17. Despite the rich nature of troops’ letters and diaries, all sources present problems and challenges, and these are no exception. The written nature of the sources automatically raises the problem of representativeness, especially with regard to illiterate soldiers, who are by definition virtually excluded from a study of soldiers’ writings. However, illiterate Civil War soldiers are fewer in number than might be supposed. Over 80 percent of Confederate soldiers could read and write, while over 90 percent of white Union soldiers were literate. Moreover, illiterate soldiers often dictated letters to literate messmates, and the words of some of these men are included here.
18. In a 1943 article, Bell Wiley excitedly reported the discovery of regimental newspapers, and announced his intention to write a book about them. He mentioned them in Johnny Reb and Billy Yank, but he later conceded that he had found too few to pursue the idea, and concluded that not very many survived. Wiley’s failure to find them is not surprising, since they are generally hidden in small archives that are unaware of their existence, let alone their location in the stacks. Finding them involves extensive and determined searching, and to the best of my knowledge, no historian has systematically looked for them since Wiley abandoned the hunt. I found them only by looking at every American newspaper published between 1861 and 1865 in the holdings of forty-five archives. See Wiley, “Camp Newspapers of the Confederacy,” North Carolina Historical Review 20 (1943), 327–35.
19. See, for example, Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Thavolia Glymph, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, ser. 1, vol. 1, The Destruction of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1–56; Ira Berlin, Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Vincent Harding, The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Vintage, 1981).
20. See, for example, LaWanda Cox, Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadership (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1981); and James M. McPherson, “Who Freed the Slaves?” in Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
21. See, for example, William C. Davis, Lincoln’s Men: How President Lincoln Became Father to an Army and a Nation (New York: Free Press, 1999); and Ida Tarbell, Life of Lincoln, vol. 2 (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1900), ch. 27, “Lincoln and the Soldiers.”
22. What follows is an abbreviated and incomplete overview of rising sectional tensions in the years before the Civil War. The best single-volume study of growing antebellum conflict remains David Potter, The Impending Crisis (New York: Harper and Row, 1976).
23. Peter D. McClelland and Richard J. Zeckhauser, Demographic Dimensions of the New Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982); Mark V. Wetherington, Plain Folk’s Fight: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Piney Woods Georgia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 63. For the expansion of slavery from the seaboard to the Deep South, see Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).
24. Missouri itself was the one exception: with its southern boundary at 36° 30’ latitude, it is actually north of the Missouri Compromise line. For Tallmadge’s Amendment, see Debates of Congress from 1789–1856, vol. 6 (1817–21) (New York, 1858). Several votes were taken in each House of Congress, all returning the same overall result. The final House vote at the close of the Fifteenth Congress, Second Session (March 1819), was seventy-nine for Tallmadge’s Amendment, sixty-seven against it. The Senate’s concluding vote was similarly close, but the result was to reject Tallmadge’s Amendment. For the return of the issue to Congress, see Debates of Congress, 6: 204–372, with voting results on pp. 344 and 372. On the Missouri controversy generally, see Richard Brown, “The Missouri Crisis, Slavery and the Politics of Jacksonianism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 65 (winter 1966); Philip F. Detweiler, “Congressional Debate on Slavery and the Declaration of Independence, 1819–1821,” American Historical Review 63:3 (1958), 598–616; Don E. Fehrenbacher, The South and Three Sectional Crises (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980); Kenneth S. Greenberg, “Revolutionary Ideology and the Proslavery Argument: The Abolition of Slavery in Ante-bellum South Carolina,” Journal of Southern History 42 (1976), 365–84; Shaw Livermore, Jr., The Twilight of Federalism: The Disintegration of the Federalist Party 1815–1830 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962); Glover Moore, The Missouri Controversy 1819–1821 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1953); Robert E. Shalhope, “Thomas Jefferson’s Republicanism and Ante-bellum Southern Thought,” Journal of Southern History 42 (1976), 529–56; Charles Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism 1819–1848 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1948); Sean Wilentz, “Jeffersonian Democracy and the Origins of Political Antislavery in the United States: The Missouri Crisis Revisited,” Journal of the Historical Society 4:3 (2004), 375–401; and Joshua Michael Zeitz, “The Missouri Compromise Reconsidered: Rhetoric and the Emergence of the Free Labor Synthesis,” Journal of the Early Republic 20:3 (2000), 447–85.
