Born Fighting

by James Webb

  Similarly, a historian’s point of reference automatically shapes the focus and priorities of the issues that were in conflict. Political histories that analyze the drift toward Civil War primarily as a study of governmental leaders in conflict must ineluctably conclude that the war was about slavery, because slavery as an institution became the nexus of every single governmental question that caused the South eventually to secede. Slavery drove the Southern economy, at least for its planter elites. The debate over slavery’s preservation or elimination was so defined by geography that it trumped the Tenth Amendment issue of whether states had reserved the right to secede when they delegated other specific powers to the federal government, no matter whether the constitutional arguments in favor of secession were valid or not.47 And in the buildup to war as well as its aftermath, positions on the slavery issue caused America’s sense of itself as a nation of differing social classes and variegated regions to shift instead into the simple sectionalism of North and South.

  During the 1832 tariff debate, Andrew Jackson had left no doubt that he opposed any breakup of the Union. But even though he himself had owned slaves, it is not clear where he would have come down on the issue of slavery as it presented itself in the years just before the Civil War. Arthur Schlesinger hints that Jackson would have turned against slavery because it came to be the driving engine of the Southern elites, positing that the Jacksonian antagonism toward unbridled aristocracies “made it imperative for the radical democracy to combat the slave power with all its will.” Indeed, Francis Preston Blair, a Virginia-born Kentuckian who had been a key member of Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet, later became one of Abraham Lincoln’s important advisers, and in 1858 his son, Missouri congressman Frank Blair, Jr., argued that the slavery issue should be viewed in terms of class rather than region: “This is no question of North and South. It is a question between those who contend for caste and privilege, and those who neither have nor desire to have privileges beyond their fellows.” However, the Jacksonians had steadily lost their influence against the “emerging nobility” after the great man’s passing, and “as the conflict deepened, the sectional theory gained status and authority, . . . partly because the class theory had to be soft-pedaled in the interest of national unity, and because many conservative Northerners, fearing the explosive possibilities of the class theory, did their best to destroy it.”48

  This left the moral issue predominant in the public sentiment, with the largely slaveless North pointing its finger southward, and the South as a whole coalescing against what many, regardless of class, viewed to be the calumnies of the North’s attacks. In this context it is hardly surprising that in 1862, when Abraham Lincoln first met Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he quipped, “So this is the little lady who made the big war.” Her novel, which when published in 1852 was the first ever to sell a million copies, had brought the moral issue of slavery to the forefront in many Northern living rooms, creating a wave of revulsion in the North and a backlash of dozens of books in the South defending the practice.49

  But what many historians miss—and what those who react so strongly to seeing Confederate battle flags on car bumpers and in the yards of descendants of Confederate veterans do not understand—is that slavery was emphatically not the reason that most individual Southerners fought so long and hard, and at such overwhelming cost. Slavery may have been the catalytic issue from a governmental perspective, and its moral dimensions may have motivated many Northerners, but other factors, some cultural and some historical, brought most of the Confederate soldiers to the battlefield. And that was particularly true among the communities in the Scots-Irish heartland that provided the bulk of the Confederate Army’s manpower.

  From its very beginning the South was never a monolithic cultural entity, and nothing divided its white population in economic and social terms so clearly as the institution of slavery. Slavery’s stronghold at its inception had been in the plantations of Virginia’s Tidewater “Cavalier” aristocracy. This early ruling class of well-appointed English immigrants had consciously created the royalist, three-tiered society that dominated Virginia’s eastern reaches. But most Scots-Irish had rejected this structure. From the first days that the Ulster Presbyterians were allowed to settle in their quasi-military mountain outposts in exchange for the right to practice a religion that had not been tolerated elsewhere in the colony, they had chosen to live outside of it. This separatism largely continued. As the Scots-Irish settlers moved down into the Carolinas and then westward into the mid-South and the Ohio Valley, the Tidewater aristocracy’s plantation system had swung like a wheel along the Atlantic seaboard, then into the coastal areas of the Deep South, and finally upward along the Mississippi River basin, not only bringing new legions of slaves with it, but growing ever more cruel along the way. Thus the core of the South was a large mass of heavily Scots-Irish farms and small communities dominating the center, from which their family networks extended northward into southern Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley, southward into the fringes of the plantation aristocracy along the waterways, and ever westward toward Colorado, California, and Oregon as the country continued to grow.

