Posted on 08/25/2008 9:11:18 AM PDT by Colonel Kangaroo
Valdosta State professor pens ‘Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War’
Generations of students have been taught that the South lost the Civil War because of the North’s superior industry and population. A new book suggests another reason: Southerners were largely responsible for defeating the Confederacy.
In “Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War” (New Press, $27.95), historian David Williams of Valdosta State University lays out some tradition-upsetting arguments that might make the granite brow of Jefferson Davis crack on Stone Mountain.
“With this book,” wrote Publishers Weekly, “the history of the Civil War will never be the same again.”
Actually, historians have long fallen into two camps in explaining the Confederacy’s demise — one stressing the Union’s advantages, the other the South’s divisions. Williams gives vivid expression to the latter view, drawing on state and local studies done primarily in the past two decades.
The 49-year-old South Georgia native discussed his interpretations in an interview from Valdosta.
Q: You write that most Southerners didn’t even want to leave the Union.
A: That’s right. In late 1860 and early 1861, there were a series of votes on the secession question in all the slave states, and the overwhelming majority voted against it. It was only in the Deep South, from South Carolina to Texas, that there was much support for secession, and even there it was deeply divided. In Georgia, a slight majority of voters were against secession.
Q: So why did Georgia secede?
A: The popular vote didn’t decide the question. It chose delegates to a convention. That’s the way slaveholders wanted it, because they didn’t trust people to vote on the question directly. More than 30 delegates who had pledged to oppose secession changed their votes at the convention. Most historians think that was by design. The suspicion is that the secessionists ran two slates — one for and one supposedly against — and whichever was elected, they’d vote for secession.
Q: You say the war didn’t start at Fort Sumter.
A: The shooting war over secession started in the South between Southerners. There were incidents in several states. Weeks before Fort Sumter, seven Unionists were lynched in Tallahatchie County, Miss.
Q: Was the inner civil war ever resolved?
A: No. As a result, about 300,000 Southern whites served in the Union army. Couple that with almost 200,000 Southern blacks who served, and that combined to make almost a fourth of the total Union force. All those Southerners who fought for the North were a major reason the Confederacy was defeated.
Q: In the spring of 1862, the Confederacy enacted the first draft in American history. Planters had an easy time getting out of it, didn’t they?
A: Very easy. If they owned 20 or more slaves, they were pretty much excused from the draft. Some of them paid off draft officials. Early in the war, they could pay the Confederate government $500 and get out of the draft.
Q: You use the phrase “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” several times. Does this history anger you?
A: I don’t think it would be unfair to say that. It seems like the common folk were very much ignored and used by the planter elite. As a result, over half a million Americans died.
My great-great-grandfather was almost one: John Joseph Kirkland. He was a poor farmer in Early County, no slaves. He was 33, just under draft age, and had five children at home. He went ahead and enlisted so he could get a $50 bonus. A year later, he lost a leg at the Battle of Chancellorsville.
Q: One of the biggest problems for the South was a lack of food. Why?
A: That does seem strange, because we think of the South as a vast agricultural region. But the planters were growing too much cotton and tobacco and not enough food. Cotton and tobacco paid more.
Q: You say the Confederate army stripped the fields of much of the produce and livestock there was, leaving civilians hungry. That sounds like Sherman’s troops marching through Georgia.
A: It was very much like that.
Q: When they couldn’t feed their families, Southern women started food riots. There was a big one in Richmond. Were there any in Georgia?
A: Every major city in Georgia had food riots. We’ve documented more than 20. In Atlanta, a woman walked into a store on Whitehall Street and drew a revolver and told the rest of the women to take what they wanted. They moved from store to store.
Q: The deprivations at home led to a very high desertion rate among Confederates. How bad was it?
A: By 1864, two-thirds of the Army was absent with or without leave. It got worse after that.
Q: There was a sort of Underground Railroad for deserters?
A: Yes. It surprised me that many Confederate deserters could count on the support of slaves to hide them and move them from one location to another.
Q: How important were black Southerners in the outcome of the war?
