What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  While the Fugitive Slave Law, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and personal liberty laws raised tensions, Kansas provided the ground on which those tensions led to armed battle. Kansas Territory was opened to white settlement in 1854. As a part of the Louisiana Purchase located above the 36° 30’ line, Kansas should have been free territory according to the Missouri Compromise, but a solution that worked in 1820 proved wholly inadequate to the hotter climate of the 1850s, by which time the extension of slavery seemed too important an issue to white Southerners, too vital to their very existence, to settle with the outdated Missouri Compromise. Instead, white southern leaders insisted, slavery followed the flag: it was a legitimate national institution that could not be barred from any U.S. territory. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois tried to douse the flames with cool reason in the form of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which threw out the Missouri Compromise and replaced it with “popular sovereignty,” which meant that white male voters in Kansas should decide at the ballot box whether Kansas would be slave or free. For his pains, Douglas was seen as a traitor to the Missouri Compromise by many Northerners and as a public danger by many white Southerners who did not believe an issue as important as slavery could be left to any mechanism as haphazard as voting. In Kansas itself, violence between proslavery and antislavery settlers erupted. Accounts by eastern correspondents such as James Redpath painted a lurid (and often exaggerated) picture in which voicing antislavery opinions or reading antislavery literature was branded a crime, aiding a fugitive slave was punishable by death, elections were fraudulent, and proslavery ruffians murdered and sacked with abandon. In 1857, it looked like all the violence might succeed in forcing slavery on Kansas. A fraudulently elected proslavery convention not recognized by most settlers in Kansas drafted the Lecompton constitution, a state constitution that would have made Kansas a slave state, and submitted it to Congress. Despite the strong opposition of most Kansas voters, President James Buchanan, thought to be under the thumb of southern Democrats, tried to force the proslavery constitution through Congress. 30 When Congress rejected the Lecompton constitution, white Southerners like Georgia Congressman Lucius Gartrell lashed out. Gartrell called opposition to the Lecompton constitution the latest in a long series of “continual aggressions” against white Southerners, and newspapers throughout the South echoed similar protests. 31

  Meanwhile, troubles mounted nationally. Even before the controversy over the Lecompton constitution arose, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of the U.S. Supreme Court declared in the Dred Scott decision that Congress could not ban slavery from any territory. In the midst of the Lecompton controversy, a prominent Democratic newspaper, the Washington Union, called northern states’ prohibition of slavery within their own boundaries unconstitutional. 32 Taney began to write a decision that would declare state laws against slavery unconstitutional. 33 In 1860, a slaveholder’s case against the state of New York would have provided Taney with the opportunity to issue his decision effectively nationalizing slavery if secession had not intervened. 34

  A new, exclusively northern political party, the Republican Party, arose in the 1850s and added to white southern fears for the safety of slavery. Republicans made rapid gains among northern voters by portraying the dangers of a “Slave Power conspiracy” of wealthy Southerners designing against the liberties of free white men and attempting to undermine the dignity of white labor by associating it with the menial condition of slavery. The Republican Party’s central focus was stopping the spread of slavery into western territories. Although the party claimed no authority to touch slavery where it existed, its emergence alongside growing (if lukewarm) antislavery feeling in the North alarmed white Southerners, who warned that the rise of the “Black Republicans” would doom the Union. The party’s first presidential candidate, John C. Frémont, lost the election of 1856, but his strong showing in many northern states further worried the white South, as did Republican victories in many northern state and local contests. 35

