The American Civil War

by John Keegan

  Washington…. We do not trust them in the line of battle. Ah, you may make speeches at home, but here, where it is life or death, we dare not risk it.”4 In the fighting around Spotsylvania, the Ninth Corps protected the rear of Grant’s army and skirmished against Confederate cavalry. Some black soldiers were taken prisoner. Unfortunately, the soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia showed themselves as ready to kill captured blacks as their Deep Southern comrades.

  As Grant prosecuted the Overland Campaign, the Ninth Corps took part in the effort to capture Richmond by direct assault. The effort was launched from the Bermuda Hundred, an enclave in a loop of the James River. It culminated in July 1864 in the most celebrated of all actions by black troops during the war, the assault on the Crater, which became notorious because of the mismanagement of the operation by Grant’s commanders. Having undermined the Confederate earthworks defending Elliot’s salient and exploded a gunpowder charge, the Ninth Corps then charged what remained of the Confederate position in an effort to break through. The Union orders given were lamentably confused. A black division was first selected to lead, but the commanders had second thoughts and a white division was substituted. It had not prepared or rehearsed, and when it got into the crater the explosion had created, it quickly fell into confusion. When the superseded black division then attempted to retrieve the situation, it fell victim to a strong Confederate counter-attack. The Confederates slaughtered the Union troops caught on the floor of the crater and killed prisoners wholesale. The survivors of the assault fled in terror to Union lines, but at least a thousand were trapped inside the crater and shot dead or bayoneted while trying to surrender. At the end of the day, it was found that 3,500 of the 15,000 Ninth Corps soldiers were dead. Seven black soldiers received the Medal of Honor for bravery shown at the Crater, out of 24,000 engaged altogether. In the aftermath, General Burnside was relieved of command. Grant’s review on the operation was as judicious as could be: “General Burnside,” he wrote, “wanted to put his colored division in front, and I believe if he had done so it would have been a success. Still I agreed with General Meade as to his objections to that plan. General Meade said that if we put the colored troops in front and it should prove a failure, it would then be said and very properly, that we were shoving these people ahead to get killed because we did not care anything about them.”5

  After the disaster of the Crater, black troops continued to take part in the siege of Petersburg and in other operations in northern Virginia and the Carolinas, including the assaults on Fort Fisher. They were principally involved, however, in operations along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, where they had the satisfaction of taking part in the capture and occupation of Charleston in February 1865. Soon after, they joined other Union troops in taking possession of Petersburg. The pinnacle of their culminating operations, however, was to be their inclusion in the march into Richmond in April 1865. At first light on April 3, the Twenty-fifth Corps, now an all-black formation, left its lines and began to march on the city. The approaches were not defended, the Confederate troops having left under Lee’s orders to retreat towards Appomattox. The 9th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops (USCT), was the leading regiment and marched down the streets leading to the Confederate capital, singing “John Brown’s Body.” The route was lined by black residents of Richmond, cheering frantically to welcome their liberators, who were followed by more black and white soldiers, all with the certainty that the end of the war was at hand.

  As peace returned, black soldiers were largely chosen to garrison the Southlands. A hundred black regiments were distributed across the former Confederate states. On May 13, 1865, the 62nd USCT took part in the last engagement of the war at Palmito Ranch, on the Rio Grande in Texas. In all 178,975 of the Union army in the Civil War were black, of whom 2,870 died in combat. When the peacetime army was reconstituted, two new infantry and two cavalry regiments were enlisted from blacks.

  The war experience of black soldiers had been varied but difficult. Disfavoured, sometimes openly despised by their white comrades and commanders, they had from the outset fought on probation. They were not expected to perform well in combat, and they had been excluded from all of the war’s great battles, most of which were over in any case before black troops were enlisted in large numbers, from 1863 onwards. The main feature of the war experience for black troops, however, was the reaction of white Confederates on meeting them in combat. There was undoubted Negrophobia in the mentality of many Northern soldiers, which weakened as the war progressed and the reputation of black soldiers improved. White Southerners simply hated black soldiers and were outraged at meeting their ex-slaves or supposed ex-slaves on the battlefield. They were commonly killed if taken prisoner. The survivors, if wounded, were taken out of hospitals to be shot or bayoneted. The danger of atrocity at the hands of the enemy might be supposed to have motivated black soldiers all the harder to avoid capture, but the reality seems to have been that the blacks were often terrified into passivity when confronted by the most black-hating Southerners, such as Texans and Mississippians. Fort Pillow was the worst of the Southern excesses but by no means an isolated one. Virginians proved as Negrophobic as their comrades from the Deep South.

