Civil War Most of Us,

¶ … Civil War

Most of us, no matter where we spent our early years in the United States, were taught a version of American history in which the Civil War (and, indeed, the decade leading up to it) were marked by first an antagonism and then a bellicosity between a universally slaveholding South and a universally non-slaveholding North. A more careful reading of the historical record, however, shows quite clearly that the picture is rather more complicated.

The issue of slavery was more complicated than the usual picture of it, which does not given sufficient weight to the economic perspective and which fails to examine the differences between slave-holding and non-slave-holding Southerners. Most histories of the Civil War also leave out the shifting dynamics of what was happening in civil society on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.

J.D.B. DeBow, in his Interest in Slavery of Southern Nonslaveholders, wrote in 1861 that secession was the only possible path for the South because it needed slaves to support its economy. While this fact is widely acknowledged about the Civil War, DeBow elevates this one aspect above all others, arguing that the central economic engines of the South were entirely dependent upon slave labor.

Not only did the slaves reduce the cost of labor (since they required room and board alone and provided for new labor through "natural increase") but they also drove down labor costs among the population of free workers because they had to compete with slaves. This attitude, obviously, was not one that most laborers themselves would support.

The non-slaveholder of the South is assured that the remuneration afforded by his labor, over and above the expense of living, is larger than that which is afforded by the same labor in the free States. To be convinced of this, he has only to compare the value of labor in the Southern cities with those of the North, and to take note annually of the large number of laborers who are represented to be out of employment there, and who migrate to our shores

(http://civilwarcauses.org/debow.htm)

Stephanie McCurry examines a very different aspect of the Civil War, but in even more significant ways (not surprising since she has the advantage of the intervening years to provide clarity) demonstrates how any accurate rendering of the war must include far more than what happened in battle. In much the same way that World War II would open up opportunities for civilian women at home, she writes that the Civil War allowed white women the chance to move out of the domestic sphere into the larger world.

The South's position, she writes, was not just about slavery but also encompassed a widely conservative view of society, and its defeat allowed for the enfranchisement of women as well as freed slaves. As these groups began to advocate for their own rights, they forced the Confederacy to fight (at least psychologically and economically) on a number of fronts at once, which was one of the key elements leading to the Union victory.

Women Numerous and Armed

In Chapter Five of her book Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, Stephanie McCurry writes about one of the lesser known (indeed, barely known) series of events during the Civil War: A series of riots led primarily by women who were frustrated to the point of violence by the lack of food. That this should have occurred during the Civil War, on the other hand, should not have been a surprise given that such riots have been a staple of wars since the classical world on. War brings on privations in the civilian sector that are usually downplayed in the aftermath of the war.

The stories that are most often told of the Civil War focus on the most important battles (Gettysburg, Bull Run, and Bull Run again), Lincoln's assassination, and the political and military pushes that led to the legal end of slavery. What is generally left out of the picture is any detailed description of the home front, especially in terms of how women were affected by the war. War diverts resources away from all forms of production that do not directly aid the war benefit, and even sometimes from those that do directly benefit the war effort.

The South was especially vulnerable to the kinds of food shortages that come to bear in any extended period of war because the great majority of its arable land was planted in non-food crops. Cotton and tobacco were the primary crops of the South before the Civil War, which had been a good economic strategy so long as trade routes were open because these crops were highly profitable. Once trade routes were shut down by the North, the value of the South's crops disappeared: Cotton and tobacco could not be eaten and there was enough time or resources once the war started to convert the large expanses of land to food crops.

The food riots during the war reflected a scarcity of food that had gotten worse during the war but that had already existed before Fort Sumter. Tax policies that favored tobacco and cotton meant that there were ongoing food shortages in the South that the war (and the resulting deflation of Confederate currency) made far worse. By March and April 1863, these structural problems in the economic and agricultural infrastructure of the South boiled over, made worse by a drought in 1862.

Both soldiers and women had reached their breaking point: They broke into stores, rampaged across planted fields, and ate farm animals. Of these two groups, it was the women's rioting that reflected the more important social changes that were happening in the South. The women had had an implicit contract with the men who ran the state and the army: The men would make decisions that would ensure that families would have enough to eat and a safe world in which to live.

McCurry writes that there were a dozen food riots in the spring of 1863 that saw up to hundreds of women violently attacked stores, government depots, granaries, railroad depots, and saltworks. (These last were highly valuable targets in an era when salt was the only effective food preservative.) the women came armed with everything from Bowie knives to repeater rifles, opening their own fronts of this bloody war.