A: They were very important to undermining the Confederate war effort. When slaves heard that Abraham Lincoln had been elected, many of them thought they were free and started leaving plantations. So many eventually escaped to Union lines that they forced the issue. As other historians have said, Lincoln didn’t free the slaves; the slaves freed themselves.
Q: If there was so much division in the South and it was such an important part of the Confederacy’s downfall, why isn’t this a larger part of our national memory?
A: The biggest reason is regional pride. It gratified white Southerners to think the South was united during the Civil War. It gratified Northerners to believe they defeated a united South.
Q: Why do you think so much Southern identity has been wrapped up in the Confederacy? We’re talking about four of the 400 years since Jamestown was settled. It seems like the tail wagged the dog — and now you tell us the tail is pretty raggedy.
A: I think popular memory got wrapped up in race. Most white Southerners opposed secession, but they were also predominantly racists. After the war, they wanted to keep it a white man’s country and maintain their status over African-Americans. It became easy for Southerners to misremember what happened during the war. A lot of people whose families had opposed the Confederacy became staunch neo-Confederates after a generation or two, mainly for racist reasons.
Q: Has this knowledge affected your feelings about Southern heritage? Did you have an opinion about the former Georgia flag?
A: I had a graduate student who did his thesis on that. He looked into the origins of the 1956 state flag and concluded that the Confederate battle emblem was put there not to honor our ancestors but as a statement against school integration.
Q: So you saw no reason to defend that flag?
A: No, not in the least.
Q: Have the Sons of Confederate Veterans been to see you?
A: Yes. They didn’t really deny anything I had to say, but they weren’t real happy to hear it. I told them, “Well, I’m not making this up.”
I smell BULLSH*T. A great big pile of it.
Another Yankee Propaganda campaign.
I have read the Lincoln-Douglass debates. Lincoln, if he had his way, would have outlawed slavery by executive order. But under the Constitution, he had no such power and never once claimed such authority. His only objective when elected was to resist further expansion of slavery into the territories.
After secession, he did on many occasions plead to the four Union slave states to enact legislation that would end slavery in their states -- two did and two didn't.
He offered to support compensation from the federal treasury for slave owners in a gradual emancipation scheme. He made very clear that he viewed slavery as a sin on the nation.
I, if President and had my way, would with a stroke of a pen outlaw Abortion of Demand which I view as a sin on the nation.
But under the Constitution, that is not possible. Like abortion today, slavery was a 'legal' institution.
To ban either would require a Constitutional Amendment or in the case of abortion on demand, the overturn of Roe v Wade and for the States to individually outlaw the practice. Today, some states would ban abortion ( as some banned slavery before the Civil War) -- but most wouldn't.
What Lincoln did with the EP via his war-time powers as CiC was to move the focus the war to the only real issue that caused the divide between the states to begin with -- that is slavery. It made slavery the issue and caused Americans not touched so much by slavery to become aware of the cancerous effect it had upon the nation.
Today, if we could make more Americans aware of the cancerous effect of abortion on demand, I think we could gain enough support of a Constitutional ban.
The EP was a large gamble on Lincoln's part, but in the end, it worked. We ended with a Union and the totally un-American institution of slavery was ended. Without the EP, it 'could' have ended with a Union (likely not), but with the institution of slavery still very much intact which would have only set the stage for the next war. P>
Why did it take four years? One man may have made the difference. It seems possible to me that the Union Army under the command of Robert E. Lee could have won the war in a single summer - and Lee could have had that command.
Wrong. The Constitution states: "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land." Federal law not in compliance with the specific written terms of the Constitution lacks any authority.
The Tenth Amendment addresses only powers that are not expressly reserved to the federal government.
Wrong again. The Tenth Amendment states: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The federal government was not "reserved" powers of any sort, because it possessed none before it was created by the States, and after it was created, it possessed only those powers delegated to it by the States. The States and their people reserved ALL powers not delegated nor prohibited - including, by definition, the right of secession.
Supremacy of jurisdiction is a power that is explicitly and clearly reserved to the federal government.
Please see my above comments - the federal government possesses only those powers specifically delegated to it by the States, via the constitutional compact. Your fantasies notwithstanding.
