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As someone who spent a decade researching and writing about the Civil War,* I am distressed when it is discussed, in what passes for civil discourse these days, as if it were a simplistic comic-book story with superheroes on one side, arch villains on the other, nothing in between, nothing to think about here.
Perhaps you will not agree with me that to understand a civil war, or any war, one must go beyond the reasons given by the leaders who initiated it. (If you do not, you must then believe we went to war in Iraq to save the world from Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, and I wish you well.) If you believe that thousands of young men in Minnesota, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and such states voluntarily (at the beginning of the war, the draft came later) left their homes, flocked to their county seats, elected their colonels and marched south hundreds of miles to fight and die only in order to abolish slavery, then I have a slightly used bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. If you believe that Confederate soldiers on the verge of starvation, ill-equipped and -supplied in the face of the Union’s overwhelming strategic advantages, fought on past all expectations only because they wanted to preserve slavery, then the price for that bridge just went up.
Those who oversimplify the past are condemned to repeat it, because they oversimplify the present, too, and haven’t a clue about what’s going on around them. Let me bring up a few things other than slavery that we must be aware of if we want to grasp what happened to this country in the 1860s. Before it happens again.
Here’s something almost everyone has forgotten about that time.
If, today, you ask a resident of Europe where she is from, she will never say, “I am a citizen of the European Union.” She will say, “I am French.” Or Spanish, or whatever. She will name her country. Similarly if in 1861, you asked an American, “Where are you from?” it would not have occurred to him to say “the United States.” He would have said, “Virginia,” or “Ohio.” Northerner or Southerner, his nationality — his identity — was defined by his state, and whatever patriotic allegiance he felt was toward that state.
Attitudes toward the federal government differed, North to South. In both, people were acutely aware that America was, as Lincoln phrased it, “the last best hope of earth” because it was the only place on the planet where ordinary people could buy and hold land as a right, not at the pleasure of a monarch to whom they paid rent forever, or from whom they got land as a reward for service. In the North, the Union was seen as a great enabler of growth, settlement, industrialization, and prosperity. In the South it was more of a nuisance, imposing taxes, regulations and restrictions on the only two things that created real wealth in the South — tobacco and cotton.
When the South threatened secession, it threatened the survival of the Union, and it was that threat that brought the farm boys and factory workers of the North swarming into the recruiting stations. When the North marched troops into the South, it invaded the countries to which the people of the South had sworn allegiance, and it was to defend against that invasion that the farm boys and grocery store clerks of the South swarmed their recruiting stations.
Remember that Virginia (east and west) voted resoundingly against secession and remained opposed until Lincoln marched troops through Virginia to retake Fort Sumter. Most ordinary people in the South did not see secession as a rebellion against their country so much as a defense of their country.
By the way, it’s fashionable these days to call all who fought for the Confederacy traitors. A technical point: every one of them was “unconditionally and without reservation” pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1868.
I bring these things up not to diminish the role of slavery in the war, but simply to remind that there were other considerations in play, some of which were more powerful in the minds of ordinary people. One of the most powerful and least recognized aftereffects of the war was that the phrase “the United States,” which had always been plural in common usage, became and remained singular. It is no accident that the principal inscription in the magnificent Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC honors him for saving the Union.
It was a complicated business. Oversimplifying the past does no service to the present.
* Two books, The Shenandoah in Flames, Time-Life Books, and The Guns of Cedar Creek, Harper and Row; five years as editor of Civil War Magazine and president of the Civil War Society; founding director and president of the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation; articles for such magazines as Smithsonian and Historic Preservation.
Very well said if things were simple we would all be living in an economic utopia and I would have the flying car I felt I would have by this time, unfortunately, no one seems to want to read anything that is longer than what fits in one of those witty meme text boxes on Facebook. Thank you again for taking the time to put out text that feeds the mind.
Complicated – yes! And with all the moralizing, it’s easy to overlook the shocking imposition of the Industrial Revolution on the agricultural and manufacturing paradigm that had fueled civilization, virtually unchanged, all the way back to the glory days Egypt and Sumer.
By the mid-nineteenth century such innovations as the steam engine, more efficient technologies in wind and water power, metalurgical developments, inventions of all sorts of gadgets, interchangeable parts, and mass production techniques had largely obviated the need for conscripted labor in the new mechanized North. At the same time, rich soil and a benevolent climate fostered a family farm culture that provided plenty of food for the growing population above the Mason-Dixon line. Meanwhile, such innovations did precious little to enhance the productivity of the anachronistic plantation system in the South.*
It seems that an individual typically adopts an ethical mindset that his material and social circumstances will allow. The same may be said for a society. The folks up north – many of them anyway – adopted an Abolitionist stance because they could afford to do so. After all, freeing the slaves seemed like the right thing to do. However, most in the South could abide no such luxury. One might conclude, then, that it wasn’t the Civil War that ended chattel slavery – it was the Industrial Revolution.
