Born Fighting (22 page)
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The Winds of War
DURING THE FIFTEEN
years that followed Andrew Jackson’s death the nation was on an unstoppable path to war. Historians have spent entire careers characterizing the divisions that led to this national tragedy, for in truth an astounding mix of emotions and rationales has always fed the whole. The eminent Civil War historian Henry Steele Commager’s words of 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.”
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Recent years, however, have seen a new kind of nastiness emerge in these disputes. Even the venerable Robert E. Lee has taken some vicious hits, as dishonest or misinformed advocates among political interest groups and in academia attempt to twist yesterday’s America into a fantasy that might better serve the political issues of today. The greatest disservice on this count has been the attempt by these revisionist politicians and academics to defame the entire Confederate Army in a move that can only be termed the Nazification of the Confederacy. Often cloaked in the argument over the public display of the Confederate battle flag, the syllogism goes something like this: Slavery was evil. The soldiers of the Confederacy fought for a system that wished to preserve it. Therefore they were evil as well, and any attempt to honor their service is a veiled effort to glorify the cause of slavery.
This blatant use of the “race card” in order to inflame their political and academic constituencies is a tired, seemingly endless game that is itself perhaps the greatest legacy of the Civil War’s aftermath. But in this case it dishonors hundreds of thousands of men who can defend themselves only through the voices of their descendants. It goes without saying—but unfortunately it must be said—that morality and decency were traits shared by both sides in this war, to an extent that was uncommon in almost any other war America has fought. It was “a curious war,” as Commager pointed out, “one in which amenities were preserved.” Commager went on to mark the essential truth that, “The men in blue and gray . . . had character. They knew what they were fighting for, as well as men ever know this, and they fought with a courage and tenacity rarely equaled in history. . . . Both peoples subscribed to the same moral values and observed the same standards of conduct. Both were convinced that the cause for which they fought was just—and their descendants still are.”
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At the same time, the path that led to this war was more complicated than any other in the nation’s history. This is one reason that the war and the era that surrounded it is the subject of such constant reinterpretation.
Some see the controversy leading up to the Civil War as a continuation of the old English conflict between King Charles’s Cavaliers, whose descendants had been granted large tracts of land in Virginia, and the Puritan forces of Oliver Cromwell, whose religious and intellectual descendants had settled New England. Some see the war, and particularly how it was fought, as going back in time even further, to the great fights between the top-down, plodding Norman English and the bottom-up, rebellious Celtic Scots. Some see it in economic and sectional terms, the result of an inevitable split between an increasingly industrial and more populous North and a persistently agrarian, rural South that did not wish to be economically dominated but had lost its political options. Some see it in constitutional terms, a war that eventually became necessary in order to resolve once and for all the issue of whether the Tenth Amendment allowed a state to secede once it entered the Union. And some—in modern times, probably most—view it in a purely moral context, with the slavery issue so compelling in and of itself that it justified both enormous bloodshed and the conquest of the Southern territories.
The whole truth was in all of these things mixed together, considered at different levels of importance among differing constituencies, so that even today, more than 140 years after the fact, intelligent and well-meaning people might still argue over the motivations and conduct of the leaders on both sides. Any effort to reach a consensus on the war is made even more difficult by the reality that certain portions of these truths burned more brightly than others in different ethnic and regional groupings, depending on the nature of their involvement. And no one camp held a monopoly on strong views or in the sincerity of their beliefs, even though they were in deep moral disagreement.
Similarly, a historian’s point of reference automatically shapes the focus and priorities of the issues that were in conflict. Political histories that analyze the drift toward Civil War primarily as a study of governmental leaders in conflict must ineluctably conclude that the war was about slavery, because slavery as an institution became the nexus of every single governmental question that caused the South eventually to secede. Slavery drove the Southern economy, at least for its planter elites. The debate over slavery’s preservation or elimination was so defined by geography that it trumped the Tenth Amendment issue of whether states had reserved the right to secede when they delegated other specific powers to the federal government, no matter whether the constitutional arguments in favor of secession were valid or not.
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And in the buildup to war as well as its aftermath, positions on the slavery issue caused America’s sense of itself as a nation of differing social classes and variegated regions to shift instead into the simple sectionalism of North and South.
During the 1832 tariff debate, Andrew Jackson had left no doubt that he opposed any breakup of the Union. But even though he himself had owned slaves, it is not clear where he would have come down on the issue of slavery as it presented itself in the years just before the Civil War. Arthur Schlesinger hints that Jackson would have turned against slavery because it came to be the driving engine of the Southern elites, positing that the Jacksonian antagonism toward unbridled aristocracies “made it imperative for the radical democracy to combat the slave power with all its will.” Indeed, Francis Preston Blair, a Virginia-born Kentuckian who had been a key member of Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet, later became one of Abraham Lincoln’s important advisers, and in 1858 his son, Missouri congressman Frank Blair, Jr., argued that the slavery issue should be viewed in terms of class rather than region: “This is no question of North and South. It is a question between those who contend for caste and privilege, and those who neither have nor desire to have privileges beyond their fellows.” However, the Jacksonians had steadily lost their influence against the “emerging nobility” after the great man’s passing, and “as the conflict deepened, the sectional theory gained status and authority, . . . partly because the class theory had to be soft-pedaled in the interest of national unity, and because many conservative Northerners, fearing the explosive possibilities of the class theory, did their best to destroy it.”
