significant loss and, you might say, gain, for the Confederates as well.  During the Battle at Seven Pines, another important general, the commander of the Army of Virginia Joseph E. Johnston, was severely wounded.  In time, the Confederacy would feel the loss of good generals to lead their troops, but for now, the command of the Army of Virginia went to Robert E. Lee.

General Lee was the opposite of most Union generals.  He was a quiet, courtly, tactful southern gentleman, a master psychologist on the battlefield, who had an unquestioned sense of duty, courage and self-command.  Although not a great strategist, he was decisive in the field and was able to inspire armies to fight for him.  Some historians have characterized him as more of a saint than a good general, but he remains in the annals of the war as one of the greatest leaders of all time.  He commanded the Army of Virginia for the remainder of the war.  It wasn’t until three months before the war’s end that he was finally made Commander-in-Chief of the Confederate Army.  Perhaps because so many of the Civil War battles were fought on Virginia soil, that General Lee comes to the forefront as the chief leader of the Southern cause.  [ Historians over the last century turned him into a hero.]

For the next two years, Confederates fought Unions troops all over the Shenandoah Valley, meeting them for a second time at Bull Run, and then at Harpers Ferry, Sharpsburg and Antietam.  At the end of 1862, Confederate forces had a tremendous victory at Fredericksburg, where Union forces had 120,000 men to the Confederate’s 75,000, suffered twice as many casualties as the rebels.  Lee had such an advantage, that as he looked on the battle scene from his command post in the heights, he was heard to remark, “It is well that war is so terrible [or] we should grow to fond of it!”

EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

For almost a year and a half President Lincoln had been framing the document that came to be known as the Emancipation Proclamation.  It was needed first, because the North had to find a way to strike the South in a vulnerable place by taking a firm stand opposing slavery.  But Lincoln’s cabinet urged him to wait for the right timing, so that it wouldn’t look like emancipation was a desperate measure to speed a conclusion to the war.  So on January 1, 1863, not long after the Union victory at Antietam, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all slaves in the Confederacy were free.  The Emancipation did not affect the status of slaveholding states that stayed in the Union, nor could it be enforced in the South unless the Union occupied the areas.  But it was important first, to reassert the North’s authority over the South.  Secondly, after two years, it was clear the Civil War was lasting much longer than expected, and the North could not be expected to fight such a long war just to see slavery continue when the war was over.  Finally, the Emancipation might eventually contribute to the Union cause by promoting slave uprisings in the South and helping to bring the war to an end sooner.  It’s interesting that your text points out the way the Emancipation Proclamation was worded, it stood firmly as a document to support the federal Union, not necessarily to promote the moral cause upon which Lincoln’s party had run.  It did, however, finally restate the Union’s war goals to include the abolition of slavery.  President Lincoln continued relentlessly to push the moral position with Congress.  Two years later, in January of 1865, Congress narrowly passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which formally outlawed slavery in the United States.  Of course, southerners were not immediately affected by it.  It took hold only in the parts of the South already cleared by the Union forces.

CIVIL WAR CONTINUES

1863 was the turning point in the long Civil War.  In April the two armies met at Chancellorsville, and Lee’s army almost repeated their success at Fredericksburg a few months earlier, but Union reinforcements limited the extent of this second victory.  Confederate losses exceeded 12,000 men, along with their beloved General Stonewall Jackson, but the Union army had suffered another fearful blow to its morale.  They now questioned how they were ever going to win if no northern general could win battles the way Robert E. Lee did.

