What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  5. Walthall Robertson to wife, November 25, 1860, Ashton, La., Mary Overton Gentry Shaw Papers, JCHS. Robertson soon joined the (Confederate) Missouri State Guard.

  6. Thomas R. R. Cobb, November 12, 1860, Milledgeville, Ga., in William W. Freehling and Craig M. Simpson, Secession Debated: Georgia’s Showdown in 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 5–30. Article IV of the U.S. Constitution permits slave owners to reclaim slaves who ran away to free states, but it does not require free-state officials or individual citizens to aid in the process. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 differed from the Constitution in that it did require the participation of free-state citizens, as well as dictate an active role for the federal government in the form of federal marshals and commissioners. In response, some northern states in the 1850s passed personal liberty laws. In Wisconsin, the Fugitive Slave Law clashed with the state personal liberty law, leading to the arrest and trial of Sherman Booth for invoking the personal liberty law and helping prevent the capture of Joshua Glover, a fugitive slave taking refuge in Wisconsin. At Booth’s trial in 1854, the Wisconsin State Supreme Court, in one of the purest articulations of states’ rights doctrine in the years preceding the war, declared the Fugitive Slave Law null and void in Wisconsin due to its unconstitutionality, and defended the rights of Wisconsin state residents to choose not to participate in slave catching. For Booth’s speech at his trial and Justice Byron Paine’s decision, see Unconstitutionality of the Fugitive Act: Argument of Byron Paine, Esq., 1854, Miscellaneous Pamphlet Collection, SHSW. For more on the case, see Bradley and Ranney, “A Tradition of Independence: The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s First 150 Years,” McManus, Political Abolitionism in Wisconsin, 1840–1861, and Ranney, “Suffering the Agonies of Their Righteousness.” For a famous fugitive slave case in Massachusetts, see Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns. It was precisely this declaration of northern states’ rights in the matter of slavery that Cobb and others saw as so dangerous.

  7. Alexander Stephens, November 14, 1860, Milledgeville, Ga.; Benjamin Hill, November 15, 1860, Milledgeville, Ga.; Herschel V. Johnson’s unionist public letter, November 16, 1860, Milledgeville, Ga., all in Freehling and Simpson, Secession Debated. The quotation is from Hill’s speech, 103.

  8. Thomas R. R. Cobb, December 6, 1860, in Freehling and Simpson, Secession Debated, xiv.

  9. Michael P. Johnson, “A New Look at the Popular Vote for Delegates to the Georgia Secession Convention,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 56 (1972), 259–75.

  10. John Halliburton to Juliet, February 12, 1861, Chapel Hill, N.C., John Wesley Halliburton Papers, SHC. See also Halliburton’s letters of February 1, 1861; February 21, 1861; March 1, 1861; March 6, 1861; and March 7, 1861. Halliburton won half of his battle. Juliet agreed to marry him, but did not abandon her secessionist principles.

  11. Hodijah Meade to mother, December 9, 1860, Richmond, Meade Family Papers, CMM Ser. A, Reel 27. Meade soon joined the Richmond Howitzers, an artillery unit.

  12. Lt. Rufus Cater, Nineteenth La., to cousin, June 26, 1861, Keachie, La., Douglas J. and Rufus W. Cater Letters, PAW, Coll. 32, Reel 11. For discussion of southern domination of the antebellum federal government, see Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic. Fehrenbacher shows that even though slaves only lived in the southern states by the mid-nineteenth century, the whole nation behaved as a slaveholding nation in terms of foreign and domestic policy, which was why the election of 1860 came as such a shock to white Southerners. In “The ‘Slave Power’ in the United States, 1783–1865,” Adam Rothman further shows that before the Civil War, southern political leaders, though in the numerical minority, were able to “get their way time after time in an ostensibly democratic polity” by using the United States’ political structure to their advantage, but that in the 1850s they grew increasingly nervous that the faster-growing northern population might one day prevent them from doing so (64).

