So intrinsic was slavery to southern life and culture, pervading everything from white men’s individual identities to safety to the structure of society, that many white Southerners simply could not imagine its absence. If the absence of slavery was unthinkable, then abolition would not eliminate the racial hierarchy that slavery enforced; it would reverse it. The Richmond Enquirer cautioned that abolition meant “the substitution of the white by the black race in the southern tier of States.” 75 To fight in defense of black slavery was to resist white degradation, and the life-and-death necessity of that resistance explained the outbreak of the war to Confederates who repeatedly proclaimed that they must fight or be made slaves. Alabama private Thomas Taylor, for instance, described the “hellish undertaking” of “Lincoln & his hirelings” as an attempt to ensure that all white Southerners were “doomed to slavery.” 76 White men like Thomas Taylor and the countless others who uttered fears of becoming slaves were not speaking in code. They were genuinely afraid of being reduced to the powerless, libertyless, and emasculated lives and conditions occupied by black slaves. Shared white racial anxieties overpowered class tensions, suppressed prospective challenges to slavery, and imparted a sense of unity and common goals among white Southerners who were otherwise inclined to focus on personal and familial interests. Nonslaveholding Confederate soldiers regarded black slavery as vital to the protection of their families, interests, and very identities as men, and they relied on it to prevent race war. Perceived northern attempts to destroy it had to be stopped.
“The rebellion is abolitionizing the whole army”
The outbreak of war led many northern men, like their Confederate counterparts, to describe the war as the defense of the legacy of the American Revolution, but Northerners interpreted that legacy and its importance in distinctive ways. Just weeks after Fort Sumter, a group of African American men who gathered in Cleveland, Ohio, resolved, “to-day as in the times of ’76 and 1812 we are ready to go forth and do battle in the common causes of the country.” 77 The Cleveland men’s offers to serve were rejected by a Union policy that initially restricted enlistment to white men, but their insistence on the connection between the Revolution and the present crisis was sincere and widely shared. Soldiers of the Seventh Iowa similarly instructed one another to “look back to seventy-six” and “remember well that sacred trust our fathers placed in our care.” 78 The words used by the men from Cleveland or Iowa could just as easily have appeared in a Confederate regimental paper or a southern soldier’s diary, but the words would have meant something different there. Confederates emulated the Revolution through the act of rebellion, but Union troops honored the Revolution by fighting to preserve the American government it created. By rallying “around the star spangled banner to defend the Union of our Revolutionary sires,” one camp newspaper explained, Union troops were helping to “protect and perpetuate a Government which the oppressed in every land have looked upon for half a century as the beacon of liberty.” 79 That statement contrasted sharply with the Confederate claim (voiced by Ivy Duggan and countless others) that the Union in 1861 violated its own reasons for being and threatened liberty.
Union troops interpreted the significance of the Union more broadly, and harbored a different vision of liberty. The Union existed, according to northern volunteers in 1861, not simply for limited purposes like facilitating white citizens’ pursuit of material interests, but for the grander purpose of proving to the world that republican self-government based on the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence could work. The destruction of the Union would turn the idea of government based on liberty and equality into an object of ridicule, and dash all hopes for the success of “the experiment of our popular government.” 80 One soldier explained to his father that the Union must survive to prove “man is capable of self government,” while his regiment’s newspaper asked, “destroy this Union and what can republics hope for?” 81
Union soldiers identified the U.S. government as “our political temple of liberty” rather than a menace to liberty, because Union men’s conceptions of liberty did not depend on the existence of slavery (as Confederate troops’ definition did), and because Union troops viewed liberty less as an individual possession than as a universally applicable ideal, embedded by the Revolution into the foundation of the American Republic. 82 As far as slavery was concerned, some Northerners believed liberty and slavery were incompatible, but initially most white Northerners did not define liberty in relation to slavery at all. More important (to most Union recruits in 1861), while Confederates associated liberty with the enjoyment of their own families, privileges, and belongings, Northerners assumed liberty transcended personal and family interests. In fact, one Michigan volunteer saw real liabilities in intensive focus on individual “labors to perform and dear friends to greet,” because a soldier who concentrated excessively on his own loved ones and their concerns could lose sight of what was at stake, or lose his nerve in the face of danger. 83 Indiana private W. D. Wildman told his former schoolteacher, “the Union is not only the citadel of our liberty, but the depostory of the hopes of the human race.” 84 A Wisconsin volunteer struck a similar note when he claimed that the liberty enshrined by the American Union applied to “the friendless and oppressed of every sun.” 85 Northern men cared about their families and their material interests as avidly as southern men did, but, unlike white Southerners, they did not intertwine those priorities with the concept of liberty; instead, they understood liberty in less personal, more worldwide terms. As Kansas private Leigh Webber put it, Union soldiers had to fight “for the Cause of Constitutional Liberty” because “if we fail now, the hope of human rights is extinguished for ages.” Webber fought in a regiment from Kansas, a state as threatened by wartime violence as any in 1861, yet he did not describe the war in terms of protecting his loved ones or belongings, as Confederates (including those from areas far removed from danger) did. Like other Union soldiers, he had grown up believing that liberty mattered not simply because it belonged to oneself and one’s relatives, but because it applied to everybody. 86
Soldiers from border states like Kentucky and Missouri might have been expected to connect the Union’s struggle more directly to their own homes and families, since more than most Northerners or Southerners in 1861, their neighborhoods and loved ones faced threats of actual violence, and Kentuckians and Missourians did articulate the Union cause in more directly personal terms than Union soldiers from more distant states. Yet even when border state Union soldiers spoke of their interests, they were less likely than their Confederate counterparts to speak in terms of material possessions, and they were also less likely to confine the discussion to their own relatives. Kentucky volunteer Terah Sampson felt that the “priveliges” to “act freely without being molested or harmed” which Americans enjoyed as a birthright were in danger of being “taken away” not just from himself or his mother and brothers, but from the entire “once happy and free people” of the United States. 87 Soldiers from homes farther from the front were more likely to reason that liberty applied to everybody, and that they and their loved ones were part of everybody.