But the South’s “Armagedon” was not far off.  It began in June, when General Lee had decided the time was right for another invasion of the north.  The plan was to move into Pennsylvania and proceed eastward to take the capital at Washington, D.C.  Lee carried a letter of surrender that he intended to place on the desk of Mr. Lincoln when he got there.  The bulk of Lee’s Army of Virginia marched into Pennsylvania blind, without the benefit of information from their scout, Captain Jeb Stuart, who had not reported back with vital scouting support.  So it was an accident that one of his Confederate regiments ran into a Union cavalry near the small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  The Union General Buford discovered he was fighting Confederate General Heath’s division of about 10,000 men.  In short order, Buford began to realize that the entire Confederate Army was behind them.  So as the small conflict began on July 1, both sides sent out calls for reinforcements; both sides started pushing for the high ground to gain the optimum position for the fight.  Buford’s forces held until 20,000 more Union reinforcements arrived.  By this time, General Lee acknowledged that “the ground” had already been chosen for them, so he ordered all of his Generals to attack.  His second in command, General Longstreet, wanted to disengage, to force the Union troops to attack on ground of the Confederate choosing, closer toward Washington, D.C.  This approach would have maintained the defensive strategy by which the South had succeeded thus far in the war.  But General Lee was determined to take the high ground at Gettysburg.  He felt the first day was successful.  His troops had pushed back two Union corps, and he wanted to continue offensively, even though he was still unclear about the Union numbers.  Regardless, the Union managed to hold the high ground at the end of the first day, and the Union generals were commenting on the fact that they had such “lovely ground” to fight on.

For a second day the Confederates attacked Cemetery Ridge from every angle, pounding it with heavy artillery barrage and repeatedly attacking the Union flanks.  A Union regiment from Maine, under the command of Col. Lawrence Chamberlain, defended Little Round Top (at the end of the Union “fish hook” foothold of the high ground), while Confederate General John Bell Hood’s brigade spent the day trying to take it, so they could sneak up on the Union flank.  Again, the Union troops held the day.  General Lee considered the end of Day 2 a standoff.  Longstreet still wanted to pull out on the right and head for Washington.

But by now Lee is convinced that the Union line can be broken in the center, because he was certain that Union troops were fortifying the hills on either side.  Again, the training from his West Point textbook on Jomini comes into play, attack at the weakest point in the center of the line.  General Longstreet is desperately reluctant to support his commander in chief.  Nevertheless, the attack on the third day begins with an artillery barage.  Then Longstreet ordered General George Pickett’s three divisions of 15,000 men to charge across an open field (approximately 1 mile) to the Union lines.  Remember, that rifle range was far more direct than any of them realized.  Longstreet did not believe that they could hold the day.  He expected at least 50% casualties.  The generals on both sides knew each other from West Point days.  They knew what they were made of, whether they would be the type to retreat or hold their ground.  It’s interesting to observe the generals in battle, who have no fear of the gunfire.  They ride in the midst of it all, evaluating the situation, just being seen by their men, making decisions to deal with changing conditions.

As the Confederate corps moved forward that third day, the Union flanked them on the right.  And indeed, the Confederates were overwhelmed when Union reserves closed in before they could consolidate their position.  There were just so many Union forces that could be brought in to support the “weak” center of the line that Lee grossly underestimated them.  Some of Pickett’s division actually made it over the wall at Cemetary Ridge, but they were met by hundreds of reserve Union forces.  A little more than half of Pickett’s men were dead, wounded or captured.

Both armies were too tired to fight on the fourth day.  Had the Union forced the attack then, they might have finally destroyed the Confederate army — but they hesitated just long enough to allow Lee’s army to make it back to Virginia.  When Lee withdrew on July 4, he had lost 17 generals and over 1/3 of his army.  Total Union and Confederate casualties numbered almost 50,000.  It is easy to see how, by the end of the third day, Lincoln was later able to refer to the open field as “hallowed ground,” because so many lives were lost there.

[There was a stunning 4-hour saga made of the Battle of Gettysburg more than two decades ago that does a great job of illustrating the personalities of the generals leading the battle, the soldiers who fought in it, and the tragic outcomes of the Confederate loss.  For those of you who are interested, I include a link to scenes from the film here,]    https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=scenes+from+Gettsyburg+the+movie