  13. The best analysis of slavery’s foundation on force and violence, and the tensions generated by that foundation, is Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

  14. For examples of proslavery ideologues’ contentions of slave happiness, see David B. Chesebrough, ed., “God Ordained This War”: Sermons on the Sectional Crisis, 1830–1865 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991).

  15. See Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).

  16. For the best single-volume treatment of antebellum political events that contributed to rising sectionalism, see Potter, Impending Crisis.

  17. Lucius Brown to father, November 7, 1860, Nashville, Tenn., Brown Family Papers, NYPL. Brown later joined the Eighteenth U.S. Infantry, serving first as an enlisted man, then as a lieutenant.

  18. New York Daily Tribune, November 28, 1860.

  19. Chicago Tribune, December 13, 1860.

  20. New York Daily Tribune, November 27, 1860.

  21. Congressional Globe, Thirty-fifth Congress, Second Session, 114.

  22. Congressional Globe, Thirty-sixth Congress, First Session, 658. James McPherson discusses the Senate resolutions in Battle Cry of Freedom, 214.

  23. Abraham Lincoln communicated the importance of holding the line on the nonextension of slavery in a letter of December 10, 1860, to a fellow Republican, Senator Lyman Trumbull: “the tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.” See Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 4 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 149–50. The remark partly referred to party imperative: after all, the Republican Party had built itself from nothing into a victorious party founded squarely on the principle of nonextension of slavery in less than a decade. To abandon that principle as soon as it won at the polls would be to abandon party supporters. Yet more than partisan-ship was at stake for Lincoln, as well as for many of the voters who had just elected him. Lincoln also believed that a “house divided against itself,” as he famously exclaimed in 1858, could not survive indefinitely. See Abraham Lincoln, Speech at Springfield, Ill., June 16, 1858, in Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 2:461. Failing to face the slavery issue would not prevent disunion, but rather make it all the more inevitable.

  24. Leigh Webber, to friend Charly and Charly’s father, Mr. Brown, January 31, 1861, Page Co., Iowa, John Stillman Brown Family Collection, Reel 2, KSHS. Webber later joined the First Kans. Infantry as a private.

  25. The Confederate Congress authorized an Army Staff on February 25, and passed a bill to raise an Army on February 28. On March 6, Congress approved the 100,000 number, and Secretary of War Leroy Walker sent a request to governors to transfer state troops to Confederate service. See William C. Davis, “A Government of Our Own”: The Making of the Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 212–13.

  26. Abraham Lincoln, “Proclamation Calling Militia and Convening Congress,” April 15, 1861, in Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 4:32–33.

  27. For discussion of the impact of southern seizure of federal property on northern public opinion, see Silvana Siddali, “‘The Sport of Folly and the Prize of Treason’: Confederate Property Seizures and the Northern Home Front,” Civil War History 47:4 (December 2001), 310–33.

  28. Wisconsin State Journal, April 15, 1861, p. 2.

  29. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 274. See also Paludan, “A People’s Contest”: The Union and Civil War 1861–1865.

  30. Union Broadsides and Ephemera, CHS.

  31. Furthermore, both Union and Confederate conceptions of the Revolution were affected by the way in which the meaning of the word “virtue” had changed from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. When the founders spoke of “virtue” in 1776, they meant something very specific, namely the willingness to subordinate self-interest to the common good. By 1861, “virtue” had taken on a much more diffuse meaning that had to do with general moral goodness. Whe
reas founders such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had meant that the republic would survive only so long as individuals were willing to place the public good above their own material interests when necessary, nineteenth-century Americans meant that the republic’s survival depended upon individuals’ avoidance of vices like drunkenness, adultery, gambling, etc.

  32. Pvt. Ivy Duggan, Fifteenth Ga., to Central Georgian, September 13, 1861, Centreville, Va., Ivy W. Duggan Letters, GDAH.

  33. For discussion of the Confederate and state constitutions and their ratification processes, see George Rable, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), chs. 3 and 4; and Davis, “A Government of Our Own,” esp. chs. 10–12.