The Terrain of Freedom

Berlin et al. ask their readers to widen their view of the causes and consequences of the Civil War by placing the American conflict within the sphere of Western democratic movements. While it is common to assess the American Revolution within the context of the Enlightenment that also brought egalitarian ideas to France (and brought its king to the guillotine), the Civil War is much less often examined within the larger context of ways in which democracy was being remade.

The Civil War is depicted as an essentially domestic affair, and this makes perfect sense seen from an American perspective. The cost in lives as well as wealth that the war exacted of Americans makes it difficult for Americans to consider how the war fits into a larger context. We have been taught to look for the answers to how the country came to be embroiled in a conflict that would stain its people for at least a century within the dynamics of American culture, politics, and economy. And certainly there is a clear necessity to understand how longstanding conflicts within American society to understand what brought the country to that point of bloodshed at that particular moment.

But no country is an island: The Civil War would not have had the shape that it did if European powers had not brought to the Civil War dynamics of their own. Both France and Britain teetered on the edge of entering the war as full-fledged combatants, attracted to a similar attitude of governance: The South was an aristocracy in much the same way that England and France were. Berlin et al. write that this essential similarity between philosophies of governance between the Confederacy and the two greatest powers of Europe drew the three nations together. but, they also write, there were cautionary winds blowing over Europe as well.

The monarchy of England, while still strong, was fading in power, ceding power to Parliament and thus the people. Supporting the South would have meant for England retreating along a path that the nation was determined to go forward on. France had smothered the power of its own revolution by bringing back its monarchy, first in its Bourbon form, and then (twice) as an empire that mirrored the empire of England. Thus is would have made sense for the French to join in with the Confederacy since the two were embracing imperialist forms of governance.

However, while such an alliance might have made sense, French leaders understood that the winds of political change were at their backs. The democratic ideals of the French Revolution had been diminished by the incestuous violence that surrounded it, and thus the French understood that any path that lead them back toward monarchy in the stricter sense would once again bring the country to misery. In some ways, the Civil War was the analogue of the Terror for Americans: It was the bloodthirsty incestuous violence that allowed the nation to move onward to a full embrace of democracy, joining itself to Europe as the world began to tip toward democratic ideas and ideals.

White Supremacy

Stephen Kantrowitz's biography of Benjamin Tillman demonstrates how he can be seen as a symbol for an entire cohort of Southerners of his generation, people (mostly but not exclusively men) who could neither understand nor tolerate the new order that had formally instituted itself after Emancipation. They could not understand a world in which black men were suddenly their legal equals. Tillman, and others like him, lived in a world that told them that blacks had to be treated like equals even though many white Southerners did not see their black compatriots as even being fully human.

This set up an internal conflict that many chose to act out by adhering to a philosophy of White Supremacy, a philosophy that allowed them to deny the political realities of Reconstruction and to plan (in ways that only partly proved to be ineffective) in which the old order would persist in fact if not in law. White Supremacy allowed white Southerners to put aside the inconvenient realities of a world in which black men could vote, hold land, marry as they wished, take their fate into their own hands.

All these rights had been recognized by the Constitutional amendments that recognized the rights of black men (and to a lesser extent black women). For racist Southerners, such rights simply did not exist: It was not that they did not want to recognize the rights of blacks; rather men like Tillman instituted a worldview in which only whites has rights. They wished to return to a "truth" stated in the Constitution -- that black slaves were "worth" only three-fifths of what a white man was worth.

Tillman created coalitions around three of the most important and enduring principles of white supremacists from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Movement: To deny blacks any real access to the franchise, to punish whites who attempted to bury the traditions of the past with a more egalitarian vision of what the future might be, and to limit the power of the federal government both the create political policies and to enforce those policies through economic sanctions.

Kantrowitz emphasizes not the morally problematic nature of Tillman's thoughts and actions; he takes these as obvious from our historical perspective but the reasons that it proved to be so ineffective. Tillman focused on the change in legalities that had occurred during the Civil War and so missed the larger social and cultural changes, changes on a scale that could not be dismissed by a retrograde racism. The New South (and the nation in large measure) would be built upon the foundation of connections between freed blacks and whites who were either proponents of integration, just saw a good business opportunity, or both.

Tillman, who treasured the values of the Old South, was limited in his vision of what the future could be. These limitations on his vision are what brought about his failure and the failure of others like him. As Kantrowitz describes him, he was a revolutionary but not a radical, and his ideas of what could be accomplished were too small to overcome the momentum of the new South.

The New South

Political orator and sometime-journalist Henry Grady popularized the term the "New South" as a part of his campaign to knit together the states after the Civil War. His father had been killed in battle and Grady himself had been a witness to much of the most terrible violence of the war and he was no doubt inspired by the thought of preventing such bloodshed and loss of life again as he traveled around the country extorted people to restore the comity of the country.