A series of other Union victories followed.  On that same Independence Day, far to the west, federal troops under the command of Ulysses S. Grant won another great victory at Vicksburg, severing Confederate access to the Mississippi River.  It was mid-1863 and President Lincoln realized that Ulysses S. Grant just might be the general he’d been looking for since the war began.  Grant was one of the most controversial officers in the army.  He was not a good student at West Point; he tended to drink a little too much, and he had a reputation as something of a ne’er-do-well.  But the fact was that he knew how to manage a large army and win battles.  Lincoln elevated him to command of all federal troops west of the Appalachians.  By May 1864, Grant devised a strategy as supreme commander that was simple, logical and ruthless.  He would attack Lee and try to capture Richmond, while General William Tecumseh Sherman pushed south toward Atlanta.  In May of 1864 the two armies marched 100,000 men each on rebel fortifications.  Confederates were becoming fewer.  The only way to beat the Confederates was to beat them with numbers of troops.  Battles at Cold Harbor and the Wilderness claimed 60,000 casualties in less than a month.  Northerners referred to Grant as a “butcher,” and demanded his removal from command.  But Lincoln stood firm.  Although the price was fearfully high, Grant was gaining his objective.  The 9-month seige at Petersburg came after that.  Once broken, the Union Army marched into Richmond and took the Confederate capitol, sending the Confederate President Jefferson Davis into hiding.   By fall 1864, General Sherman had beaten the Confederates in Atlanta and marched his troops on to Savannah, destroying everything in his path that might help the enemy continue the fight.  Sherman’s march to the sea broke the South’s will to resist much longer.  He cut a path 60 miles wide as he crossed Georgia and marched into Savannah in late December.  Early in February his troops captured Columbia, South Carolina; soon thereafter they were in North Carolina, pressing ahead relentlessly.  Grant’s Virginia campaign provided the remaining nails in the South’s coffin, as Confederate lines grew thinner and more ragged.

As Lincoln anticipated, the Emancipation Proclamation had a subtle, but continuing impact on America.  Increasingly, men discounted and ignored its limitations; what mattered was that it committed the United States to fight against slavery.  It caused a gradual yet massive shift of opinion in the North and also served as a beacon to the southern Negro still enslaved.  Wherever the Army of Freedom approached a southern plantation, black men laid down their plows and hoes and stole away.  Northern troops thus became more like emancipating crusaders as the years went on.

In the last campaign, when Richmond fell to the Union.  Lee recognized the futility of further resistance.  He had 30,000 troops left and Grant was prepared to oppose him with 115,000.  In April 1865, exactly four years after it began, Generals Lee and Grant met at Appomattox Court House to discuss the terms of the South’s surrender.  Lee was noble in defeat.  Grant remembered meeting him once before, when they both served on the same side during the Mexican War, and they talked briefly of that earlier time.  Then Grant outlined the terms of surrender.  All that would be required was for the Confederate soldiers to lay down their arms.  They could return to their homes in peace, and would be allowed to take their horses with them (to help them with the plowing).  So the war ended.  More than 110,000 Union soldiers were killed in battle; 250,000 died of disease and other causes.  Another 275,000 were wounded.  The total Confederate deaths numbered 258,000.

POST-WAR RESULTS

The price in dollars is hard to compute, but if civilian property damage is any measure, it ran into the tens of billions.  2/3s of the railroad mileage of the South was destroyed.  It would take 30 years for the South to restore the agricultural output it had been producing in 1860 before the war began.  The psychological cost was even more enormous.  Aside from the anguish suffered by relatives and friends of the wounded and the dead, there was the eroding hatred and bitterness that the war implanted in millions of southerners.

But slavery was dead and the Union restored.  The people of both sides had learned to appreciate how much this country and all of its associations meant to them.  Would they be able to forget the recent past and begin again to restore the hopes for which so many brave men had given their “last full measure of devotion”?

Lee’s surrender occurred on April 9, 1865.  Grant returned to Washington, but turned down an invitation to join the President and Mrs. Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre on April 14.  We talk about all of the generals the South lost during the Civil War.  But in the end, the Confederacy could claim the post-war victory over generals.  Because, that night Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by an unemployed pro-Confederate actor named John Wilkes Booth.  He entered Lincoln’s box at the theatre and shot him in the head.  Then, waving a knife, Booth leaped onstage shouting the Virginia state motto, “Such is always the fate of tyrants,” and then escaped, despite having broken his leg.  The same night, a Booth accomplice stabbed Secretary of State Seward, who later recovered.  A third conspirator, assigned to Vice President Johnson, failed to attack.  Union troops hunted down Booth within two weeks.  Whether they shot him or he had already committed suicide when they found him is unclear.  However, Booth never made it back alive for a trial.