*the cotton-gin was an outlier; it speeded the processing of raw cotton, but in so doing, it put pressure on planters to produce larger harvests, thus increasing the demand for more slave labor….Progress is seldom linear!
I saw an interview not too long ago with Shelby Foote, and he was asked, knowing what he knows now, which side would he have fought with in the Civil War, and he responded by saying that he would undoubtedly fight with his home state, Mississippi, probably join a local regiment, the Greenville Volunteers or some such, because that’s where his people are, and that’s where his heart is.
I found that interesting … that’s where my people are.
Yes, most of participants caught in the worst of Civil War savagery were not fighting for or against black chattel slavery, because black chattel slavery didn’t mean sh*t to em either way.
And in my opinion, based on many thousands of fairly intimate interactions with white men over the years, that viewpoint hasn’t changed in slightest.
Tom I enjoy your blog but your argument here is inadvertently oversimplifying the subject the oversimplification of which you are trying to counterpoise.
It’s one thing to argue that neither support for nor opposition to the *ideal* of abolition per se can be said to have been the popular motivation on either side; in fact I concur. Quite another to equate that largely illusory *ideal* with the *actual* economic importance of black slavery – and later on formal/informal black serfdom – in the southern economy. Slavery – and later formal/effective serfdom – and the huge export surpluses earned from primary commodities produced by black slave/serf labour intermeshed with the vast majority of white southerners’ material stake in defending the slave system. The grave and insurmountable threats posed to the industrialised states of the north by a south trading independently with Europe, retaining the ability to own and subcontract a labour force that works for free and cannot negotiate terms of employment, and the inherent instability of rebellious often majority black populations which wanted to, and did, revolt at every opportunity, were all important factors motivating the average northern white man to subjugate the south.
There was also the rarely discussed issue of new, non-British European immigrants – who weren’t ‘white’ in those days because ‘race’ is a euphemism for ‘class’ and not a valid biological category – finding common cause with black, Indian and Chicano populations in their fight against the genocidal master-race communist system favoured by the $on$ of Albion.
Any discussion of motivations premissed on attachment to a ‘home’ or ‘land’ in the middle of a cornfield wholly outside the bounds of the known universe cannot account for the inconvenient, complex realities outlined above and thus inadvertently serves to attenuate confusion about the causes of the Civil War rather than allaying it.
Off topic: Tom Lewis, I have spent a few hours over at a site called wrongkindofgreen dot org and I think you may be interested. It was new to me, via moneycircus.
My friends from the South have taught me a good deal about the civil war which I did not know. Considering the real basis for wars- all of them- I don’t think erasing them does any good in figuring out how to end them. Nice post.
Thank you Mr. Lewis. I respect your quiet courage more and more.
Thank you, sir.
Here, here!
Interesting story from my ancestral stomping grounds: In 1859 militant abolitionist John Brown and his band of merry men seized the Federal Armory at Harper’s Ferry, Va. (now W.Va.). His mini-rebellion was thwarted by an attachment of Marines under the command of one Colonel Robert E. Lee. Brown – already a hero among Northern liberals – was martyred at the end of a hangman’s rope a few months later, thereby solidifying his status as abolition’s messiah.
By 1861 with war on the horizon, Lee reluctantly resigned his commission in the United States Army, to throw his fortunes in with the Commonwealth of Virginia.
True – Lee was pro-slavery. But I wonder if his come-to-Jesus moment regarding the slavery issue didn’t take place that day at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, and his confrontation with the man he considered to be a “raving lunatic” – John Brown.
History can turn on such odd events.
Why it’s worth studying. It’s also interesting to remember that Lincoln offered Lee command of the Union armies, requiring him to choose between his state and the United States.
There’s a reason why I can’t stand the countless good-versus-evil save-the-planet/kingdom/galaxy/whatever movies churned out by Hollywood nowadays. Truth be told, I haven’t stepped inside a cinema for more than twenty years now.
Here’s an article I discovered by the way that explores the possibility that bankers funded the Civil War.
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/07/22/did-bankers-foment-the-civil-war/
Have to say this isn’t the first time I’ve read about wars being funded by bankers. They sure are nice people. Yup.