The American Civil War

by John Keegan

  By 1860, and despite lulls and Northern retreats from the issue, slavery had got a thoroughly bad name in the North. Most Northerners, despite their undoubted Negrophobia, were ashamed that their country, alone among the great constitutional polities of the Western world, continued to allow the practice of slavery and, without agreeing in any way about how the end was to be achieved, wished to see the institution disappear. Many Southerners, though trapped by the economics of slavery, in which their world and livelihoods were embroiled, deduced, with some sincerity, that slavery was a burden to them and that, paradoxically, slave owners were themselves the slaves of the system, committed by it to a way of life that monopolised all their time and attention. Even some among them who would fight most energetically for the Confederacy, or support their husbands in so doing, were frequent complainers of the loss of liberty that their performance of slave-owning duty imposed on them. They held that the peculiar institution was the hardest of taskmasters. Nevertheless, a majority of Southerners were prepared to fight to defend it. The question was, how many Northerners were prepared to fight them over the issue?

  At the beginning, after the first clashes of 1861, the soldiers who were to fight the Civil War began to demonise each other. To Southerners, the men in the Union ranks were, of course, Yankees, but also “mercenaries” or “Hessians” or “regulars,” terms of abuse descended from the War of Independence against the British. To Northerners the men of the South were “secesh” but also “savages” and “brutes” as well as “traitors” and “rebels.” “Rebel” was of course an accurate description and quite quickly the Confederates became Johnny Reb to the Union soldier, who became Billy Yank in return. “Yankee” had a qualitative as well as geographical meaning to Southerners. It implied a cold, narrow-minded Puritan, everything that the Southerner held himself not to be. Well-educated Southerners preferred to think of themselves as cavaliers, figures from a novel by Walter Scott, the writer whom Mark Twain, only half jokingly, identified as having caused the Civil War.

  The spectre of slave uprising was constantly raised by alarmists and by die-hard defenders of slavery. Nevertheless, for all the searching for motives that occupied minds on both sides once the fighting had begun, it remained, as it still remains, difficult to explain why the Civil War became a war as opposed to a continuation of a long-running dispute over slavery which had occupied minds, North and South, for the previous forty years. Yanks were given to asking Rebs why they were fighting. One Reb, captured in Virginia early on, answered, “Because you are here.” It was, and remains, as good an answer as any.

  It is often suggested that the war was a conflict between two Americas, an older, agricultural South and a newer, industrial North that was coming into being. There is something, if very little, in that.

  With fewer places in which to find industrial employment, more Southerners than Northerners were country-dwellers and farmworkers. Nevertheless, both armies were predominantly raised from farming communities, and the list of soldiers’ occupations was closely similar. Bell Irvin Wiley, in his study of Johnny Reb, found that of 9,000 soldiers in twenty-eight Confederate regiments, although half described themselves as farmers, 474 entered themselves as students, perhaps school as well as university pupils, since it is known that at least one teacher closed down his school on the outbreak of war and marched his class off to enlist. There were also 472 labourers in Wiley’s sample, 321 clerks and 318 mechanics, 222 carpenters, 138 merchants, and 116 blacksmiths. Other occupations showing more than 50 enlistees were sailors, doctors (most of whom must have served as surgeons), painters, teachers, shoemakers, and lawyers.3 Some described themselves as gentlemen, no doubt from the planter class, whom the elected officers often found difficult to handle. Professor Wiley’s examination of the rolls of 12,000 Union soldiers disclosed an almost exactly similar set of occupations and numbers of those practising them with the difference that more of the Northerners were teachers or printers, evidence of the higher degree of literacy in the Northern ranks.4

  Another category better represented in the North than the South was the foreign-born. In 1860 there were a million Germans living in the Northern states, most of them immigrants from the repression following the 1848 revolution. They and their native-born descendants, who might still be German-speaking, numbered 200,000 of the Union army’s two million members. The next largest foreign-born contingent was the Irish, with 150,000. The Irish were, of course, English-speaking, as were the 45,000 English-born and most of the 50,000 Canadians. The Confederate equivalent numbers were not separately counted, but it is known the Irish, Germans, Italians, and Poles totalled tens of thousands. However, the typical Confederate soldier, if such a being can be isolated, was English-speaking and of British ancestry, English or Scotch-Irish. Many immigrants were to prove violently opposed to conscription when it was introduced in 1863. Most of the New Yorkers who looted and burnt and fought in the streets during the infamous draft riots of that year were Irish, who equated military service with British oppression.