  34. White Southerners’ desires for more active federal promotion of slavery through a federal slave code or other similar measure, even over the protests of individual states and citizens, might help explain why Confederate soldiers in 1861 did not discuss “states’ rights.” In many ways, what they wanted was just the opposite.

  35. Capt. Robert Snead, Fiftieth Va., to wife, October 18, 1861, Greenbrier Courthouse, Va., Robert Winn Snead Papers, CMM Ser. A, Reel 40. See also Pvt. Thomas Taylor, Sixth Ala., to wife, October 15, 1861, Fairfax Station, Va., Thomas S. Taylor Letters, ADAH.

  36. The Missouri Army Argus, November 30, 1861, p. 4, Osceola, Mo., MOHS. The Argus was the camp paper of the Mo. (Confederate) State Guard.

  37. Josiah Patterson to sons, December 13, 1861, Manassas, Va., in Mills Lane, ed., Dear Mother: Don’t Grieve About Me. If I Get Killed I’ll Only be Dead: Letters from Georgia Soldiers in the Civil War (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1977), 89.

  38. Pvt. Ivy Duggan, Fifteenth Ga., to Central Georgian, September 7, 1861, Manassas Junction, Va., Ivy W. Duggan Letters, GDAH; Pvt. Thomas Taylor, Sixth Ala., to wife, October 15, 1861, Fairfax Station, Va., Thomas S. Taylor Letters, ADAH.

  39. Although their interpretations vary in key respects, George Rable, The Confederate Republic; William Davis, “A Government of Our Own”; and Drew Faust, Creation of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), all address the Confederate need for unity throughout the war. In The Confederate Republic, Rable argues that the new Confederate government represented a conscious, revolutionary change from the federal Constitution because it eschewed parties and sought to remove influence from the hands of the people and concentrate it in the hands of the “few” of the Revolutionary-era “one, few, and many” triad. While unconvincing in arguing for vast change (Rable admits that the new constitution virtually replicated the old one and in fact was written after only a few days of tinkering), Rable persuasively demonstrates the importance of a “political culture of national unity” to any successful Confederate effort, and shows that Confederate politics placed at least a theoretical “premium” on “internal harmony and white liberty” (see esp. 1–5, chs. 3 and 4, and the epilogue; quotations from 300, 302). In “A Government of Our Own,” William Davis emphasizes continuities between the Confederate government and constitution and the American past. Holding that Confederates saw themselves as more faithful heirs of the founders, Davis views those continuities as important sources of unity, since Southerners were accustomed to rallying around the memory of the Revolution. In Creation of Confederate Nationalism, Faust treats the need for Confederate national sentiment among the populace at large rather than the creation of a new government. She points out that since the new Confederacy immediately faced a war against a people in many ways identical to the people of the Confederacy, it needed to craft a sense of nationalism quickly, and that sense of nationalism could ill afford anything other than unity and harmony (see esp. 6–21).

  40. Lt. Christopher Winsmith, First S.C., to mother, April 24, 1861, Sullivan’s Island, S.C., John Christopher Winsmith Papers, MOC.

  41. Pvt. Joseph Bruckmuller, Seventh Tex., Address delivered to other prisoners at Ft. Douglas Prison, Chicago, June 1862, Joseph Bruckmuller Notebook, CAH.

  42. The Spirit of ’61, December 25, 1861, Dumfries, Va., pp. 4–5, EU. The Spirit of ’61 was the camp paper of the Eighteenth Ga.

  43. Pvt. James Williams, Twenty-first Ala., to wife, December 20, 1861, Fort Gaines, Ala., in John Kent Folmar, ed., From That Terrible Field: Civil War Letters of James M. Williams, Twenty-First Alabama Infantry Volunteers (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1981), 13.

  44. For a recent analysis that emphasizes the decision of ordinary white yeomen in a specific region (south-central Georgia) to support slavery for their own reasons, see Wetherington, Plain Folk’s Fight.