Secession, a fancy term for states laying claim to supremacy of jurisdiction, is obviously unconstitutional.
LOL! The right of secession was no where prohibited to the States by the Constitution as it was originally adopted; was clearly reserved by the States under the specific terms of the Tenth Amendment; and secession was therefore "obviously" constitutional in 1860-1861...
And, yes, I had a number of ancestors who served in the Confederate Army and a couple who fought for the Union.
Here in six weeks or so, my dad and I are heading to Gettysburg. On the way, we are going to Gathland State Park, the site of the Battle of Crampton's Gap, where one of my ancestors, Private Steven Treadwell of Company F, 16th Georgia Infantry was mortally wounded and died the next day in a Union field hospital. The next day, we are going to Elmira, New York, the site of the infamous Northern POW camp, where Steven's brother, Private Branham Treadwell, died of diptheria after being captured at Cold Harbor and is buried in Woodlawn National Cemetery. According to our family records, his relatives back in Georgia thought he'd been killed in combat and his body was not recovered. Apparently, he died of the disease before he could write his family and let them know that he was alive. So it looks like I will be the first relative to visit his grave since he died, one hundred forty-four years ago.
Wrong again. Mr. Toombs' address was most certainly more rational than your posts here. If you take exception to any portion of it, please feel free to provide a citation, and a specific explanation of your grounds for disagreement. In fact, your unsubstantiated opinions 'take the cake' when it comes to "self-serving and poorly reasoned."
...as well as of the proceedings of the ratifying conventions, and of Madison's and Jefferson's surreptitiously written Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions (and their abject failure in their objects) and finally of Tucker's commentaries (which although cited by the US Supreme Court as valuable historical material are not some sort of "official" key to the US Constitution nor can they be).
I must assume, then, that your irrational opinions are based on willful ignorance.
I am likewise aware, "sport", that you have mentioned them purely as an exercise in namedropping without actually making a reasoned argument utilizing them as sources.
I'll allow Mr. Jefferson to make 'a reasoned argument' for me:
That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government; but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes, -- delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force; that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party: that the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.
In fact, sport, it is you who offer unsubstantiated opinions, and I doubt you've ever read the documents in question.
I am further aware that your inability to do so is based on the fact that there is no unitary and consistent argument to be found animating all these sources univocally. Any argument for secession using them would be cobbled together, by definition.
LOL! I'll make it easy for you, sport - tell us where Mr. Jefferson was wrong (please see the citation above). If you can 'cobble together' some kind of rational argument, perhaps we can move on to the other documents. If not (which is no doubt the case), you're wasting my time.
So spare us the empty, supercilious speechifying.
I have a better suggestion: spare us your ignorant, irrational opinions - it'll help save energy...
these so called conservatives borrow trouble where there is none
Yes indeed....stirring up the past to make a dollar.
The Tenth Amendment addresses only powers that are not expressly reserved to the federal government.
Supremacy of jurisdiction is a power that is explicitly and clearly reserved to the federal government.
Secession, a fancy term for states laying claim to supremacy of jurisdiction, is obviously unconstitutional.
Thanks for expressing things so clearly and succinctly. I would have added steps and only confused things. But you've condensed the argument down to its essence superbly.
Toombs made at least two famous addresses. One to the Georgia Legislature on Nov. 13, 1860 and one to the US Senate on January 7, 1861, and I don't know which one is being referred to. I also don't know if they yield a Constitutional argument of any weight. Slavery is so important an element in both speeches that it's hard to see what's left if you separate out the grievances of slaveowners and slave states and Toombs's cheeky bravado.
Here are the "five propositions" from the farewell to the Senate. You can see from the beginning of the passage that Toombs was not quite honest about his intentions with his audience:
Senators, my countrymen have demanded no new government. They have demanded no new Constitution. The discontented States have demanded nothing but clear, distinct, constitutional rights, rights older than the Constitution. What do these rebels demand? First, that the people of the United States shall have an equal right to emigrate and settle in the Territories with whatever property (including slaves) they may possess. Second, that property in slaves shall be entitled to the same protection from the government as any other property (leaving the State the right to prohibit, protect, or abolish slavery within its limits). Third, that persons committing crimes against slave property in one State and flying to another shall be given up. Fourth, that fugitive slaves shall be surrendered. Fifth, that Congress shall pass laws for the punishment of all persons who shall aid and abet invasion and insurrection in any other State.