[Those of you who read Manhunt for your Book Review know the details of the assassination better than I can recount them to you here.]

There is no doubt that Lincoln’s humanity, his awareness of the terrible costs of war, his determination to save the Union, and his eloquence set him apart as one of this country’s most extraordinary presidents.  From one perspective, the Civil War established the power of the federal government, with a broad range of constitutional powers to effect the general welfare.  Remember, we talked about the fact that many were fighting for the right of individual states to make their own decisions — however, in order to make that fight, a strong central government was necessary to coordinate the war.  From another perspective, the long war was over, but the memories of that event would fester for years to come.  About 3 million American men, a third of all free males between the ages of 15 and 59 had served in the army.  The experience of fighting, of mixing with all sorts of people from many places, of traveling far from home had lifted former soldiers out of their familiar local world and widened their vision.  Just fighting the war had made the concept of national union a reality.  During the war, the Republicans seized the opportunity to pass legislation that would foster national union and economic growth.  They passed the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, setting aside huge tracts of public land to finance transcontinental railroads.  And the Homestead Act of 1862 provided yeoman farmers with cheaper and easier access to public lands.

But what would happen to the slaves?  And what about Southerners?  Should they be allowed to keep their property?  Should they be punished for the rebellion?

POST-CIVIL WAR RECOVERY EFFORTS

So President Lincoln died too soon after the war to put into effect any of his ideas about rebuilding the South.  Your textbook points to some efforts to start the rebuilding process as early as December 1863, when Lincoln began offering amnesty to southerners in areas that were already occupied by Union troops, if they would take an oath of allegiance.  Lincoln was willing to recognize the government of former Confederate states established by a group of citizens equal to 10% of those voting in 1860, as long as the group swore to support the Constitution and to accept the abolition of slavery.  He began to restore state governments in three former Confederate states on that basis.  He believed that generosity and goodwill would pave the way for reconciliation.  However, Lincoln never received much support from Congress on his plan, because they felt the South had to pay a higher price than that.  Both Congress and the President failed to resolve those disagreements on how to bring southern states back into the Union before Lincoln was killed.

It was left then to President Johnson to take the initiative, and he was equally generous to the South.  He himself was a southern Democrat and something of a white supremacist.  He issued two proclamations setting forth his reconstruction program.  He maintained, as Lincoln had always maintained, that the southern states had never left the Union.  He offered “amnesty and pardon, with restoration of all rights of property” to all former Confederates who would take an oath of allegiance to the Constitution and the Union of the United States.  Exceptions were wealthy Confederate leaders and landowners who had to apply for individual pardons.  By fall of 1865, most had been pardoned.  In addition, Johnson accepted the reconstructed government of North Carolina and laid out similar plans by which the other southern states could reestablish state government.  By the President’s plan, all of the southern states had completed reconstruction and elected members to the Congress by December 1865.  Less than 8 months after Appomattox, the southern states were back in the Union; however, Congress had been in recess for the 8 months after Lincoln’s assassination, and when they returned to Washington, would suddenly face a very different set of new delegates to office.  Taken on its own merit, Johnson’s reconstruction plan might have worked.  But by restoring many of the wealthy southern leadership to its former place in society, he freed them to devise their own ways to regulate the newly freed slaves of the south.

Known as the “Black Codes,” they were really just another form of slavery for blacks.  The Codes gave blacks the right to sue in court and legalize marriages; however, they created other obstacles that limited their freedoms.  In labor contracts, they were required to complete the term of work or forfeit all wages earned to date and risk prosecution for failure to complete the work. There were vagrancy clauses, where any person under the age of 18 who was orphaned or appeared to be inadequately cared for by parents could be impressed into work and cared for and supervised by a suitable master.  Such masters also had the right to inflict punishment.  Any persons over the age of 18 found to be unemployed or determined to be assembling with others publicly were deemed to be vagrants and risked fines and imprisonment.  Blacks could not carry firearms.  Freedom of speech was also outlawed.

