What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  Because white Southerners’ unique understanding of liberty and their inclination toward privileging individual families’ interests could make unity elusive, Confederate unity relied heavily on white Southerners’ interpretation of the third main function of government: the protection of slavery. In order to wage war against a better-equipped foe, in the name of a government whose form and structure differed little from the enemy’s government, Southerners needed to maintain a united front, both for the practical purposes of making war and for the moral purpose of showing that the war was justified because it represented the will of the people. 39 Shared belief in the dangers of abolition powerfully united Confederate soldiers and motivated them to fight, even when they shared little else. An urbane young lawyer and son of a wealthy South Carolina plantation owner recognized the unifying potential of perceived threats to slavery when he urged “the whole South to make common cause against the hordes of abolitionists who are swarming southwards.” 40 Joseph Bruckmuller, a German immigrant saloon keeper who fought with the Seventh Texas, had almost nothing in common with the scion of the Palmetto State, yet Bruckmuller also saw the need to preserve slavery as a powerful glue binding all whites in the South. Scoffing at “improve-the-world ideas of emancipation,” Bruckmuller urged his fellow “adoption citizens” to stand by “your own countrymen and race” against the “murder and arson, hanging and stealing” that were sure to accompany the “liberation of the half-civilized cannibal.” 41

  Slaveholders’ commitment to slavery comes as no surprise, but most Confederate troops (including Joseph Bruckmuller) owned no slaves. Nonetheless, like Bruckmuller, they forthrightly depicted the war as a battle to prevent the destruction of slavery. When discussing reasons for the conflict, a Georgia regimental newspaper, The Spirit of ’61, pointed to personal liberty laws, “those grevious enactments of some of the free state legislatures in regard to fugitive slaves,” as evidence that Northerners were “black hearted abolitionists” who must be opposed before they crushed slavery. 42 With less legislative specificity but at least as much passion, James Williams fumed, “confound the whole set of Psalm singing ‘brethren’ and ‘sistern’ too. If it had not been for them…preaching abolitionism from every northern pulpit,” Williams was convinced, “I would never have been soldiering.” 43 It is patronizing and insulting to Confederate soldiers to pretend that they did not understand the war as a battle for slavery when they so plainly described it as exactly that. There is no way to understand the Civil War from a Confederate perspective—no way to understand why the war began or why it lasted so long—without understanding why white nonslaveholding men would believe that the preservation of slavery justified a fight.

  Slavery was worth fighting for because it served many fundamentally important purposes that white men considered vital to themselves and their families, whether or not they owned slaves. 44 Black slavery in the antebellum South buttressed the ideals of white liberty and equality. It stabilized an otherwise precarious social structure. Slavery undergirded white Southerners’ convictions of their own superior moral orthodoxy. In addition, it anchored the individual identity of white southern men as men in a firm conception of their rights, duties, and social roles, and it intertwined with the southern notion of honor. Finally, slavery supplied an unambiguous mechanism of race control in a region where 40 percent of the population was black. Nonslaveholding Confederate soldiers’ willingness to fight for slavery grew from a much deeper source than the calculation of economic interest to be expected among those who owned slaves. It grew from white southern men’s gut-level conviction that survival—of themselves, their families, and the social order—depended on slavery’s continued existence.

  Black slavery enabled white liberty and equality because it allowed all whites to pursue property ownership (including slaves) without outside interference, and because it made whites equal in not being slaves. 45 Confederate assumptions about the reliance of white liberty and equality on black slavery appeared in countless ways. To take one example, an Alabama soldier wrote “Run, Yank, or Die,” a song that soldiers from other states exchanged and sent home to give loved ones a taste of camp life, and to help explain the war from an enlisted point of view. The song repeatedly portrays “little Northern Yankees,” minimized by the absence of slavery in their own society, who run away whenever southern men shouting “Hurrah for slavery” (the first line of the song’s chorus) arrive on the scene. One verse specifically identifies and mocks the Tennessee unionist Andrew Johnson, who broke with his state and remained in the U.S. Senate until later appointed military governor of Tennessee by President Lincoln. According to the verse, once “old Andy Johnson…join[ed] Lincoln to set the negro free,” Johnson revoked his claims to liberty, equality, and even manhood. He no longer counted among the true “Southern boys.” 46

  White equality was fragile in an antebellum South characterized by change and growth; slavery helped strengthen it by providing stability and making ambitions seem attainable. The antebellum United States thrived with the growth of a market economy, territorial expansion, and vast increases in wealth. Again and again, southern whites abandoned places of poor soil and disappointing prospects for new locations where land and slave ownership seemed possible. 47 Yet movement did not always bring upward mobility. As white Southerners sought to get ahead, wealth became increasingly concentrated, a pattern with disturbing implications for the idea of white equality. 48 Slavery softened the dislocations by holding out the prospect of slave ownership as an ambition to which all whites were entitled to aspire, and by providing reassurance. 49 No matter how difficult in practice, entrance to slaveholding status remained possible in theory, and it offered white southern yeomen the chance for advancement that counted among the prerogatives of white men. The importance that southern whites placed on the appearance of slaveholding attainability helps explain why the question of reopening the Atlantic slave trade emerged in the 1850s, and also suggests another reason, along with concern for public safety, why the question of slavery’s extension to the territories loomed so large. Slaveholding possibilities seemed even greater in the West: while one out of three white southern families living in the states that eventually formed the Confederacy owned slaves in 1860, the proportion rose to as high as one out of two families in southwestern states like Mississippi, giving nonslaveholders real reason to care about slavery’s continued expansion westward. 50