Union soldiers’ distinctive understanding of liberty as a universal quality specially entrusted to the United States grew out of a tradition of millennial thought far more prominent in the antebellum North than in the antebellum South. Sunday sermons, schoolbooks, and Independence Day orations had long assured Northerners that God had special plans for the American Republic. 88 When the Second Great Awakening swept Civil War soldiers’ parents’ generation and singed soldiers’ own generation in its youth, northern revivalism’s emphasis on perfectibility renewed the United States’ special mandate to bring about God’s kingdom on earth. Sin, corruption, injustice, and misery plainly demonstrated that the United States remained a long way from perfection, but by banding together into reform societies, many middle-class Northerners believed ordinary citizens could remove obstacles to perfection and establish t
he United States as a model to the world. An “explosion in voluntary societies” occurred in the North from 1825 to 1850, during which northern middle-class men and women formed organizations dedicated to idealistic causes like temperance, prison and asylum reform, and (less popularly) abolitionism and women’s rights. 89 In short, the millennial tradition and the Second Great Awakening encouraged even the majority of Northerners who did not join reform societies to think about ideals like liberty in more collective terms than Southerners were accustomed to, and to view the United States as a specially chosen example that would bring ideals like liberty to the whole world, while simultaneously leading the rest of the globe to a state of moral perfection.
Millennial habits of thought combined with daily habit and local governmental practices to encourage northern men to feel and express more emotional attachments to the government—not just the geographic territory or population or idea—of the United States than Southerners were wont to do. Over and over, new recruits in 1861 referred to the Union not just as their home or their country, but as “the best government on earth.” Joseph Scroggs, an Ohioan about to enlist in the 104th Ohio, called the Union the “best government that ever existed”; a Wisconsin sharpshooter wrote about “the best and most honorable Government on the face of God’s earth”; and an anonymous enlisted contributor to the camp newspaper The Ohio Seventh praised “the justest, freest, most beneficent government on which the sun has ever shone.” These men were only a few of the legions who sounded some variation on this refrain, which recurred incessantly among Union soldiers in 1861 but not at all among Confederates. 90 As one historian has explained, daily life in the North gave white northern men more reason than their southern counterparts to believe that “government in the pre–Civil War North was not ‘them,’ it was us.” Differences in northern and southern society offered northern men more opportunities to participate directly in government in ways beyond voting. While dispersed settlement patterns minimized the number of town governments and therefore opportunities to cast ballots on mundane municipal questions or to hold minor office in the South, the northern landscape included more small towns and villages, more local ballot questions, and more prosaic offices, such as that of fence-viewer (a village official who inspected fences and helped neighbors resolve property, livestock, and trespass disputes), which were unnecessary and therefore rare in the South. 91 Recruits who joined the Union ranks in 1861 did not view the U.S. government as a distant abstraction or as a hostile ruling force. Neither did they see it as irrelevant to their lives or dangerous to their liberties. Instead, they viewed government in general and the Union government in particular as a dynamic process in which they expected to take active part. 92
Because Union troops felt emotionally attached to the U.S. government, many would have perceived any rebellion as a personal insult, but secession from the United States in response to election results amounted to an especially egregious affront to the principles of self-government for which northern whites believed the Union stood. In practical terms, secession undermined self-government and democracy by undercutting the electoral process. Elective government depended upon all parties abiding by the outcome of fair and free elections. If the losing side severed the government whenever it disapproved of the results, electoral government lacked legitimacy and all hopes for self-government were destroyed. As one camp newspaper explained, the United States owed its “powers and its privileges” to its “rules of government,” which were based “upon the will of the people fairly and legally expressed” through elections. 93 Lincoln was elected according to procedures outlined in the Constitution, which made reneging on the outcome tantamount to abandoning elections altogether.