We demand these five propositions. Are they not right? Are they not just?
Uh ... no?
A kid who's fed up with the uber PC mindset that too often afflicts the schools is not going to be too meticulous in researching the nuances of history when he looks for a symbol of opposition to a one-sided wilded. But to kids fed up with the system, a symbol of the heavy-headed establishment of the 1860s is an ironic choice for a symbol of rebellion against unfair authority.
oh please.... they didn't call my hometown Chimneyville 'cause we burned it to the ground
The Union army was not always fair and guiltless in its actions but it passed on its way and was not permanent. Had the rebs won, the Confederate government of thieves would have remained in place. If you don't think reb government could be a reign of terror, I suggest you read Hurlburt's contemporary account of the Civil War home front in Bradley County in Tennessee.
South Carolina and the other rebellious states violated Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution. There is no provision in that article (or anywhere else) for those restrictions to be waived if a group in a state say that their state "seceded". In fact there is no provision anywhere in the Constitution for any such secession to supercede the supreme law of the land.
We're conservatives, not liberals. We need to be strict constructionists and go by what the Constitution says, not by what it doesn't.
Lee's resignation of his commission in the US Army was perhaps the most dishonorable act of his life. If he had stayed true to his oath, the Civil War might have been over in 6 months, with a minimal loss of life.
I wouldn’t call it Yankee propaganda. To me, Yankee propaganda is the idea that every southerner of the day and the every rebel soldier was a slave beating xenophobic fanatic. Books like this help to remove the albatross of the Confederacy from the backs of the southern people. Many southern people saw through the rebel lies and exploitations better than many do to today.
Wrong. As Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution notes:
No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.
That clause contains no prohibition of State secession, a right the States (even those which did not explicitly reserve it, via their ratification documents) reserved by their insistence upon, and ratification of, the Tenth Amendment.
The right of secession was recognized at the time. As William Rawle (http://www.constitution.org/wr/rawle_32.htm) observed:
It depends on the state itself... whether it will continue a member of the Union. To deny this right would be inconsistent with the principle on which all our political systems are founded, which is, that the people have in all cases, a right to determine how they will be governed.
As Mr. Rawle noted, the foundation of our union is this:
THE PEOPLE HAVE IN ALL CASES, A RIGHT TO DETERMINE HOW THEY WILL BE GOVERNED.
As for your post, once a State had retired from the Union, it was no longer bound by Article 1, Section 10, or any other article of the Constitution.
Thanks for the reply...
I agree. However, the Constitution as it existed in 1860-1861 nowhere prohibited State secession. You seem to be the one who is refering to "what the Constitution [doesn't say]," as a basis for your argument...
"Secession, a fancy term for states laying claim to supremacy of jurisdiction, is obviously unconstitutional."
Thanks for expressing things so clearly and succinctly... you've condensed the argument down to its essence superbly.
Oh, you betcha! It's an illogical argument at best, and 'condensing' it certainly saves the more rational among us a great deal of time...
;>)
And what if a state joined the confederacy and allowed the CSA army to occupy into its territory before formally ratifying its act of secession? Is Article 1, Sec. 10 meaningless as long as the state says, "Oh, I was going to secede but just hadn't made it official yet"?
Give me a break. Under your line of reasoning, 'What if Martian parasites invaded the bodies of State officials, and allowed a Martian army to occupy the State's territory before the State formally ratified its act of secession? Is Article 1, Sec. 10 meaningless as long as the state says, "Oh, I was going to secede but just hadn't made it official yet, because the Martian parasites gave me a bad itch"'?
Go vote for Obama - it's more rational (even though it's completely irrational) than what you just posted...
Go look at the timeline of Virginia secession. Virginia joined the confederacy on April 23, 1861. The confederate legislature voted to move its capitol to Richmond on May 21. And finally, on May 23, Virginia ratified its act of secession. A month after joining the confederacy.
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