To what extent he was successful is hard to say, since his efforts were joined with those of many others who wished to reunited the country on a cultural basis. The fact that the nation had been formally and legally joined again made little difference for many Southerners who believed that the "South would rise again." A war produces victors and losers, not a single united set of people who wish to follow the beliefs of the winners. Grady understood this: Indeed it may well have taken a Southerner to understand this position.

Grady understood that key to the South's ability to rejoin the Union on anything like equal terms required a South that had a secure economic base that was far more diverse that it had had before the war. Grady, in a speech delivered in 1886 advertised the readiness of Southerners to regain their civilian status:

The soldier stepped from the trenches into the furrow; horses that had charged Federal guns march before the plow, and fields that ran red with human blood in April were green with the harvest in June; women reared in luxury cut up their dresses and made breeches for their husbands, and, with a patience and heroism that fit women always as a garment, gave their hands to work. (Grady, the New South)

Thomas Watson, in his 1892 essay "The Negro Question in the South," addresses an issue that would become an important one over the next fifty years in American politics: The way in which parties enforced loyalty among certain groups. In a strategy that Tammany Hall would have been proud of, Northern Republicans continually reminded Southern blacks how much the latter owed to the former. Watson writes that the Southern black was:

Reminded constantly that the North had emancipated him; that the North had given him the ballot; that the North had upheld him in his citizenship; that the South was his enemy, and meant to deprive him of his suffrage and put him "back into slavery," it is no wonder he has played as nicely into the hands of the Republicans as his former owner has played into the hands of the Northern Democrats. (http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/spl/tomwatson.html)

Watson is describing the ways in which the major consequence of the Civil War -- the freeing of the slaves -- was subsumed to other consequences in the generations of Reconstruction. While the Civil War was putatively about giving to blacks the rights that all Americans deserve through the process of ending slavery, in fact there were a number of other currents running through the nation at the time. Grady and Watson both noted that the war had fundamentally reshaped the relationships of all parts of society to each other, often in ways that had not been foreseen during the war itself, nor yet in the earliest years of Reconstruction.

Watson writes that emancipation was translated to blacks (primarily through the mechanism of the Northern Republicans) not so much as a chance to move forward as one with other Americans but rather as a chance to seek revenge for slavery. Blacks were told:

that the ballot was placed in their hands as a weapon of defence against their former interns; that the war-won political equality of the black man with the white, must be asserted promptly and aggressively, under the leadership of adventurers who had swooped down upon the conquered section in the wake of the Union armies. (http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/spl/tomwatson.html)

Given this, it is hardly surprising that Reconstruction raised rather than lowered the degree of enmity in the country.

Wells and Washington

Ida B. Wells and Booker T. Washington were two of the most important voices seeking change to the nation's culture, striving to find a way that would take the country forward to a truly more egalitarian future while not causing the country to fall into any greater degree of internal chaos and acrimony. Both championed the rights of communities that were in desperate need of articulate and fierce advocates.

Wells was as concerned with improving the rights of women as she was with improving the rights of blacks. The daughter of freed slaves, she grew up in the shadow of a family whose lives would always be defined by the fact that they had been born in one world but spent the second part of their lives in a different one. By the time she was 24, she had already settled into firm ideas about the rights that she had as an American: stating that she would not "begin at this late day by doing what my soul abhors" by flattering men simply to make them feel more important than her simply because of their gender.

One of the most important causes that Wells took up was that of lynching. The lynching of black men by white mobs was one of the most effective (as well as one of the hideous) means by which white determined not to cede anything to the new order in which blacks had to be acknowledged as equal to themselves. She wrote the Red Record, a 100-page pamphlet that described the scope and effects of lynching in the South since the Emancipation Proclamation. Her goal was twofold: To inform people about the terrible cancer that lynching represented as well as to inform whites about the ways in which blacks continued to struggle for their rights.

Wells was determined to shed light on the ways in which life was proceeding for blacks. For her readers who thought that all the problems that blacks faced under slavery had magically disappeared as well as for those who saw blacks as passive in the face of history, Wells wanted to set the record straight. She felt that there had been a gradual amnesia gathering in the country that allowed whites to "forget" the real state of the lives of blacks: She intended her writings to banish this amnesia.

Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition Speech is one of his best known -- and most often reviled -- of his talks. This 1895 speech was the foundation for an informal but enduring agreement between Southern black and white leaders that set out guidelines that exchanged black's acceptance of white political rule for access to education and due process for blacks.