  In 1859, warnings about the inevitable violence that growing northern antislavery sentiment would bring seemed to come true when abolitionist John Brown tried to capture the federal armory at Harpers Ferry and ignite a slave revolt throughout the South. Brown did not identify himself as a Republican (or a member of any party), but his actions struck white Southerners as the logical result of the growth of a sectional, antislavery party. The failure of Brown’s mission and the horror with which most of the white North viewed it did not matter: a white man marching South to arm blacks and end slavery corresponded to white Southerners’ worst nightmares. 36 The survival of slavery and the South required decisive action. In January 1860, Mississippi Senator Albert G. Brown submitted resolutions charging the Senate with the duty of passing laws protecting and promoting slavery in a territory if a territorial legislature failed to enact its own sufficiently strong proslavery laws. In February 1860, Senator Jefferson Davis followed up with a set of resolutions stating that neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could ban slavery from a territory, and that if “judiciary and executive authority” or “the territorial government shall fail or refuse to provide” protection for the “Constitutional Rights” of slaveholders to bring and keep slaves in a territory, “it will be the duty of Congress to supply such a deficiency.” In short, white southern leaders were demanding an expanded role for the federal government in promoting slavery. Such demands provided a platform for southern Democrats when the Democratic Party met for its 1860 convention. Southern Democrats insisted on some version of a federal slave code while northern Democrats espoused popular sovereignty. The party split virtually assured the victory of a Republican candidate in the 1860 election. 37

  Such was the world in which Civil War soldiers had come of age. To be sure, they did not spend night and day thinking about the slavery issue, and most probably preferred to push it as far from the forefront of their minds as possible, but once the war came, they could not, and more importantly, did not, ignore it. Some historians have criticized (implicitly or explicitly) the study of Civil War soldiers as something of an escape hatch offering authors and readers a way to avoid wrestling with difficult and sometimes painful ideological questions about the war. 38 Even some veterans in their later years did their best to suppress the role of slavery, and even to deny that soldiers possessed any ideological awareness at all. Most famously, an aging Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., sighed three decades after the end of the war, “there is one thing I do not doubt…and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands.” 39 But that wistful sentimentalism flies in the face of the reality that soldiers confronted during the war itself. If we listen to what soldiers had to say as they fought the Civil War, the men in the ranks do not allow us to duck the uncomfortable issue of human slavery, but rather take us right to the heart of it. They force us to look at it unflinchingly, and what is more, to see it as a national, not simply southern, issue that defined a war and shaped a nation.

  CHAPTER 1

  “Lincoln and Liberty”:

  Why an Antislavery President Meant War*1

  CHARLESTONIANS crowded the city’s rooftops, craning their necks to watch as ribbons of fire arced their way toward Fort Sumter. Beginning in the early morning hours of April 12, 1861, the batteries ringing Charleston Harbor bombarded the federal garrison for thirty-four hours. As daylight advanced, the barracks caught fire, the flagstaff fell, and the U.S. soldiers inside the fort ate their last rations. On April 14, Maj. Robert Anderson surrendered Fort Sumter to Confederate officer Pierre Beauregard. After decades of arguing and compromising, the northern and southern United States had gone to war.

  Union soldiers confront slavery in 1861: slave pen in Alexandria, Virginia. Courtesy of Local History/Special Collections, Alexandria Public Library

  Slave woman in slave pen, Alexandria, 1861. Courtesy of Local History/Special Collections, Alexandria Public Library
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  As thousands of militiamen stared across Charleston Harbor at the scanty U.S. Army force occupying Fort Sumter, communities everywhere gathered to discuss the crisis facing the nation in early 1861. At a meeting of Louisiana students attending the University of North Carolina, nineteen-year-old Thomas Davidson recorded the proceedings. The Louisianans accused “fanatics of the North” of robbing “the South of her most cherished liberties,” and pledged their lives to the protection of slavery, “that Institution at once our pride and the source of all our wealth and prosperity.” 1 Nearly seven hundred miles away, Stephen Emerson, a Harvard College student who hoped to become a minister, attended a campus meeting that also passed resolutions. “We see our beloved country in imminent peril, our institutions of civil liberty threatened, [and] the genius of freedom & human progress assailed by the spirit of slavery and despotism,” the Harvard students noted, before affirming their “chief allegiance” to God, the heritage of the American Revolution, and the Union. 2 Mean-while, black Philadelphians flocked to the Masonic Hall on South Eleventh Street. There, Alfred Green, a prominent man of color, reminded listeners that black soldiers defending Philadelphia in 1777 helped secure victory in the American Revolution. Now the time had come to realize the ideals of the Revolution by overthrowing “the tyrant system of slavery,” and bringing “truth, justice, and equality to all men.” 3