  Especially for the economically insecure, the hope of slave ownership staked a claim to white equality in a competitive world that offered few guarantees. Some non-slave-owning soldiers used the war itself as an opportunity to enjoy the benefits of slaveholding as soon as they got the chance. Marching through Missouri in August 1861, for example, yeomen soldiers seized slaves from local plantations for their own use. 51 Meanwhile, slavery steadied an otherwise turbulent and dynamic southern society by promising that southern whites could never fall into the lowest social stratum no matter how far or frequently they moved, geographically or economically. 52

  Slavery also provided stability by securing southern claims to moral orthodoxy. The Second Great Awakening, a period of religious revivals culminating in the 1830s, swept the antebellum North and South. As a result, just over one-third of Northerners and slightly under one-third of white Southerners were church members, principally within the Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian denominations, yet the fiery religious fervor glazed the North and South with distinctive casts. In the North, emphasis on perfectibility (the idea that since all people were made in the image of God and God was perfect, individuals and societies could reform themselves into a state of moral perfection) sparked a wave of social reform movements, including abolitionism. In the South, revivals inspired concentration on personal conversion and salvation while discouraging involvement in radical social reform. 53 As the Kehukee (North Carolina) Association of Primitive Baptists plainly put it in 1849, “the Kingdome of Christ is not of this world,” which made human attempts to ap
proximate God’s kingdom on earth presumptuous and heretical. 54 A South Georgia and Florida Baptist publication made the same point when it criticized New England ministers who had signed an antislavery petition for sinfully seeing themselves as God’s “viceregents to act for him on earth.” 55 Furthermore, southern evangelical emphasis on biblical literalism cemented the relationship between religion and slavery. As southern clergy and proslavery ideologues had pointed out for decades, slavery appears in the Bible, which meant it must be part of God’s divine order. 56

  Since the destruction of slavery defied God’s appointed order, abolitionism amounted to sinful heresy. South Carolina soldier Chesley Herbert summed up many white Southerners’ conflation of abolitionism with general moral decay when he dismissed Northerners everywhere and unionists in border states as “abolitionist and any other sort of an ‘ist’ that is not good.” 57 Abolitionism worked like an infection, except that instead of sickening the body, it perverted right morals. Georgia soldier A. H. Mitchell, for one, linked abolitionism in the North to other moral pathologies like “spiritualism and free love.” 58 Allowing infidelity to slavery to creep south would contaminate the moral virtue needed to retain God’s favor and to sustain a republic.

  Mitchell identified abolitionism with “free love” for a reason: abolitionism, according to many white Southerners, would set off a social earthquake sure to rattle every single social relation, right down to the basic units of society, households and families. While most antebellum American families continued to live and work on farms that relied on the labor of all family members, the growth of a market economy facilitated the development of a “separate spheres” ideology that divided the aggressive competition associated with the market from the domestic realm of home and family. The task of moral inculcation, on which survival of the republic and the favor of God depended, fell to mothers, who were to train children within the family circle. So important was this ideal of an inviolable family cemented by bonds between mothers and children that any threats to the family ideal were regarded as a “crisis of the family” by the mid-nineteenth century, according to one historian. Insulating the family from threats secured the moral fiber, guaranteed the safety of republican government, and pleased God, in the minds of many nineteenth-century Americans. 59 To white Southerners, the way to safeguard the family was to preserve a strictly hierarchical household structure within which women played circumscribed roles, subordinate to men and confined to the private sphere. Among abolitionism’s many faults, according to numerous proslavery ideologues, was its tolerance of activism among women, who figured prominently among the abolitionist rank and file. As William Drayton explained in an influential pamphlet, women’s “interference with subjects of this character, if sufficiently important to have any influence, must have an evil one,” because female participation in a public question interfered with women’s proper roles, and therefore threatened the family structure. 60

  Disturb slavery, in other words, and even the family fell apart. If the family disintegrated, so did white men’s identities as men because of the centrality of the nuclear family to nineteenth-century American culture, and because nineteenth-century Americans regarded marriage and the establishment of one’s own household and family as the threshold that ordinarily marked the passage from boy to man. In southern society as white southern men conceived it, adult white males headed households and possessed the right to command all dependents, such as women and children. Slavery meant that white men, regardless of whether they were slave owners, also had the right to exert mastery over African Americans. The loss of slavery would call white men’s right to rule over blacks into question, and once right to rule in any sphere was weakened, its legitimacy became suspect in every sphere. 61