25. On the Missouri crisis and the emergence of proslavery ideology, see David W. Blight, “Perceptions of Southern Intransigence and the Rise of Radical Antislavery Thought, 1816–1830,” Journal of the Early Republic 3:2 (1983), 139–64; Chandra Miller, “‘Title Page to a Great Tragic Volume’: The Impact of the Missouri Crisis on Slavery, Race, and Republicanism in the Thought of John C. Calhoun and John Quincy Adams,” Missouri Historical Review 94:4 (2000), 365–88; Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism; Wilentz, “Jeffersonian Democracy and the Origins of Political Antislavery.” On proslavery generally, see Drew Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987). On abolitionism see James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: Abolitionism and American Slavery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996); Ronald G. Walters, The Anti-Slavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830 (New York: Norton, 1984). For political antislavery, see Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
26. On the gag rule controversy, see William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York: Knopf, 1996). On Elijah Lovejoy, see Paul Simon, Freedom’s Champion: Elijah Lovejoy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994). Even though slavery generally remained below the surface in the 1830s, it was rarely absent, as Susan Wyly-Jones shows in “The 1835 Anti-Abolition Meetings in the South: A New Look at the Controversy over the Abolition Postal Campaign,” Civil War History 47:4 (2001), 289–309.
27. On expansion and slavery in the 1840s through the Compromise of 1850, see William J. Cooper, Liberty and Slavery: Southern Politics to 1860 (New York: Knopf, 1983); Eric Foner, “The Wilmot Proviso Revisited,” Journal of American History 56 (1969), 262–79; William Freehling, Road to Disunion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Thomas Hietala, Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003); Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992); Stephen E. Maizlish and John J. Kushma, eds., Essays on American Antebellum Politics 1840–1860 (Arlington: University of Texas Press, 1982); Michael Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, vol. 1, Fruits of Manifest Destiny 1847–1852 (New York: Scribner, 1947); Potter, Impending Crisis.
28. First appearing serially in The National Era in 1851–52, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published as a novel in 1852. More than 300,000 copies sold in a single year. To place that number in perspective
, respectable sales enjoyed by authors like Henry David Thoreau and Herman Melville ran in the two thousand range. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was also performed as a play throughout the North. For more on Stowe and the impact of the book in the North, see Joan Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). For an example of the southern response, see Louisa McCord’s review of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published in the Southern Quarterly Review, in Richard C. Lounsbury, ed., Louisa S. McCord: Political and Social Essays (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995).
29. Ann Walsh Bradley and Joseph A. Ranney, “A Tradition of Independence: The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s First 150 Years,” Wisconsin Magazine of History (winter 2002–2003), 42–49; Michael McManus, Political Abolitionism in Wisconsin, 1840–1861 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1998); Thomas Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Joseph A. Ranney, “Suffering the Agonies of Their Righteousness: The Rise and Fall of the States Rights Movement in Wisconsin, 1854–1861,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 75:2, 85–117; Albert J. Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
30. For Stephen Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, see Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Roy F. Nichols, “The Kansas-Nebraska Act: A Century of Historiography,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43 (1956), 187–212; Potter, Impending Crisis, 145–76. Born in Scotland, James Redpath wrote for the New York Tribune regularly and for the Chicago Tribune and St. Louis Democrat occasionally. For Kansas in the 1850s see Albert Castel, Civil War Kansas: Reaping the Whirlwind (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997); Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004); Thomas Goodrich, War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas, 1854–1861 (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Press, 1998); Sarah T. L. Robinson, Kansas: Its Interior and Exterior Life Including A Full View of Its Settlement, Political History, Social Life, Climate, Soil, Productions, Scenery, Etc. (Boston, 1856). For the impact of the Lecompton constitution see Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln, vol. 1, Douglas, Buchanan, and Party Chaos 1857–1859 (New York: Scribner, 1951); and Kenneth Stampp, America in 1857 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). For more information on guerrilla warfare in the bordering state of Missouri, see Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
31. Speech of Hon. Lucius Gartrell of Georgia, Congressional Globe, Thirty-fifth Congress, First Session (Washington, D.C., 1858), 393.
32. Washington Union, November 17, 1857, cited in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988): 180. For more on the Dred Scott decision, see Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); and Stampp, America in 1857, 68–109.
33. Paul Finkelman notes the existence of unpublished notes and drafts in Roger Taney’s papers which indicate that Taney was preparing to write a decision dictating that “all,” including the “free states of the union” had “an obligation…to respect the institution of slavery” even within their own borders. See Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 338.
34. For discussion of Lemmon v. the People, the case of a slaveholder against the state of New York, see Finkelman, An Imperfect Union, 312–36; and Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case, 444–45. For more on Northerners’ fears that Dred Scott would lead to slavery for every state, see William E. Gienapp, “The Republican Party and the Slave Power,” in Robert H. Abzug and Stephen E. Maizlish, eds., New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America: Essays in Honor of Kenneth M. Stampp (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1986), 68–69; and Stampp, America in 1857.