Further, as Union troops saw it, Confederates had repudiated the principles of self-government by rejecting not just any undesirable election result; they had specifically rejected an outcome that did not favor the expansion of slavery. Firmly convinced that the rebellion was started by slave owners “to secure the extension of that blighting curse—slavery— o’er our fair land,” an Iowan volunteered to defend “the Union and a government” from destruction by such base motives. 94 Meanwhile, a Vermont soldier claimed that the moral “stigma” of slavery brought “animosities and wranglings” down on the nation and threatened its very existence, while a Wisconsin chaplain emphasized that “radical reform must be had everywhere” or else “a slave Empire” would replace “Republican Government,” and then “our country must die.” 95 The Union mattered to Union soldiers and to the whole world (by the rank and file’s lights, at least), and in 1861 a large and growing number of ordinary soldiers believed that a war endangering that Union had come about because of slavery. White Southerners’ willingness to destroy the Union over slavery made the war about slavery whether an individual Union soldier wanted it that way or not, and regardless of how he felt about black Americans.
Widespread recognition that slavery had started the war did not immediately translate into agreement over what the Union should do about it. At first, slavery and emancipation were the most hotly contested issues in the Union Army, unlike in the Confederate Army, where soldiers shared a belief in the necessity of black bondage. Then as now, racism was a nationwide, not exclusively southern, phenomenon, and it led some Union troops to denounce the idea of a war to end slavery. The regimental newspaper of the Seventeenth Illinois lambasted “the northern fanatic,” who awaits “the probable abolition of slavery in the southern States, rubs his hands with delight and rejoices that the day of deliverance has arrived. All the horrors of civil war are of no consequence to him if his darling project is accomplished.” 96 Other soldiers concluded that the way to end the war was to quiet southern fears about the safety of slavery by leaving the institution alone. 97
Right from the beginning, some Northerners rejected the conciliatory approach. Most obviously, black Northerners knew immediately that the war must strike at slavery. As one black New Yorker bluntly put it, “this war…is virtually nothing more nor less than perpetual slavery against universal freedom.” In his view, the Union would not win until it made up its mind “to put an everlasting end to negro slavery.” 98 Just weeks after Fort Sumter fell, the black newspaper the Anglo-African predicted that “no adjustment of the nation’s difficulty is possible until the claims of the black man are first met and satisfied…. If you would restore the Union and maintain the government you so fondly cherish, make way for liberty, universal and complete.” 99 Some white Northerners concurred. Andrew Walker, a son of Irish immigrants, was teaching school in Illinois when he heard that Fort Sumter had fallen. He hoped that the crisis would at last allow the United States to “forever set aside Slavery,” and before the year was out, he enlisted in the Fifty-fifth Illinois to help. 100
Disagreement never wholly disappeared from the Union Army, but fighting the war convinced many Union troops early on that slavery was “the exciting as well as the approximate cause of the trouble which now agitates our once proud republic,” which meant that winning the war would require the destruction of slavery. 101 If Southerners had not rebelled, a Pennsylvanian insisted, most Northerners would have continued “following their plow, minding their forge, or exerting their talents in the mercantile line” with thoughts of slavery and war far from their minds, but the South had left no choice but to take action against the institution that brought the war. 102 Wartime service reinforced that analysis in two ways. First, early battles like Bull Run and Wilson’s Creek dispelled delusions about a short and easy war. One shaken survivor of Bull Run testified to the impact that combat could have when he lamented to his fiancée, “O Emily you can imagine nothing about the horrors of war. I have read about it but knew nothing what it was untill I experienced it.” 103 As soldiers came to grips with the likelihood of a long and difficult struggle, they also looked differently at measures that might once have seemed too radical. Second, soldiers heard over and over from southern civilians that the Yankees were out to destroy slavery
, and that the South went to war to save it. Wisconsin Chaplain A. C. Barry spent a lot of time talking to residents of Virginia’s eastern shore, where he was repeatedly struck by their insistence that they had gone to war because they believed “the institution of slavery was in danger.” 104 Sgt. E. C. Hubbard, a hard-bitten volunteer serving in Missouri, explained to his brother that white men were killing one another “all for a detestable black man.” 105 Hubbard hardly qualified as a radical abolitionist, yet his observations convinced him that slavery had caused the war. The longer he served, the more certain he grew that successful war policies would have to strike at slavery. 106
Men like Hubbard added up to a striking pattern that took shape between August and December of 1861: soldier after soldier began to insist that since slavery had caused the war, only the destruction of slavery could end it. In October, a member of the Third Wisconsin told the Wisconsin State Journal, “the rebellion is abolitionizing the whole army.” Time in the South forced troops “to face this sum of all evils, and cause of the war,” slavery. “You have no idea of the changes that have taken place in the minds of the soldiers in the last two months,” the soldier continued, and the changes were not restricted to Republicans. Now that they saw slavery with their own eyes, “men of all parties seem unanimous in the belief that to permanently establish the Union, is to first wipe [out] the institution” of slavery. 107 A Missouri private agreed that since “it was slavery that caused the war,” it would take “the eternal overthrow of slavery” to win it. 108 Throughout the rank and file, as enlisted soldiers decided that only elimination of the war’s cause could end the rebellion and prevent its recurrence, they championed the destruction of slavery a full year ahead of the Emancipation Proclamation, well before most civilians, political leaders, or officers did.
What This Cruel War Was Over Page 6