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This left the moral issue predominant in the public sentiment, with the largely slaveless North pointing its finger southward, and the South as a whole coalescing against what many, regardless of class, viewed to be the calumnies of the North’s attacks. In this context it is hardly surprising that in 1862, when Abraham Lincoln first met Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, he quipped, “So this is the little lady who made the big war.” Her novel, which when published in 1852 was the first ever to sell a million copies, had brought the moral issue of slavery to the forefront in many Northern living rooms, creating a wave of revulsion in the North and a backlash of dozens of books in the South defending the practice.
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But what many historians miss—and what those who react so strongly to seeing Confederate battle flags on car bumpers and in the yards of descendants of Confederate veterans do not understand—is that slavery was emphatically not the reason that most individual Southerners fought so long and hard, and at such overwhelming cost. Slavery may have been the catalytic issue from a governmental perspective, and its moral dimensions may have motivated many Northerners, but other factors, some cultural and some historical, brought most of the Confederate soldiers to the battlefield. And that was particularly true among the communities in the Scots-Irish heartland that provided the bulk of the Confederate Army’s manpower.
From its very beginning the South was never a monolithic cultural entity, and nothing divided its white population in economic and social terms so clearly as the institution of slavery. Slavery’s stronghold at its inception had been in the plantations of Virginia’s Tidewater “Cavalier” aristocracy. This early ruling class of well-appointed English immigrants had consciously created the royalist, three-tiered society that dominated Virginia’s eastern reaches. But most Scots-Irish had rejected this structure. From the first days that the Ulster Presbyterians were allowed to settle in their quasi-military mountain outposts in exchange for the right to practice a religion that had not been tolerated elsewhere in the colony, they had chosen to live outside of it. This separatism largely continued. As the Scots-Irish settlers moved down into the Carolinas and then westward into the mid-South and the Ohio Valley, the Tidewater aristocracy’s plantation system had swung like a wheel along the Atlantic seaboard, then into the coastal areas of the Deep South, and finally upward along the Mississippi River basin, not only bringing new legions of slaves with it, but growing ever more cruel along the way. Thus the core of the South was a large mass of heavily Scots-Irish farms and small communities dominating the center, from which their family networks extended northward into southern Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley, southward into the fringes of the plantation aristocracy along the waterways, and ever westward toward Colorado, California, and Oregon as the country continued to grow.
Some members of the Scots-Irish ascendancy became large-scale slaveholders in the Carolinas, Georgia, and the Deep South, but the slave system was not a part of the usual Scots-Irish way of life, and in truth was in the hands of a very small percentage of the Southern population. As John Hope Franklin points out in his landmark work
From Slavery To Freedom
, by 1860 Virginia was still the greatest slaveholding state, while regionwide less than 5 percent of the whites in the South owned slaves. Franklin goes on to say that, “Fully three-fourths of the white people of the South had neither slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery or the plantation system.”
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Further, of the 385,000 who did own slaves, more than 200,000 had five slaves or less, and “fully 338,000 owners, or 88 percent of all the owners of slaves in 1860, held less than twenty slaves.”
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More emphatically, Wilbur Cash points out in
The Mind of the South
that the South’s ruling class in 1860 “ought actually to include only some four or five thousand of the great planters,” and that of those the number who could truly “be reckoned as proper aristocrats came to less than five hundred—and maybe not more than half that figure.”
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Ominously and correctly, Cash goes on to point out that despite the typical white Southerner’s tendency to be swept up in the rhetoric and debate of politics, the “only real interest involved in [politics] was that of the planter,” and that for the nonslaveholding yeoman, his instinctive support of issues that benefited the slaveholding elites would eventually “bear him outside the orbit of his true interest [and] would swing him headlong, perhaps against his own more sober judgment, into the disaster of the Civil War.”
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Slavery had flourished rather than dying a natural death after Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1792 dramatically improved the ability to process cotton and thus made this crop the staple of the South’s economy. As Vernon Parrington points out, “In 1791, three years after Andrew Jackson settled in Nashville, the total export of cotton was only 200,000 pounds. In 1803, it had risen to 40,000,000 pounds, and by 1860 the export for the year was of the value of two hundred millions of dollars. Such figures provide a sufficient explanation of the militant spirit of the slave economy. . . . This peculiar institution, which a generation before was commonly believed to be in the way of natural extinction, had the South by the throat.”
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More properly, it had the Southern elites by the throat.
The slave system had become crueler as it expanded for a number of interconnected reasons that affected not only the slaves but also the entire ethical and socioeconomic structure of white society in the South. In 1808, Congress had outlawed the legal importation of slaves, assuming that slavery itself would eventually disappear as the human pipeline from Africa ran dry. Instead, as cotton became king and the plantation system expanded into what became known as the Black Belt in the Deep South, the slave trade became ruthless and even more dehumanizing. Slave runners—many, as Parrington points out, “respectable New England church members”
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—made fortunes as the price of human bondage reached a premium. Slaves were further degraded through a busy speculative market, uprooted and moved to new locations for the right price as if they were horses or barley, and in some cases made to endure the practice of forced breeding.
As the institution dehumanized the slaves, so also did it corrupt the Great Captains. Again, Parrington: “The generous culture of Virginia failed to take root in the Black Belt. The development of the plantation system under hired overseers infected the masters, few in numbers and absolute in power, with an exaggerated sense of their own greatness. . . . In the frontier Gulf states the rapid expansion of the plantation system created an aristocracy given to swaggering,
bourgeois
in spirit, arrogant in manners. Republican simplicity was losing vogue and there was much loose talk about the superiority of the classes.”
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