  45. The classic exposition of this concept, known as the herrenvolk democracy thesis, remains George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 61–71. See also William J. Cooper, Liberty and Slavery: Southern Politics to 1860 (New York: Knopf, 1983); Lacy K. Ford, Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975); and Frank Lawrence Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1949).

  46. T. W. Crowson of the Alabama Hickories composed “Run, Yank, or Die.” Pvt. Edward Baines, a Louisiana soldier from West Feliciana Parish, so enjoyed sharing the song with his comrades in camp that he wrote a letter home from Columbus, Ky., on November 4, 1861, on the back of a printed copy of the song so that he could share it with his family. Henry Baines Papers, CMM Ser. B, Reel 5.

  47. White antebellum Southerners simply did not stay put for long. For discussion of their tremendous mobility, see James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Vintage, 1982), ch. 3; Donald, Baker, and Holt, Civil War and Reconstruction, 3; and Joseph C. G. Kennedy, Preliminary Report on the Eighth Census (Washington, D.C., 1862).

  48. For the most thorough yet compact treatment of this theme, see Oakes, The Ruling Race. See also Cooper, Liberty and Slavery, esp. ch. 11; and Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, 50, 373.

  49. For the importance of ambition as an attribute of manhood as white southern men understood it, see Stephen W. Berry II, All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  50. Cooper, Liberty and Slavery, 251–53.

  51. Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage, 92. For analysis of white nonslaveholders’ dependence on the hopes of eventual slave ownership to provide stability and bolster equality in the antebellum South, see Oakes, The Ruling Race, 37, 39–43.

  52. For Southerners’ desire for stability in the antebellum world, see William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979, first published 1957), esp. 96–101 and chs. 4 and 10.

  53. A voluminous literature treats church membership, reform movements in the North and South, and the particular characteristics of southern religion. Some titles that specifically consider the comparative lack of reform movements in the South; southern suspicion of northern churches, religion, and reform; and the higher value placed by Southerners on orthodoxy include: Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “The Antimission Movement in the Jacksonian South: A Study in Regional Folk Culture,” Journal of Southern History 36 (November 1970), 501–29; John G. Crowley, Primitive Baptists of the Wiregrass South, 1815 to the Present (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998); Hill, The South and the North in American Religion; Hughes and Allen, Illusions of Innocence, 190; John W. Kuykendall, Southern Enterprize: The Work of National Evangelical Societies in the Antebellum South (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1982); Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Shattuck, A Shield and Hiding Place, Introduction; Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism & Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U
niversity Press, 1981); and Mitchell Snay, Gospel of Disunion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Recent works such as John Quist, Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), and Beth Barton Schweiger, The Gospel Working Up: Progress and the Pulpit in Nineteenth-Century Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), argue that differences between northern and southern religion have been overstated, and point to evidence of protemperance sentiment among some southern divines to make a case for southern reform. Yet even allowing for temperance strength in one Alabama county (Quist) and among some Virginia clergy (Schweiger), it remains the case that even reform in the South focused on behavior likely to earn the individual’s salvation. Urging individuals to limit personal consumption of alcohol was one thing, but pushing for public schools or increased civil and legal rights for particular groups, movements that addressed society rather than just individual behavior, truly were much more characteristic of the North than the South before the Civil War.

  54. Church Records of Kehukee (N.C.) Association of Primitive Baptists, 1849, as cited in Crowley, Primitive Baptists, 86.

  55. Signs of the Times 22 (April 15, 1854), 54, as cited in Crowley, Primitive Baptists, 87–88.

  56. For biblical sanctioning of slavery see Mark A. Noll, “The Bible and Slavery,” in Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 43–73. The sermons of Charles Colcock Jones, James H. Thornwell, Benjamin Morgan Palmer, and J. W. Tucker in Chesebrough, “God Ordained This War,” are examples of southern ministers’ eagerness to point to the recognition of slavery in the Bible as vindication of the institution. For the conviction of some white Southerners that “slavery and the southern way of life” more closely approximated the “purity of rectitude of first time” than the North with its lack of slavery did, see Hughes and Allen, Illusions of Innocence, 188–204.