  By 1865 nearly one-tenth of the Union army was black. Psychologically the commitment of black soldiers enormously enhanced the Northern war effort. Yet despite their large numbers, black soldiers made disappointingly little material contribution. Faced by the ferocity of their Southern antagonists on the battlefield, they simply could not stand up to combat as white soldiers did. Forrest, their grimmest persecutor, was simply stating reality when he said that blacks could not cope with white Southerners, who, in the last resort, were fighting to preserve slavery as the mastery of the white over the black.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Home Fronts

  THE NORTH, unlike the South, was an established and functioning state in April 1861, one on whose structures, resources, and machinery of government the war would exert unprecedented demands but which would continue to function, much as it had done in times of peace. The South, by contrast, did not exist as a state until the coming of the war. Almost everything necessary to wage that war had to be brought into being, if not actually invented, even while the first shots were being fired. The task would have proved impossible had not the existence of the United States and the political and legal habits of eighty years of independence provided a model which the secessionists could use to design their new polity. Thus the Confederacy, at the first meeting of the seceding states’ representatives, held in Montgomery, Alabama, on February 4, 1861, adopted as a provisional constitution that of the Founding Fathers of 1787 almost in its entirety. The only changes were those that strengthened states’ rights and reduced the power of central government and those making explicit the rights of slave owners and the legality of slavery. The provisional Confederate Congress remained at Montgomery until May 1861, when it transferred to Richmond. It was not an elected body, its members having been delegated by their states. There would be no elections until the autumn of 1861, though thereafter, despite low voter turnouts, it did assume a democratic character. A practical difficulty in investing the Southern Congress with a properly democratic nature was the absence of formal political parties in the South; there were at best remnants of the old Whig and Democratic parties, and these former party labels served to identify candidates. By 1861 former party affiliation had lost significance in the South, when adherence to secession overrode all other positions. Since the South insisted on the primacy of states’ rights, it is not surprising that Congress and president were to experience a great deal of frustration at the hands of the eleven state legislatures, which remained energetic throughout the war. The states raised troops, produced military supplies, and furnished provender, often as they saw fit, rather than as the Richmond government required.

  Jefferson Davis was a man of considerable talents who commanded, at the outset, general respect. Of all those available in th
e South to hold the office of president, he was probably as good as any other, but he was not of the first class as a politician. His vice president, Alexander Stephens, was a man of great ability, but he was a fanatic champion of states’ rights, and devoted most of his efforts to supporting his state of Georgia against the central government throughout the war. Davis was also hampered by a dearth of good cabinet officers. The War Department frequently changed hands and never found a truly satisfactory head. The Treasury, of such key significance, was held by only two men, neither up to the extraordinary difficulties of making Confederate financial policy work. The best cabinet officer, Stephen Mallory, served as secretary of the navy, with great competence, but despite Confederate successes at sea, that theatre of war offered too little scope for his talents to achieve what they might have done in another department.

  Manpower, munitions, and money are the lifeblood of war. Manpower was not a major Confederate problem until the last year of fighting. Volunteers and then conscription filled the ranks adequately until the onset of despair began to fuel desertion and absenteeism during 1864. Munitions supply was a Confederate success. Purchase abroad brought in great quantities of weapons in 1861-62, and thereafter improvised manufacture kept up the necessary flow. The Tredegar Iron Works at Richmond was a major industrial facility even by comparison with equivalents in the North. Tredegar produced 1,100 pieces of artillery during the war, vast quantities of ammunition, and the armour plate to protect the Confederate ironclads. Curiously, it did not produce any railroad track or locomotives, two items of supply of which the Confederacy was in desperate need throughout the war. Important manufacturers were established at Selma, Alabama, and a great powder mill at Augusta, Georgia. There were others at Macon and Fayetteville. Exploration concluded that there were more essential raw materials to be exploited in the South than had been recognised before the war.

  Money, as many war-making states have discovered to their ultimate cost, is all too easy to improvise. America before 1861 worked on coin, minted in gold or silver. There was no official paper money. Indeed, Americans had a long and deeply held suspicion of paper money, and of bank investments and indeed of banks in general. At the start of the war there was only something between $25 million and $30 million in gold held in the South, by private citizens, banks, and financial houses, far too little to support the costs of the war. How were government purchases, expeditions, and soldiers’ wages to be paid? Secretary of the Treasury Christopher Memminger was an intelligent man with orthodox financial views. The government, he decided, would have to subsist by levying taxes, selling bonds, and issuing paper money, in that sequence. Taxes never worked in the Confederacy. Prewar citizens had been taxed at a very low rate, and only on clearly definable transactions. Customs duties were the most common and acceptable, since imports were not run-of-the-mill commodities for most people. Memminger decided to enlarge the uptake by levying an export tax on cotton, at a time when cotton exporting had almost collapsed. He then tried levying a tax on property at one-half percent of value. The states, however, declared that their records were inadequate to assess such a tax, and most agreed to pay an estimated sum to the government, to be recouped later by applying the tax in the hope that their paperwork would improve. The eventual return was only 1.7 percent of the Confederacy’s revenues.