  The soldiers of the two sides were alike enough to fraternise readily when opportunity offered, to their officers’ great disapproval. A common pretext was the exchange of Reb tobacco for Yankee coffee. At Kennesaw Mountain in 1864 one of Sherman’s soldiers recorded that “we made a bargain with them that we would not fire on them, if they would not fire on us, and they were as good as their word. It seems too bad that we had to fight men that we like. Now these Southern soldiers seem just like our own boys. They talk about their mothers and fathers and their sweethearts just as we do. Both sides did a lot of talking but there was no shooting until I came off duty in the morning.” Not all contestants were so easygoing. Sergeant Day Elmore wrote from near Atlanta in July 1864, “The Boys have been to gather a number of times … traiding coffee for tobacco, but I do not love them so I could not take them by the hand as some of the Boys did.”5

  Earlier in the war, Billy Yank commonly execrated Johnny Reb, cursing him as the blackest of enemies and as a foe of the liberty that the Founding Fathers and their men had won from the British. What can we tell about the United States at mid-nineteenth century from the sentiments of the men who wore the blue or the gray? The enormous extent of the United States was still more unsettled than not. Many of the modern states had not yet come into being, so that there was no Idaho, no Wyoming, no Washington State, no Oklahoma, while Utah and New Mexico were territories and included land that would eventually belong to states later admitted to the Union. Many familiar cities were as yet simply unbuilt landscape, Bismarck and Pierre, Omaha, Helena. Most of the vast plains stretching from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains was still the preserve of the buffalo and the Indians who hunted it and, so unpromising did it appear for settlement, that it was known to early American geographers as the Great American Desert, though in time it would prove, given adequate irrigation, abundantly fertile. What both Billy Yank and Johnny Reb noticed about each other’s landscapes was the difference in appearance that their different styles of farming imposed on the land. At dividing lines like the Tennessee River, Northerners noted that the northern shore ran down to the water like a garden, while below the southern shore looked unkempt. Northern soldiers were also deeply critical of the condition of the landscape in Virginia, writing home to say that “if in Northern hands, it would have been far more productive than it was.” Jesse Wilson, a soldier in a Maine regiment, wrote to his mother in 1862 from Virginia, “In the hands of New England people, this country might be created into a garden.” Southern farming methods probably did differ from Northern, since Northern farms were usually small family enterprises, raising cash crops, while Southern farms were either subsistence holdings or else slave labour properties. In either case, the Southerners did not expend the care on them that Northern proprietors did on their cherished acres. Northerners were also often contemptuous of Southern towns, which they found small, poky, and ill-built. They often complained that the streets were dirty and the general a
ir “old-fashioned,” a common term of criticism in Northerners’ letters home. They also criticised Southerners themselves, finding them badly educated and badly spoken.

  Bell Irvin Wiley, who read many thousands of soldiers’ letters and hundreds of diaries in compiling his wonderful profiles of the common soldiers, North and South, formed the impression of a spiritual and temperamental difference between Yank and Reb, reflecting differences in the two societies. Johnny Reb was a lighter-hearted correspondent, passing on jokes and comic incidents to the folk at home more frequently than Billy Yank. He was more heartfelt in expressions of affection and more graphic in his descriptions of battle. Billy Yank was more political, expressing views about forthcoming elections, which the Southerner lacked the opportunity to do, since the Confederacy held only one presidential election during 1861-65, and he was generally less given to stating his views about the conduct of the war and government. He was also more businesslike, demanding news about the family fortunes and management, typically of the farm. Whatever the pattern of difference, however, soldiers with paper and pen in hand revealed more similarities than differences. Analysis of soldiers’ letters emphasises the tragedy of the war and raises questions about how and why enmities were so long sustained.6

  In the years before 1860 North and South, not seriously dissimilar at the time of independence, had drifted far apart. It was not simply economic difference, the industrialisation of the North and its extension westward into the new farming lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains, and the South’s persisting otherness. It was the social difference between a wholly free region and a partially unfree one. That was Lincoln’s point in his famous remarks about “a house divided.” A country which in 1781 had been united by its origins in British, largely English culture, by its common practice of English-speaking Protestantism, by its acceptance of British legal and political forms, had by 1861 become separated by the features that the practice of slavery had inflicted on its southern half.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Will There Be a War?

  IN DECEMBER 1860 the United States of America trembled on the brink of … what? Disunion certainly. But civil war? Violent language filled the columns of newspapers, North and South, and the air of debating chambers in state and the national legislatures. How far would violent language lead those who spoke with passion? On December 20, a convention in South Carolina declared its secession from the United States, created by the thirteen British colonies’ declaration of independence and their subsequent promulgation of a common constitution eighty years earlier. South Carolina’s secession was swiftly followed by that of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. The occasion of secession was the election of Abraham Lincoln as the new president of the United States. He and his Republican Party had won on a platform that opposed slavery, and many in the South had concluded that his presidency threatened an end to the “peculiar institution,” which for them defined their way of life and underpinned their prosperity. Secession secured the means to preserve both. Secession did not, however, imply war, nor did the South, or the North for that matter, proceed from secession to undertake any preparation for fighting.

