Economic perspectives on Civil War causes and Southern society

¶ … 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.

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.

Stephen Kantrowitz: Benjamin Tillman

Kantrowitz's biography of Benjamin Tillman has already been discussed in a previous section; this answer focuses on the second half of the book. While Kantrowitz's biography is mostly sequential (in that the book follows Tillman's life from birth to death), the second half of the book also deals with the broader themes that Tillman's life connects to. The author focuses on the ways in which Tillman was unable to understand the larger picture of which his life was a part. He was limited by his upbringing and by the position that he held due to his class and race.

While Kantrowitz is concerned with elucidating the ways in which Tillman's goals were continually frustrated by the smallness of his own vision, the author is also concerned with the ways in which the dynamics of Reconstruction mirrored this trend. The white leaders of the South in the post-Civil War decades were fighting a rearguard action without truly understanding this fact. They, like Tillman, did not have either the willingness or the courage to acknowledge that in the brave new world of Reconstruction there was no possibility of turning back.

Kantrowitz outlines the smallness of Tillman's actual accomplishments in his life: A few small political "triumphs" that changed nothing at all in the larger picture. The question that Kantrowitz leaves us with is whether Tillman himself understood his life as a failure or a success. For those inclined to fight wars that are already lost, what, after all, counts as a success? This question, like other aspects of Tillman's life, goes to the heart of life for many Southerners for generations after the war was over. Or over for most people.

American Blues

Louis Armstrong has a chapter to his life that most people are not now aware of, although it was one that he hardly kept secret in his own lifetime. Indeed, Armstrong wrote about his year living with a Lithuanian-Jewish immigrant family named the Karnofskys. Armstrong wrote about how the family had taken him in his book Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, La., the Year of 1907. The family and Armstrong taught each other something about how narrow the definition of most whites was about who counted as "white."

Armstrong was surprised that the Karnofskys were not considered white despite the way they looked: Living with them demonstrated to Armstrong that being "white" was not simply a question of how one looked but also a question of how one thought and behaved, and what they believed in. In his recounting of his life with the family he wrote how the family was discriminated against because of "other white folks' nationalities who felt that they were better than the Jewish race. I was only seven years old but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the White Folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for."

Armstrong -- who wore a Star of David for the rest of his life -- understood that there could be a powerful alliance between blacks and Jews, both communities that stood on the periphery of American society and who were perceived of as capable of providing entertainment of various sorts to white Americans. This particular alliance of blacks and Jews would strengthen and grow through the 1960s.

William Barlow's Mississippi Delta Blues takes up some of the same themes that Armstrong addressed several generations before. Barlow understood that the blues was a uniquely American form of art not because of anything intrinsic in the musicality of it (for there is nothing new under the sun in terms of what can be done musically) but because it provided a unique voice for the experiences of black Americans and, in some measure, of Southerners as a whole.

The blues are a refrain that details the ways in which Southern society was stratified in the generations after the Civil War and through World War II and the ways in which individuals in those strata challenged their position in the larger society. Blacks found a voice, literally, that allowed them to make the best of their own lives without speaking up in a way that would bring about violence against them.

Barlow understood that blues were a way of "looking up at down," a way of acknowledging that blacks were on the bottom of society and yet could find value in their position by using it to make art. Part of how blues musicians transformed their position at the bottom of society was by retrieving African traditions, calling on a past in which blacks had not been subjugated. But the writer also understands that the blues, while anchored in the past, also a reaching out toward the future, a future when life might be sung to a different tune.