  Memminger had better hope for bond issues, in effect a government promise to pay a guaranteed rate of interest against a purchase of paper by a private buyer. Bond issues, if efficiently managed, are an ancient and effective way of raising money, if there is goodwill on both sides. Bonds have a long history, however, of renegotiation, on terms less and less profitable to the lender. So it proved with Confederate bonds. The Confederate Treasury began to accept purchase in the form of mortgages of future cotton crops. Not-yet-existent money was being used to secure a return on non-existent money, the face value of the bond. What began as an issue of $15 million was succeeded by an issue of $50 million and then $100 million. The final stage of the transaction was when planters refused to sell their cotton, hoping for better returns by export into the blockade-running traffic.*

  Failure to tax efficiently and the decline of the bond market drove the Confederate Treasury to the last recourse of a poverty-stricken government, the printing of paper money. The practice began even before war broke out, in February 1861. At first the issues were small, $1 million to begin with. By August 1861, however, the Confederacy had put $100 million into circulation and the amount grew. Bewilderingly, the notes were not legal tender, meaning that they need not be accepted as settlement of debt. Accepted the notes were nevertheless, and not only the Treasury’s. Private businesses began to issue notes. The truth was that by 1863, if not earlier, paper money, even if without convertible value, had to be used. People spent in the knowledge that currency transactions were a sort of natural confidence trick made necessary by the absence of any other medium of exchange. By the end of 1863 more than $700 million in paper was in circulation, though the paper dollar had fallen in value to four cents in gold.

  Depreciation was matched by runaway inflation. Between October 1861 and March 1864 prices rose on average 10 percent each month. By April 1865 average prices were ninety-two times higher than in 1861. In practice such calculations were difficult to make, since there were so many sources of issue, including the states and many towns and cities. Postage stamps were widely used as money. Confederate citizens were all too keenly aware of the level of inflation, since standard items of purchase rose inexorably in price. J. B. Jones, author of the celebrated Rebel War Clerk’s Diary, noted the increasing cost of staples. By March 1864 he was paying $300 a barrel for flour and $50 a bushel for cornmeal; by October 1864 they had risen to $425 and $72. His income had risen to $600 a month but he felt poor and was oppressed by price rises and shortage of money. Jones, moreover, was middle class. Soldiers were paid $11 a month, skilled workers between $2 and $5 a day.

  Inflation was deeply depressing to all within the Confederacy, particularly for parents. Its effect was heightened by the shortage of almost everything. While food remained plentiful in the countryside, difficulties of distribution eventually caused hunger in towns and cities. Almost all other necessities, particularly clothing, became difficult to obtain anywhere. Home weaving revived, as wives and mothers relearnt the skills of their pioneering ancestors to replace worn-out factory-made dresses and suits. Shoes fell to pieces. Luxuries disappeared. Shortage became part of the Southern way of life.

  The shortages included shortage of labour. The ranks of the Confederate armies were filled to an overwhelming extent by young men from the countryside, which left farms to be run by older men, slaves, should any be owned, and by women. The place of women in Southern society has been heavily mythologised. There was little that was romantic about it at the time. For every brave beauty who assumed leadership on the plantation while the men were away at the war, there were hundreds of ordinary farmers’ wives who simply added ploughing and reaping to the endless list of jobs they had always performed. War may have brought unaccustomed responsibility, but it also brought much extra work which taxed women very hard. Yet Southern women are a distinctive breed even today, admired for their femininity and outward-going personality. Their difference must surely be ascribed to the war, not perhaps so much to the work they were obliged to undertake as to the role they were forced to assume in the lives of their menfolk. To Europeans Southern women seem much more akin to European women than American women generally. The egalitarian qualities of American women are to Europeans one of their most striking characteristics. It is possible to believe that the femininity of Southern women derived from the parts they played as the war turned to failure and eventual defeat, in supporting and eventually comforting their men. Defeat is not part of the American way. American armies have an almost unbroken record of success. American women have traditionally welcomed their men home as victors. The exception is in the South, to which and to whose womenfolk the armies of th
e Confederacy returned beaten and dejected. Comforting beaten men, restoring their self-esteem, was a major part of the Southern women’s work after April 1865. The experience helped to form the distinctive characteristics of Southern womanhood.

  The Civil War for women was a significant moment in American history. Women in the 1860s were not recognised for their abilities outside the home, even though they had been working on their farms and in their family stores for generations as their husbands went pioneering out west. The Civil War forced recognition upon women who worked the land and kept their families together whilst their husbands were fighting. Some, like Pauline Cushman, an actress from New Orleans, risked their lives by offering their services as spies.

  At least 250 and possibly as many as 1,000 women fought in the war on both sides, either dressing in the uniforms of their dead fathers, brothers, husbands, or sons or merely enlisting in order to fight alongside their menfolk, or to get away from the hard physical labour of farming and to earn more money. They evaded detection because, in most cases, the physical examination was so hastily administered that most women had no problem passing and went on to complete their enlistment; soldiers did not usually undress for bed; baths were few and far between; and the ill-fitting uniforms could disguise the female form. A woman who enlisted in either army masqueraded as a man by cutting her hair short, wearing men’s clothing, binding her chest, and taking a man’s name, and she tried to conduct herself in a masculine manner so as not to draw attention to herself. Sarah Emma Edmonds, using the alias Franklin Thomas, enlisted in a Michigan volunteer infantry company, successfully evading detection as a woman for a year. She participated in the battles of Blackburn’s Ford and First Bull Run, the Peninsula Campaign, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. Sarah Edmonds also served as a spy, disguised as an Irish peddlar or as a black man, and provided valuable information on the enemy to the Union army.