35. A vast literature exists on the politics of the 1850s, the rise of the Republican Party, and the Slave Power conspiracy. Adam Rothman provides a very useful and concise summary of the idea of the Slave Power in “‘The Slave Power’ in the United States, 1783–1865,” in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 64–91. Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) emphasizes the importance of the dignity of free white labor to Republicans’ appeal. Works such as William E. Gienapp’s The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), Joel H. Silbey’s The Transformation of American Politics, 1840–1860 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), and Ronald P. Formisano’s The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827–1861 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) stress ethno-cultural factors such as anti-Catholicism and nativism. David Brion Davis in The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969) and Michael Holt in The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Wiley, 1978) present alternative views of the Slave Power conspiracy idea. Both emphasize the suspicions of conspiracies against liberty (discussed, for example, in Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967]) bequeathed to subsequent generations from the American Revolution. Davis, as his title suggests, represents the antebellum variation on the conspiratorial theme as an abnormality, while Holt describes fears of the Slave Power conspiracy less as pathology than as politics as usual. In other words, Holt emphasizes linkages between nativism, anti-Catholicism, widespread suspicion of secretive groups like the Masons, and calls for resistance to the Slave Power, because, he argues, Northerners’ real fear was for the fate of republicanism, to which foreigners, Catholics, and shadowy organizations could seem as threatening as slaveocrats. Soldiers, however, made no such connections. Though many began the war without being altogether clear as to whether they opposed the institution of slavery itself or the chief practitioners of it, they regarded issues surrounding slavery as uniquely significant, and spent no time pondering the doom of republicanism at the hands of Catholicism, immigrants, or groups like the Masons.
36. On John Brown and reaction to his raid, see Paul Finkelman, ed., His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995); and Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984).
37. For Brown’s resolutions, see Congressional Globe, January 18, 1860, Thirty-sixth Congress, First Session, 404. For Davis’s, see Congressional Globe, February 2, 1860, Thirty-sixth Congress, First Session, 658. In the spring of 1860, the Senate took up the question again. See Congressional Globe, Thirty-sixth Congress, First Session, 2321–22. For discussion of the resolutions on slavery, and demands for a federal slave code, see David Herbert Donald, Jean Harvey Baker, and Michael F. Holt, The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Norton, 2001), 117, 657 n. 39; Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln, vol. 2, Prologue to Civil War 1859–1861 (New York: Scribner, 1951), 178–81. William J. Cooper disagrees, writing that Albert Brown proposed a federal slave code, but Jefferson Davis merely wanted to discredit Stephen Douglas and did not call for a slave code, but it seems clear from Davis’ explicit mention of “the duty of Congress” that he called for a federal role. See William J. Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American (New York: Knopf, 2000), 304–306. On the Democrats in 1860, see William L. Barney, Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974); William Gienapp, “The Crisis of American Democracy,” in Gabor S. Boritt, ed., Why the Civil War Came (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 79–124; and Potter, Impending Crisis. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, also discusses the Democratic breakup in 1860.
38. See, for example, David Blight, “For Something Beyond the Battlefield’: Frederick Douglass and the Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War,” Journal of American History 75:4 (March 1989), 1156–78, esp. 1162–63; and Miller, Arguing About Slavery, 3–4.
39. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “The Soldier’s Faith,” May 30, 1895, in Richard A. Posner, ed., The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 89. For later suppression of slavery’s place in the war, see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).
1: “Lincoln and Liberty”: Why an Antislavery President Meant War
1. Resolutions of Louisiana students at the University of North Carolina, 1861, Chapel Hill, N.C., Thomas Benjamin Davidson Papers, SHC. The undated resolutions followed Louisiana’s seizure of forts on January 26, 1861.
2. Resolutions recorded at Cambridge, Mass., by Stephen Emerson, 1861, Stephen G. Emerson Correspondence, MHS. The undated resolutions followed the fall of Fort Sumter.
3. Alfred Green, “The Colored Philadelphians Forming Regiments,” Philadelphia Press, April 22, 1861, in Alfred M. Green, Letters and Discussions on the Formation of Colored Regiments (Philadelphia, 1862), Schomburg.
4. Pvt. John Lyon Hill, Churchville Cavalry (later Va. Cavalry), diary, August 9, 1861, Camp Alleghany, Va., John Lyon Hill Diary, CMM Ser. A, Reel 17.
What This Cruel War Was Over Page 31