  Davidson, Emerson, and Green echoed many of one another’s concerns, but they spent the bloodiest war in United States history on different sides. None of the black men to whom Green spoke could legally enlist in the Union Army for more than a year, and Green’s own age made him an unlikely recruit, yet before the war ended, more than 180,000 African Americans had joined the Union war effort. Thomas Davidson served the Confederacy as a private in the Nineteenth Louisiana Infantry until he was killed at Atlanta. And Pvt. Stephen Emerson, First Massachusetts Infantry, fought for the Union until he died at Chancellorsville.

  The words and actions of Green, Davidson, and Emerson show that to many of its participants, the Civil War was nothing less than a clash between competing ideas about how Americans should interpret and enact their founding ideals. The problem, as soldiers on both sides saw it, was that the opposing section posed a direct threat to everything that mattered. The opposing side threatened self-government. It threatened liberty and equality. It threatened the virtue necessary to sustain a republic. It threatened the proper balance between God, government, society, the family, and the individual. And no matter which side of the divide a Civil War soldier stood on, he knew that the heart of the threat, and the reason that the war came, was the other side’s stance on slavery. From first to last, slavery defined the soldiers’ war among both Union and Confederate troops, though how it did so would change over time. In the early months of the conflict, little budged in Confederates’ initial understanding of the war as necessary resistance to the destruction of slavery. In contrast, Union soldiers’ newfound acquaintance with the South, firsthand observations of slavery, and first taste of combat quickly led them to take a much firmer stand against slavery than many could have imagined before the war.

  “No earthly Power can prevent Secession and revolution”

  The immediate catalyst for secession and the outbreak of war was Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency on a platform that pledged to halt the expansion of slavery. As one Virginia private put it, “the poisonous germ which must have sooner or later brought about a conflict between the two sections of the United States” was Northerners’ apparent determination to bar “slaveholders from introducing slavery” into the territories. 4 A majority of northern voters had, after all, just cast ballots in the 1860 election for a candidate who ran on a platform of preventing slavery from spreading into the territories. Following the election, a slave trader complained that Lincoln’s victory disturbed his business and caused slaves to act up. “No earthly Power can prevent Secession and revolution,” he told his wife. 5 Even before Lincoln was inaugurated, seven slaveholding states had left the Union.

  Most states seceded through the action of conventions, which voted to repeal state ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Secessionist and unionist candidates campaigned for election to these state conventions by asking voters to decide if slavery, their best interests, the well-being of their families, and the legacy of the American Revolution were safer inside or outside the Union. Just days after the presidential balloting, Thomas Cobb campaigned for the Georgia state convention by insisting that “the memory of our fathers” as well as Georgians’ “property, our liberty, and our reputation” were all endangered by an antislavery president. Furthermore, he reminded voters that states like Wisconsin and Vermont had personal liberty laws, which permitted individual citizens to refuse to help capture runaway slaves within the boundaries of their own states, and that compounded the threat. 6 Georgia unionists like Alexander Stephens, Benjamin Hill, and Herschel Johnson countered that they, too, sought to protect the spirit of 1776, slavery, and white families’ best interests, and that “the only real ground of difference now is: some of us think we can get redress in the Union, and others think we cannot.” How, these men asked, could remaining in a Union with a Fugitive Slave Law do a worse job of protecting slavery than establishing a national boundary between the slave and free states, which would release the northern states from any obligation to return slaves to their owners? Shoring up protections for slavery within the Union served southern interests better, Georgia unionists argued. 7