  Many Confederate soldiers warned that abolition would obliterate the rights and duties of white manhood, chief among them the protection of white women’s virtue, which required control of white women’s bodies. 62 Newspapers like the Richmond Enquirer reminded readers “where the two races approximate equality in numbers, slavery is the only protection of the laboring classes against the evils of amalgamation.” 63 “Amalgamation,” later known as miscegenation, was hardly unknown; white men’s sexual coercion of female slaves accounted for the high number of mulattoes in the South. But allusion to amalgamation in relation to “laboring classes” was another matter, because it reminded non-slaveowners of slavery’s importance to them. Without slavery, the Enquirer warned, the daughters of honest white yeomen would be helpless against the sexual advances of black men. Soldiers frequently and emphatically echoed this theme. One Georgia recruit fretted about rumors that slaves who thought the war meant freedom were already discussing “whom they would make their wives among the young [white] ladies.” 64 Virginia soldiers expressed similar anxieties in The Tenth Legion, a camp newspaper. If the “fanatical marauders” of the North succeeded in eradicating black slavery, intimate relations between white women and black men would occur, and the South would become a place “terrible to contemplate.” 65

  By depriving white southern men of the rights and privileges due the white male head of household, abolition would leave white southern men powerless, propertyless, and degraded in real, not simply symbolic, senses. The daily conditions in which they lived made it impossible for white southern men to ignore this danger, because every day white southern men observed adult males (slave men) who did not enjoy the unfettered right to accumulate property, who were subject to the will of others, and who could not protect their families from dangers like punishment or sale. Black slavery constantly reminded white men that in a society where most residents (African Americans, women, and children) were disenfranchised and subordinate to them, the independence that white men enjoyed as adult white males, and the ability to command the labor and fealty of the people in their households, set them apart and identified them as men. Meanwhile, the presence of dependents also forced white men to recognize and dread what subordination and loss of manhood’s privileges meant. 66

  While family life was central to many white southern men’s assumptions about what it meant to be a man, additional prerogatives of manhood, which the destruction of slavery would also threaten, existed outside the realm of the family. Unmarried as well as married white men had the duty to protect and right to control white women’s bodies and morals, as the Georgia volunteer’s worries about former slaves choosing white wives (rather than already having them) testifies. Men who failed to provide such protection did not deserve the love of a woman, another key hallmark of true manhood. 67 Other indicators of white manhood included personal mobility and the right to bear arms. Women, at least white ladies, did not parade about unescorted, nor did they wield guns. Meanwhile, black slaves required passes signed by whites to justify their movements, and a slave’s access to firearms relied on the discretion of his owner rather than on the slave’s own free will. Even unenslaved blacks in the South could not travel freely without carrying special papers, signed by whites, certifying their freedom, and black access to firearms was closely governed by law in many locales. The right to handle firearms freely and the ability to go where one pleased in a society where most inhabitants did not enjoy such privileges distinguished an individual as a white man. 68 Complaining that if a soldier “wants to go any where he has to have a pass,” Louisiana private Frederick Taber told his parents that he found himself treated more like a “Nigro” than a white man. 69 Taber could afford to exaggerate because his white skin saved him from actually being mistaken for a slave, but if slavery disappeared, it would take with it the clear distinctions between the rights of whites and blacks that Taber and his fellow soldiers relied upon to secure their own masculinity.

  White men’s ability to exercise authority over others contributed to another quality, honor, which set white men apart and identified them as men. Though difficult to define precisely (and significantly different from what we mean by “honor” today), a specific notion of honor was cent
ral to white Southerners’ values and culture. It encapsulated white southern men’s concern with personal reputation, and rested on acknowledgment by one’s peers of attributes like courage, right morals, and masculinity. Recognition of a man’s honor chiefly depended upon his demonstration of authority over subordinates, including women, children, and African Americans, whether or not he owned slaves. 70 Enforced by an elaborate set of rules and rituals (the duel being the most dramatic if least often utilized), honor was a vulnerable quality demanding vigilant oversight, even to the point of touchiness. To many white Southerners, outside reproaches about slavery insulted southern honor by casting aspersions on Southerners’ morals. Criticizing slavery questioned one way—and therefore every way—in which white men exercised authority over others. Such insults necessitated war, much as questioning a white man’s character or authority over his wife could lead to a fight. 71 Charles Trueheart believed secession was unconstitutional, but still supported departure from the Union as the only proper reaction to slurs against slavery. “There is no other alternative left us,” he decided, “unless we come down from the high ground that we have taken, and humble our heads in the dust at the feet of Black Republican masters, disgraced in our own eyes and before the whole world.” 72

  Finally, nonslaveholding whites believed in the necessity of slavery because they lived in a biracial society, which they assumed would explode into race war without slavery. Much as worries about slave revolt plagued antebellum white Southerners, rumors of slave violence circulated throughout the Army in the early days of the war. A Virginia soldier pretended to scoff at the idea that slaves near his home “were marching through the Country & committing all manner of depredations and outrages,” yet gossip to that effect preyed upon him enough that he wrote to his father just in case. 73 When Ivy Duggan warned that abolition by even the most apparently slow and careful measures meant “fire, sword, and even poison as instruments in desolating our homes, ruining us and degrading our children,” he invoked the racial fear that strengthened nonslaveholding whites’ belief in the necessity of slavery. 74