The evidence of such “black codes” in the South added fuel to the fire when Congress reconvened later in 1865.  Radical Republicans in Congress wanted stronger measures than Johnson was taking, and asserted their constitutional authority to thwart his plan.  They simply refused to allow the newly pardoned and elected senators and representatives from the Confederate states to have seats in Congress.  They established the Joint Committee on Reconstruction to investigate conditions in the South.  It reported disorder and resistance in the South, as well as poor treatment of freedmen.  In 1866, Congress passed a civil rights bill to protect black rights.  It declared that Negroes were citizens of the United States and it denied the states the power to restrict their rights to testify in court or hold property.  Although President Johnson vetoed the bill, it passed Congress by a two-thirds majority, the first time in American history that a major piece of legislation became law over a President’s veto.

PRESIDENT JOHNSON VS. CONGRESS

The problem with Congress seating the newly-elected Southern senators and representatives was a realistic one.  If they were allowed in immediately, it would shift the balance of power to the Democrats, and the Republicans were not ready to surrender power of government to their defeated former enemies.  And in many instances, that’s exactly what they were — Georgia elected Alexander Stephens to the Senate.  He was the former vice-president of the Confederacy and he was still in prison when they elected him!  Many other of the newly-elected delegates were once high officials in the Confederacy and four were Confederate generals.  In addition, public opinion in the North was still a little suspicious of the South.  Most northerners wanted to move very cautiously toward granting full political rights to ex-Confederates.  I mentioned before the residue of hatred and bitterness after the war that many Southerners continued to feel.  It was realistic for northerners to want to move cautiously.  And the existence of the Black Codes only reinforced the position of the North.  Instead of a quick return to complete self-government, much of the South remained under federal domination for more than a decade.

But the President stood firm on his own personal policies, virtually separating himself from the Republican party under whose ticket he had originally been elected Vice President along with Lincoln.  When Congress passed measures dealing with the former slaves, Johnson vetoed the legislation.  Congress also submitted the 14th Amendment to the states for ratification.  It specified that no state should deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.  Johnson had no trouble convincing the southern states against ratification.  In fact, all of the former Confederate states except Tennessee refused to ratify.  Ultimately, Congress made ratification of the 14th Amendment a prerequisite if the South wanted to seat any of its Southern elected delegates in Congress.

So it was ultimately ratified, providing permanent constitutional protection of the civil rights of freedmen by defining them as citizens, granting black male suffrage and cancelling the 3/5s clause in the Constitution.  In addition, the amendment denied leaders of the Confederacy the right to hold national or state political office, except by act of Congress.  It also refused to consider any Confederate debts for repayment — under President Johnson’s plan to restore property rights, many Southerners had submitted bills to Congress for loss of their slave workers! — and denied claims for compensation by former slaveowners for their lost property.  Besides settling the Negro question and other related matters, this 14th Amendment marked a major milestone along the road to the centralization of political power in the nation, for it greatly reduced the power of all the states.  In this sense it confirmed the great change wrought by the Civil War:  the growth of a more complex, more closely integrated social and economic structure requiring national supervision.  Few persons understood this aspect of the amendment at the time.

Three Reconstruction Acts, some of which became Amendments to the Constitution, were passed in 1867.  The first divided the southern states into five military districts in which military commanders had broad powers to maintain order and protect the rights of property and persons.  Congress also defined a new process for readmitting a state.  Qualified voters, which included blacks and excluded reconstructed rebels, would elect delegates to state constitutional conventions, which then would write new constitutions guaranteeing black suffrage.  After the new voters of the states had ratified their constitutions, elections would be held to choose governors and state legislatures.  If these new constitutions proved satisfactory to Congress, and if the new governments ratified the 14th amendment, their representatives would be admitted to Congress and military rule ended.