  The electorate mirrored the difference of opinion voiced by secessionist and unionist candidates. Realizing this uncomfortable truth, Cobb and other secessionists hoped to hurry secession along without a vote that might reveal divisions in white southern opinion. “Wait not till the grog shops and crossroads shall send up a discordant voice from a divided people,” Cobb urged, and although he failed to prevent an election, the returns showed he was right to worry about the outcome. 8 The results were so close that the count was never revealed; although Georgia Governor Joseph Brown claimed that 58 percent of the vote went to secessionist candidates, the actual total either resulted in a virtual tie or squeaked out a bare secessionist majority. 9 The state convention opted for secession, but deep differences in public opinion hinted that popular attitudes toward a new Confederate nation would be complex, with connections to a Confederacy created through secession remaining tenuous among some segments of the population.

  Divisions like those present in Georgia emerged everywhere, but as the winter progressed, even initially reluctant white Southerners resolved their doubts in strikingly similar ways throughout the South. They began by weighing secession against the threat Lincoln’s election posed to the expansion of slavery, white Southerners’ best interests, and the Revolution as white Southerners interpreted it. John Halliburton, a young man from Memphis, Tennessee, spent the winter wooing his cousin, Juliet, through letters that discussed everything from politics to marriage. Juliet, an ardent secessionist from Arkansas, maintained that the Declaration of Independence enshrined the right of secession, which the election of an antislavery president gave southern states reason to invoke. Halliburton disagreed, insisting, “I can hate [Lincoln] and still love the Union.” Further, Halliburton argued, “no state has a right to secede” because the Constitution followed and therefore superseded the Declaration, and its spirit forbade secession. Besides, the Declaration must be treated with caution. “Why if we had to do as the declaration of Independence says we should have to assert ‘that all men were born free and equal’…and fight for Nigger equality.” Better to abide by the Constitution, “the bulwark of slavery,” and stay in the Union, Halliburton concluded. 10 Initially, Virginian Hodijah Meade agreed that secession was neither legal nor in the best interests of the South, but that was before he learned that some northern states “refused to repeal those Personal Liberty laws.” Reasoning that Lincoln was unlikely to interfere with states’ personal liberty laws, Meade asked his mother, “are
you not for Secession now?” 11 Even John Halliburton eventually capitulated and enlisted in a Confederate regiment. However torn, many white Southerners accepted the logic that a Lincoln presidency threatened slavery, and threats to slavery justified—even demanded—drastic measures, including secession and war.

  Threats to slavery meant secession and war for many reasons. For one thing, they made the privileged place that southern states held within the Union insecure, and without a dominant role for the South, the Union seemed less valuable. Louisianan Rufus Cater agreed with his cousin Fannie that “the United States government was once a glorious and prosperous one,” under which white Southerners profited. For most of the nation’s existence, the South had masterfully used the Constitution and political structure of the United States to dominate the federal government, despite the region’s smaller size and slower-growing white population. The “three-fifths clause” of the U.S. Constitution, which provided for the counting of three-fifths of the slave population when determining Congressional apportionment despite slaves’ obvious exclusion from the body politic, gave white Southerners disproportionate voting clout. In addition, Southerners controlled key Congressional committees and dominated powerful positions like the speakership of the U.S. House of Representatives, the chief justice’s seat, and the presidency (with a small number of exceptions) throughout the first eight decades of the United States’ national existence. The election of a president who did not share the South’s concern for the safety of slavery, along with growing northern hostility to slavery’s expansion, threatened the favoring of southern interests to which white Southerners felt entitled, and in so doing, dissolved any federal claim on southern allegiance. As Rufus Cater put it, when northern “fanatics” like Lincoln “misinterpreted and…perverted” the Constitution to bar slavery from the western territories, they relieved white Southerners of all obligations of loyalty, and licensed the southern states to frame a new government “suited to themselves,” even if doing so precipitated war. 12