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.”
LS, He considers Marylanders, West Virginians, Delawareans, Kentuckians and Missourians as Southerners even though none of these states ever were really part of the Confederacy - because these states were culturally part of the South.
And part of his larger argument, which tends to be obscured, is that following myth:
"The people of the North were united as one against the slave power/The people of the South were united as one against the Yankees"
is a myth that serves the worst elements on both sides.
It serves the anti-Southerners who want to tar the entire Southern people with Confederate ideology, and it serves the anti-Northerners who want to portray the North as cultural imperialists.
The reality is that in both Union and Confederacy there were sizable elements of the population who were not on board with their government's goals.
Good point on W VA. Hadn’t thought of that, since it technically was the “Union.”
Civil War historian Henry Steele Commager’s words from more than fifty years ago still ring true today:
“No other war started so many controversies and for no other do they flourish so vigorously.Every step in the conflict, every major political decision, every campaign, almost every battle, has its own proud set of controversies, and of all the military figures only Lee stands above argument and debate.”
That I thought was always understood.
No way the US could win another war using the "more men, more resources" strategy.
You got that right. There were “Copperheads” and all sorts of northern Dems who opposed the war, including George McClellan by 1864. Victor Hanson makes a nice point in a speech about how it depends on which year it was how “great” or “brilliant” Lincoln was. Right after Fredericksburg, a much higher % of northerners were “anti-war,” and after Gettysburg, a much higher were “pro-war.”
“Yep, son. We have met the enemy and he is us.”
—Pogo
Doesn't appear to be ground breaking research here.
“I’m wondering if he’s including West Virginians in that 300,000 figure.”
The Union enlisted 175,000 black soldiers during the American Civil War, 75% of which came from Confederate statest. That is 132,000 right there. 167,000 more seems believeable, especially when you consider the large numbers of Union supporters in states like Tennessee, North Carolina, Arkansas and Virginia.
There were white Union regiments raised in every Confederate state. I’d have to check at home to get ther exact number.
Outside of the Quakers and the German American population, Philadelphia was a stronghold of pro-southern sentiment, both among the upper class (many of whom had family connections in the south, or were in the cotton trade) and poor Irish immigrants. Such folks were hostile to the idea of war with the confederacy.
It wasn’t only the schools but the media as well which until the 60s made the rebels out to be heroes. I hated the damn Yankees until I started reading some real history as did almost all southern kids. But for some odd reason I could not hate Lincoln.
It serves the anti-Southerners who want to tar the entire Southern people with Confederate ideology, and it serves the anti-Northerners who want to portray the North as cultural imperialists.
That's why learning the true facts can be so important. Then the Civil War becomes a poor vehicle for regional chauvinism. Get that out of the way, we can argue over more relevant differences such as grits and auto racing.
The truth always sounds that way to those who do not accept it.
With all due respect to Commager, may I also volunteer the French Revolution? The legacy and meaning of the revolution has been debated and contested in France, sometimes violently, to this day. Francois Furet may have angrily declared that "the French Revolution is OVER" back in the 1970s, but it is still being debated, everything from the level of popular support, Louis XVI's miscalculations, they loyalty of the national guard, whether Napoleon continued the revolution or was a reactionary at heart, etc. There are even many female historians who claim that the revolution took power AWAY from women, as women had more power at Versailles than in the Directory.
Our Civil War is far from the only conflict that causes continuous controversy and debate over its legacy.
“The historical fact is that “the American South” and “The Confederacy” are not synonyms.”
I agree. In fact ‘the American South” isn’t exactly correct.
There were many different views in different parts of the South.
I’m not against the South. But in the war years it was often the Confederates who were the south bashers. In much of the South, the Confederates brought extortion, political oppression and lawlessness, while the Union army restored a degree of law and order and peace. In many areas of the South, Reconstruction was a delightful picnic in the park compared to the rebel reign of terror.
By the way, good luck with the Neo Confederates. Hope they don't burn your keyboard.
In “Lincoln’s Loyalists” Richard Nelson Current comes up with your figure. The Provost Marshall General gives official figures of 86,009 for enlistments but this figure is considered too low by those who looked into the question.
Another author, Charles Anderson in “Fighting by Southern Federals” claims 296,579 whites but includes those from the Border states (he also claims 200,000 southern born Northerners enlisted for a total 634,255 southerners fighting to preserve the greatest nation in history). This is close to the 300,000 this author claims. I think it is safe to claim at least 250,000 black and white troops served.
In “Lincoln’s Loyalists” Richard Nelson Current comes up with your figure. The Provost Marshall General gives official figures of 86,009 for enlistments but this figure is considered too low by those who looked into the question.
Another author, Charles Anderson in “Fighting by Southern Federals” claims 296,579 whites but includes those from the Border states (he also claims 200,000 southern born Northerners enlisted for a total 634,255 southerners fighting to preserve the greatest nation in history). This is close to the 300,000 this author claims. I think it is safe to claim at least 250,000 black and white troops served.
That's a discredited thesis.
Grant's strategy was not to sacrifice men, but to turn the tables on Lee by giving him battle consistently: his predecessors (McClellan, Hooker, Meade) were famous for taking as much time as possible between campaigns - dillydallying that allowed Lee time to regroup and take the strategic initiative.
Grant's plan was to hammer at Lee again and again and rob Lee of the extra time that his predecessors had continually given Lee.
In the Overland Campaign - the one in which Grant undeservedly got the "butcher" title - he lost 7,600 killed in 12 major battles or engagements.
In the same period Lee lost 4200 killed - more than half Grant's number, despite the fact that much of these battles were fought with Lee on the defensive.
If one terrible command decision had not been made at Cold Harbor, that number would have been more like 6400 killed for Grant and 4500 killed for Lee.
Lee lost 1700 men killed at Chancellorsville.
In other words, Lee according to a deliberate plan that was masterfully executed lost almost as many men at Chancellorsville as Grant lost at Cold Harbor - which is famous as Grant's worst bloodbath and worst-executed plan.
Another comparison: Gettysburg was Lee's worst disaster. He lost 4700 killed at Gettysburg. That is more than twice as many men as Grant lost at Cold Harbor.
If Grant is to be called a butcher, then he is an apprentice butcher to Lee the master butcher.
You make reference to Sherman's abortive attack at Cheatham Hill in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. Sherman launched that assault believing that he had found a thin and breachable point in Johnston's line - the scope of the losses his command sustained in that engagement was completely unanticipated.
A just comparison might be the actions of John Bell Hood, the Confederate commander who made a similar assault at Franklin that cost him almost the identical amount of men killed as the Union endured at Kennesaw Mountain.
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