At first, Southerners preferred to continue living under military rule rather than observe all the rules placed upon them by the Northern Congress and certainly to delay allowing blacks the right to vote.  But then Congress passed a second act, requiring the military authorities to register voters and supervise the election of delegates to constitutional conventions.  If white southerners continued to refuse to be involved, the black participants would carry the majority vote.  So, eventually, white southerners started observing the requirements.  In this way, the will of Congress was finally carried out.  In June 1868, Arkansas was readmitted to the Union.  But it was not until July 1870 that the last southern state, Georgia, qualified with Congress for readmission.

Radical Republicans in Congress continued to butt heads with President Johnson throughout his term of office.  President Johnson’s stubbornness in supporting the reconstruction amendments only made the radical Republicans in Congress more determined to defeat him.  It led them to attempt a kind of grand revision of the federal government, which almost destroyed the balance between judicial, executive and legislative power in government — consider that Congress had established the military districts in the South, instead of the President, who serves as Commander-in-Chief.  A series of measures passed between 1866 and 1868 increased the authority of Congress over the army, over the process of amending the Constitution, and over the Cabinet and lesser appointive office.  When the President began firing cabinet members who sympathized with the radical Republicans, Congress limited his presidential appointment powers.  The Tenure of Office Act required Senate approval in order for a cabinet member to be removed from office.  Even the size of the Supreme Court was reduced and the range of its jurisdiction over civil rights cases was limited.

President Johnson refused to be pushed around by Congress.  Early in 1868, he tried to replace the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, because he was outspoken in support of Republican goals.  The House grabbed the opportunity and voted to impeach Johnson for violation of the Tenure of Office Act.  Johnson was a poor President and out of touch with public opinion, but he had done nothing to merit ejection from office under the Constitution for committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.”  Although he had a low opinion of Negroes, it is unhistorical to condemn him as a reactionary on this ground.  Johnson believed that he was fighting to preserve constitutional government.  So when Congress passed laws taking away powers granted him under the Constitution, he refused to submit.

Johnson’s lawyers easily proved that he had removed Stanton in an effort to show that the Tenure of Office Act was unconstitutional.  He was tried by the Senate, but was one vote short of being officially removed as President.  Had he been convicted, it is more than likely that future battles between Congress and the President would have employed the weapon of impeachment much more freely, with the result that the independence of the Executive branch would have been destroyed.  As your textbook points out, in 1868, some Republicans simply took a stand for balanced government and refused to risk a future where the legislative branch could have more power than the executive branch.  The President was finally acquitted and was able to complete the remaining months of his Presidency to the next election.

POST-WAR STATUS OF SOUTHERN SOCIETY

Many white southerners could not imagine a society without blacks in bondage.  It was the basis not only of social order but of a life style, particularly by larger slaveholders, who had long regarded it as the perfect model of gentility and civilization.  Having lost control of all that was familiar and revered, whites feared everything from losing their cheap labor supply to having to sit next to blacks on trains.  The mildest of their fears was the inconvenience of doing various jobs and chores they had rarely done before, like housework.  Many worried that blacks wanted social equality.  The worst fears of southern whites were rape and revenge.  From their perspective, impudence and pretensions of social equality would lead to intermarriage and the destruction of the purity of the white race.

Blacks were cautious about what freedom meant.  The first thing they did to test the reality of freedom was to leave the plantation, if only for a few hours.  Some returned to an earlier master, but others went to towns and cities for work and to find schools, churches and associations with other blacks, where they would be safe from whippings and retaliations.  Many left the plantation in search of members of their families.  Legal marriage was important to blacks, to establish the legitimacy of children and gain access to land titles and other economic opportunities.  For many newly-married blacks, the initial goal was to create a traditional family life.  Additionally, blacks chose surnames; names associated with the concept of independence, such as Washington, were common.  Masks were dropped, and old expressions of humility were discarded.  For the blacks, these were necessary symbolic expressions of selfhood.  But, the primary goal of newly freed blacks was the acquisition of their own land.  Only through economic independence could former slaves prove to themselves that emancipation was real.