  Moreover, as cooler heads in the South recognised, neither Lincoln himself nor his Republican Party proposed abolition, the legal ending of slavery by an amendment of the Constitution, which indirectly permitted slavery while not positively endorsing it. What Lincoln and the Republicans and indeed a very large number of Northerners insisted upon was that slavery should not be extended into the “territories,” the vast tracts of North America belonging to the Union but not yet organised as states. Unfortunately, many in the South had persuaded themselves that slavery and a South dependent on slavery could only survive if slavery was extended into the territories. The issue had already caused a great deal of trouble within the United States, legal, political, and constitutional, and in some of the territories, notably Kansas, was provoking bitter and violent conflict. Pro-slavery parties were prepared to tolerate the violence, or the passions that underlay it, if that was the price of carrying slavery westward. The anti-slavery parties foresaw that the extension of slavery would strengthen Southern power in Congress and, they believed, undermine the principles of political and economic liberty on which the United States had been founded. In December 1860 the implications of the crisis were yet to be perceived. While there was talk of war by some, it was still only as an eventuality, not an inevitability.

  Sixty years earlier few would have been found who believed that slavery could cause a crisis threatening the domestic peace of the nation. The South’s attachment to slavery in 1860 was explained by the slaves’ role in cultivating and preparing raw cotton. In 1800 only 70,000 bales of cotton fibre had been produced, in 1860 over four million bales. The number of slaves had increased proportionately, from 700,000 at the time of the first census in 1790 to four million in 1860, exclusively the result of births, since the slave trade had been abolished in 1807. The rise in output had a number of causes, including the invention of the cotton gin, which separated fibre from the hard cotton boll much more quickly and less laboriously than it could be done by hand. Rich land in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana also yielded much larger crops, at a time when the traditional growing areas in Virginia and the Carolinas were losing their fertility. The development of “short staple” cottons also opened up regions unsuitable for the planting of long staple varieties. The expansion of planting was driven by rising demand from Europe, where in Britain, Belgium, and France the industrial revolution was bringing a mechanised textile spinning and weaving industry into being. Rising demand for cotton generated rising demand for slave labour, supplied by slave owners who were also slave breeders in the South and who despite the prohibition of slave imports made large profits by selling American-born slaves on the domestic market at prices that rose throughout the century’s first half. Rising slave numbers heightened the South’s attachment to slavery, since the institution had sound social as well as economic functions, assuring control of an unfree population, which in some areas of the Deep South exceeded in number that of the free, slave-owning white population.

  During the 1850s, as the population of the United States was swelled by the immigration of millions of European settlers, many of whom joined native-born Americans in moving west into the fertile farmlands of the Midwest, slavery acquired a critical political importance. Southerners sought to have the legality of slavery established in the new areas of settlement not only because they wished to profit by the spread of slave owning, but also because territories, once settled, were destined to become states and so to alter the balance of power in Congress. Thitherto, the balance between slave and free states had been maintained with remarkable equilibrium; in 1847 there were fifteen slave and fourteen free states. The balance was crucial to the South, since though it could not hope to limit numbers of voters in states, their electoral weight counted only in the House of Representatives. In the Senate, by contrast, each state controlled two votes. As long, therefore, as territories were admitted to Congress as states in which slavery was permitted, and slavery was accepted in the federal Constitution, slavery was safe within the South, since anti-slavery legislation passed by the House of Representatives could be voted down in the Senate. Much of the political business of the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century was concerned with the creation of new states, carefully supervised by the South to assure that the balance was maintained. The process was delicate. In 1787 Congress had by ordinance banned slavery in the Northwest, territory that became the states of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin, then only beginning to be settled. In 1820, when the question of admitting Missouri arose, the North agreed to a compromise, accepting Missouri as a slave state on condition that Maine, the northern part of Massachusetts, was admitted as a free state, thus maintaining the balance. The Missouri Compromise also excluded slavery from those territories forming part of the Louisiana Purchase, north
of 36°30’, the largest remaining tract of federal territory within the United States. The South did not quibble because the excluded territory was recognised to be unsuitable for slave agriculture, in that neither its climate nor its soil was fitted for the intensive cultivation of cotton or tobacco.