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.”
Sorry for the double post - my second in 10 years...
Screwed up? They ignored the un constitutional ad-hoc procedure that they themselves created out of whole cloth. By their own "standards," they were in violation of the constitution.
...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. -- William Rawle, 1829
Which people?
The hike involved a lot of navigating through and over boulders (sometimes room sized) and multiple stream crossings. I'm getting too old for this rough a hike.
Thanks for the pictures looks like fun.
No overlooking Lincoln’s political wisdom which you pointed out. Lincoln’s goal was to preserve the Union. That was not a task for the faint of heart and only a man of his transcendent greatness could have accomplished it.
It is no secret that slaves were only freed in the territories not under control of the federal government.
Lincoln’s hatred of slavery was so well known that the Slavers revolted when he was elected. That is no secret either.
The Draft rioters were Democrats. Largely the criminal gangs which plagued decent New Yorkers during the 1800s almost all were linked to Tammanney Hall.
Mmmmn... Maybe that was Tojo or Mussolini that he said it to. It was one of ‘em I'm pretty sure
The claim you made was. "If anyone who considers the secession of the Southern States to have been been unconstitutional wants to be historically (and legally) accurate, maybe they should read the United States Constitution (as it then existed) instead..." I'm showing that not only did a great many men read the Constitution and disagree with you, but among them was the man who, more than any other single individual, was responsible for creating the document in the first place.
Now, if what you actually meant was "I am John Freakin' Galt and my interpretation of the Constitution is the only correct one. Bow down before me, you lesser mortals.." then you should have come out and said it. Maybe we can find you a football stadium somewhere, put up some Greek columns, and then you can display your mighty ego for all?
The underlying illegality of all the Southern acts of secession are not the issue, I was responding to your question in your reply 131. "You are assuming that a plebiscite is required, before a State may secede. Upon what do you base that assumption?", was what you asked. And the answer was, Virginia herself. Virginia set down what she believed was needed to secede in her declaration, and that included the belief that a popular referendum was needed before seceding. Then, of course, Virginia went and promptly violated it. But respect for the rule of law was not a confederate trait.
What difference would that have made, given your disregard for the courts? Instead, why not point out what clause of the constitution gave Virginia the right to take federal property without the approval of Congress and without compensation. Can you do that?
You have that backwards. It was the states that were doing the accepting, not the other way around. And somewhere in each of the ratification documents you referenced was a line that stated they assent to and ratify the Constitution as passed out of the Philadelphia convention. And that would include the part that says the Constituiton, and the laws made in pursuance thereof, shall be the supreme law of the land. Not the ratification documents.
Anyone seen stand waite lately? Surely that book must be in by now? It’s been what, a couple months?
I'm done talking to you until you figure out how to stop being an insulting child.
MyG-grandfather was a Tennessee State Senator and voted against the War, he did take up arms and fight however
He lost all during reconstruction..
None of those are in the Constitution. Do you need to see a copy? How many other things does the Constitution include aren't actually in its text?
What you are in fact claiming is that Virginia unilaterally amended the Constitution.
very few who did not...
my wife's great X2 was a state senator too here....Levi Wade, owner of Bellevue Plantation in Rutherford county
Levi managed to hold onto the farm (1500 acres) till 1873 when a NY bank went under and took his notes with them....then he started selling off in pieces...the last was sold by a descendent in the 1950s for a neighborhood between Murfreesboro and Smyrna
we still maintain the family cemetery there.....the slave one too btw for all you sorryassed race baiters here
The Constitution does not contain the word secession on way or the other. But the Constitution says that the states cannot enter into treaties, confederations or engage in war apart from the United States. Without the powers prohibited in Article 1, Section 10, secession would be no more than a bunch of power-grabbing politicians making useless noise. And in the end, the secessions produced nothing more lasting than hot air and a trail of misery.
"The Constitution flatly and clearly says that states may not exercise sovereign powers" - so long as they remain members of the union. Once a State retires from the union, that prohibition is obviously no longer applicable.
You're adding words to the Constitution again. There's nothing in the Constitution that limits its authority as the supreme law of the land to the a period of time that states remain in the Union. What I'm getting at with my awkward logic and prose, Lincoln got at clearly and more succinctly when he said no government contained provision for its own dissolution.
I will gladly limit myself to the specific written terms of the US Constitution of 1860 - which no where prohibits State secession.
Where is the provision for state secession in the Constitution in 1860? I see powers prohibited to the states in Article 1, Section 10. I see a 10th Amendment yielding the powers that have not been prohibited to the states. But Article 1, Section 10 has prohibited actions of sovereignty to the states so the 10th Amendment does not negate Article 1, Section 10. Where then in the Constitution is there a negation of the restriction contained in Article 1 Section 10?
But since you asked for some "verifiable historical reference," here's "The Error Of Secessionists" by John William Noell, a Democratic Congressman from Missouri. Like Toombs, Noell offered five propositions, but his were less tied to the institution of slavery:
1. That the Federal Government is a compact between the States, not as organized State governments, but in their highest sovereign capacity as communities of people.
2. That the powers of the various departments of the Federal Government have been arranged with special reference to the reserved rights of the States and people, and means are thereby provided for the protection of both.
3. That in case of any attempted or actual infraction or violation of those rights, the protection and remedy are to be sought through the means provided by the Constitution, and not by secession or nullification.
4. That in case all these remedies are appealed to and fail, and our grievances shall become so enormous that revolution and the overthrow of the Government are preferable to further submission, then we may resort to the ultima ratio of all people under every form of government - to overthrow by force the existing, and establish a new government to secure our safety and happiness.
5. That it is against the true policy of the South to dissolve the Union or secede from it; and that on the real question that divides parties, the South always did hold, and will continue to hold, under this Government, all the power necessary for her security, protection and equality.
Noell goes on to offer proofs for his propositions that many will find compelling. He cites the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, as "wideawake" did.
Noell wasn't an abolitionist. Indeed, it looks to me like he argues that secession is unconstitutional in the way that some personal liberty laws enacted by the Northern states were. In his view both violated the Supremacy Clause, and federal courts could overturn both.
Noell stayed in Congress as Unionist until his death in 1863.
This actually makes a certain amount of sense. From what I have read, even without the war there was a growing dislike of slavery even in the south, and the slave owners were definitely a minority. Maybe they saw this seccession as the only way to preserve their “heritage”. They would control their politics much more if they didn’t have their counterparts (rich businessmen in manufacturing) in the north diluting their position on slavery.
Just thinking out loud.
"Un constitutional?" Care to cite the specific constitutional clause to which you are apparently referring?
Of course not.
Which people?
That would be 'the people of the individual States' - the same 'people' who ratified the Constitution...
And it's good to have the balance provided when you point out that unionists were not always saints either, whether it be Maine or Tennessee. But I do still believe that the violence was more systematic in the Confederacy. A mob explodes and diminishes with merciful rapidity. The heavy-handed rebel rule kept on holding the population, slave and free, under its thumb. Lincoln, the great centralizer, took actions to negate the anti-press actions of subordinates like Burnside,while that champion of localism. Jeff Davis, was quite content to allow local leaders full use of the big stick of government.
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