But money to buy land was extremely scarce, particularly for the freedmen, so the system known as sharecropping developed.  Instead of cultivating his lands by gang labor as previously done by the slaves before the war, now a planter broke his estate up into small units, which were given over to individual black families.  The planter provided housing, agricultural tools and other supplies, and the black family provided the labor.  The landlord told them what to grow and how much, and took a share, usually half of the harvest.  Thus, the sharecroppers were semiautonomous, but remained tied to the landlord’s will for economic survival. This system created the incentive needed to keep the sharecropper on the job in all seasons and also gave him the chance to rise in the world.  He became the independent manager of his own acres, and if he was successful, he could save money and eventually buy land of his own.  Of course, the most important benefit for an ex-slave who became a sharecropper was what he gained in self-confidence and personal dignity.

To whites, these behaviors were seen as acts of insolence, insubordination and putting on airs.  Many whites felt the key to reestablishing white dominance was the “black codes” that state legislatures passed in the first year after the end of war.  Many of the codes granted freedmen the right to marry, sue and be sued, testify in court and hold property.  But these rights were qualified.  Complicated passages in the codes explained under exactly what circumstances blacks could testify against whites or own property or exercise other rights of free persons.  The crucial provisions of the black codes were intended to regulate the freedmen’s economic status and continue to provide labor for the restoration of a plantation-based society.  Many of the black codes were passed to induce the federal government to withdraw its remaining troops from the South.

One of the social reform organizations implemented soon after the war was the Freedmen’s Bureau.  It served as an employment agency and attempted to monitor the economic well-being of the blacks.  It registered newly-freed blacks and gave them surnames, and set up schools for them.  It issued emergency rations of food and provided clothing and shelter to the homless and hungry victims of the war.  It established medical care and hospital facilities; provided funds for transportation for the thousands of freedmen and white refugees dislocated by the war and helped blacks search for and put their families back together, including arranging for legal marriage ceremonies.  Despite its high goals, it was desparately underfunded (Congress underestimated the fact that there were 4 million freedmen in the South) had limited success in accomplishing much during Reconstruction.

Within the first decade after the war’s end, land ownership in the South was concentrated into fewer and even larger holdings than before.  The wealthiest 1/10th of the population owned about 60% of the real estate.  Large planters increasingly concentrated on one crop, usually cotton, and relied on the international market for their profits.  This resulted in a steady drop in food production in the postwar period.  Reliance on one-crop farming meant that a new credit system emerged whereby most farmers, black and white, depended on local merchants for renting seed, farm implements and animals, provisions, housing and land.  Freedmen thus became tied to the same land, either as contract field workers or tenant farmers.  A system of debt peonage replaced the slavery they had known before, and it insured planters of a continuing cheap labor supply to grow cotton and other staples in the South.  At the same time, it inevitably placed the freedmen in a new state of perpetual indebtedness.

The tradition of black community self-help survived in organized churches and schools of the antebellum free Negro communities and in the invisible cultural institutions of the slave quarters.  Religion was vital.  There was an explosion in the growth of membership in black churches.  Black ministers continued their tradition of community leadership.  Many led efforts to oppose discrimination, some entered politics.  Black schools became community centers.  Most freedmen eagerly accepted the opportunity to learn.  Nearly all appreciated the immense importance of knowing how to read and write; the sight of elderly Negroes poring laboriously over elementary texts beside their grandchildren was common everywhere.  In addition to education, they published newspapers, provided training in trades and farming, and promoted political participation and land ownership.

But white leaders continued to pursue efforts to control and limit black freedoms.  Your textbook mentions the new Democratic party of the South known as Redeemers, who believed that the government should not interfere in state commerce and who were strongly united as white supremacists.  They used racial violence, intimidation and coercion to restore white power in the South — and successfully kept many blacks (most of whom were Republicans) away from the voting booths, so that Democrats could retain the political power in the South.  The Ku Klux Klan was one of several secret organizations that used force and violence against black and white Republicans to keep them from exercising their rights.  In some states, like Mississippi and Louisiana, plans were specifically legislated to allow Democratic clubs to arm militias and march through black areas, breaking up Republican meetings and provoking riots to justify the killing of hundreds of blacks.  Armed men were posted during voter registration to intimidate Republicans.  Klan members were dedicated to driving the blacks out of politics.  In 1868, they opened a campaign of intimidation on a broad front.  Some of them even claimed to be ghosts of Confederate soldiers as they burned crosses and spread terrifying rumors to persuade the freedmen that it was unhealthy for them to participate in politics.  Your text refers mentions the Force Acts which made it a federal crime to interfere with an individual’s voting rights.  These helped to suspend much of the Klan efforts in the South.

When the Republicans successfully elected Ulysses S. Grant to the Presidency in 1872, another type of movement against the blacks began.  Instead of hiding behind masks and operating in the dark, these terrorists donned red shirts, organized into military companies, and paraded openly.  While they appealed to southern whites to reclaim their supremacy in government, groups like the Mississippi red-shirts seized militant Negroes and whipped them publicly.  Killings were frequent, and the blacks soon learned to stay home on election day.  Federal Government efforts did little to stop the reign of terror against blacks in the South.

But the political opposition had its own influence.  White southerners who allied with the northern Republican Party, were called Scalawags.  These supporters may have represented almost a quarter of the white population in the South.  If you think back to the class divisions of Southern white before the Civil War, fully 75% of all whites owned no slaves at all, so it is surprising that there were not more of those aligning with the Republicans in the post-war era.

Another group of white Republican Party supporters were called Carpetbaggers.  These were actually northerners who moved to the South after the war, hoping to have an economic advantage over the debilitated southerners.  Their group included former teachers and individuals investing in the cotton industry.  The Scalawags were looked down upon, because most of them came from the poorer classes.  The Carpetbaggers were condemned as outsiders, skewing the voting trends against a white Democratic resurgence in the South.

Even today, you will occasionally hear someone referred to as a “carpetbagger,” and it still has the same connotation, particularly here in Texas, where so many, what I call “Yankees,” have moved South for jobs or the warmer temperatures.  Texas was a predominantly Democratic state for most decades of the 20^th century, and it’s only been in the last quarter century that the voting trends have shifted.

THE PRESIDENCY

Ulysses S. Grant succeeded Andrew Johnson as President for the remaining years of Reconstruction in the South.  Remember, Grant was a war hero, General-in-Chief of the Union Army from March 1864 to the end of the war.  Qualities that had made Grant a fine military leader for a democracy — his dislike of political maneuvering and his simple belief that the popular will could best be observed in the actions of Congress — made him a poor Chief Executive.  He managed Reconstruction in the South by simply allowing it to run its course, occasionally providing military force when needed.  As President, he presided over the Government much as he had run the Army.  In fact, he brought a large part of his Army staff to the White House.  He was independent-minded and honest, but he naively accepted handsome presents from admirers.  His most serious weakness as President was his failure to put through any coherent program to deal with the economic and social problems of the post-war period, and an even bigger problem was his inability to cope with corruption in government.  Out of some misplaced belief in the sanctity of friendship, he did nothing to prevent the scandals that disgraced his administration, so-called friends who were not above using his good name to advance their own interests at the country’s expense.  Regardless, Grant still won reelection easily in 1872 with a popular majority of nearly 800,000.  It was during his second term that the full story of government corruption unfolded.

END OF RECONSTRUCTION — WHO GAINED, LOST?

When Reconstruction officially ended in the 1870s, it was the Northerners who had clearly gained.  First, they achieved an end to slavery.  Then, there was little damage to industry and property in the north.  And when the war was over, Northerners returned to their normal lives.  The South would never be normal, to the degree that southern whites understood it, again.

However, despite the huge losses in property and wealth, they gradually reestablished their superiority over the new freedmen.  Blacks were free, and even with discrimination and plenty of other obstacles in their path, they made gains in education and in economic and family survival that would never have been possible before the war.

The Reconstruction Era was a decade-long attempt to force the South to treat former slaves the same as most Americans living in the North.  However, it would prove impossible to change the hearts and minds of a population of whites who could not overcome their own prejudice.  To that end, as your textbook points out, racism undermined Reconstruction, and as “Jim Crow” laws became the norm throughout most of the South, it would be almost a century before enough new generations could recast quality of life for everyone.  Nonetheless, slavery was gone.  It remained to be fought in the minds of white southern supremacists for years to come