  Some members of the Scots-Irish ascendancy became large-scale slaveholders in the Carolinas, Georgia, and the Deep South, but the slave system was not a part of the usual Scots-Irish way of life, and in truth was in the hands of a very small percentage of the Southern population. As John Hope Franklin points out in his landmark work From Slavery To Freedom, by 1860 Virginia was still the greatest slaveholding state, while regionwide less than 5 percent of the whites in the South owned slaves. Franklin goes on to say that, “Fully three-fourths of the white people of the South had neither slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery or the plantation system.”50 Further, of the 385,000 who did own slaves, more than 200,000 had five slaves or less, and “fully 338,000 owners, or 88 percent of all the owners of slaves in 1860, held less than twenty slaves.”51

  More emphatically, Wilbur Cash points out in The Mind of the South that the South’s ruling class in 1860 “ought actually to include only some four or five thousand of the great planters,” and that of those the number who could truly “be reckoned as proper aristocrats came to less than five hundred—and maybe not more than half that figure.”52 Ominously and correctly, Cash goes on to point out that despite the typical white Southerner’s tendency to be swept up in the rhetoric and debate of politics, the “only real interest involved in [politics] was that of the planter,” and that for the nonslaveholding yeoman, his instinctive support of issues that benefited the slaveholding elites would eventually “bear him outside the orbit of his true interest [and] would swing him headlong, perhaps against his own more sober judgment, into the disaster of the Civil War.”53

  Slavery had flourished rather than dying a natural death after Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1792 dramatically improved the ability to process cotton and thus made this crop the staple of the South’s economy. As Vernon Parrington points out, “In 1791, three years after Andrew Jackson settled in Nashville, the total export of cotton was only 200,000 pounds. In 1803, it had risen to 40,000,000 pounds, and by 1860 the export for the year was of the value of two hundred millions of dollars. Such figures provide a sufficient explanation of the militant spirit of the slave economy. . . . This peculiar institution, which a generation before was commonly believed to be in the way of natural extinction, had the South by the throat.”54 More properly, it had the Southern elites by the throat.

  The slave system had become crueler as it expanded for a number of interconnected reasons that affected not only the slaves but also the entire ethical and socioeconomic structure of white society in the South. In 1808, Congress had outlawed the legal importation of slaves, assuming that slavery itself would eventually disappear as the human pipeline from Africa ran dry. Instead, as cotton became king and the plantation system expanded into what became known as the Black Belt in the Deep
South, the slave trade became ruthless and even more dehumanizing. Slave runners—many, as Parrington points out, “respectable New England church members”55—made fortunes as the price of human bondage reached a premium. Slaves were further degraded through a busy speculative market, uprooted and moved to new locations for the right price as if they were horses or barley, and in some cases made to endure the practice of forced breeding.

  As the institution dehumanized the slaves, so also did it corrupt the Great Captains. Again, Parrington: “The generous culture of Virginia failed to take root in the Black Belt. The development of the plantation system under hired overseers infected the masters, few in numbers and absolute in power, with an exaggerated sense of their own greatness. . . . In the frontier Gulf states the rapid expansion of the plantation system created an aristocracy given to swaggering, bourgeois in spirit, arrogant in manners. Republican simplicity was losing vogue and there was much loose talk about the superiority of the classes.”56

  What had been created through the extension of the plantation system into the Deep South and Mississippi River basin was not the idyllic, Tara-like antebellum gentility that one finds in wistful novels such as Gone With the Wind, but instead a rapacious system based on a false sense of entitlement that looked condescendingly on white and black alike. This system was separate and apart from the daily lives of most Southern whites and especially those in the mountain and backcountry regions. In many ways it represented the creation of a new “hybrid royalty” of the sort brought to Scotland by the Anglo-Normans who intermarried with the Scottish royal families in the era of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. Remnants of this exclusivity and arrogance remained for generations after the Civil War and still persist in many parts of the South today. That the Scots-Irish yeomen could live alongside such a system is as much a comment on their long-held indifference to wealth and power as it is on their views on slavery, or even of their own diminishment as a result of the slave system.

  And they were clearly diminished by it. Benjamin Franklin had predicted as much nearly a century before, commenting that with the introduction of slavery, “the Poor are by this Means deprived of Employment, while a few Families acquire vast Estates; which they spend on Foreign Luxuries, and educating their Children in the Habits of those Luxuries; the same Income is needed for the Support of one that might have maintain’d 100.”57 Wilbur Cash confirmed this prophecy, pointing out that the plantation system had kept ordinary white families on the poorer lands, “walled them up and locked them in there—had blocked them off from escape or any considerable economic and social advance as a body . . . Moreover, having driven these people back there, it thereafter left them virtually out of account. . . . Worse yet, it concerned itself but little if at all about making use of them as economic auxiliaries. . . . Following its own interests alone, it always preferred to buy a great part of its hay and corn and beef and wool from the North or the Middle West rather than go to the trouble and expense of opening up the backcountry properly. Roads, railroads, transportation facilities generally, were provided mainly with regard to the movement of cotton. . . . The slaveless yeomen . . . were left more or less to stagnate at a level but a step or two above the pioneers.”58

  This remoteness accentuated the historic independence of the Scots-Irish culture, and not wholly in ways that would benefit its people in future generations. The hardscrabble lifestyle of the backcountry was almost wholly lacking in infrastructure such as schools and libraries that would allow intellectual growth. Governmental functions were minimal, leaving most problems to be solved through violent personal confrontations or by a rough system of vigilante justice. And contrary to popular mythology, in the twenty years before the Civil War, more than 90 percent of those hanged or burned by lynch mobs in the South were white.59

  The practice of religion took on a harder tone as well. The democracy of the Presbyterian Kirk had eliminated both the formal sacraments and the overarching power of a central church authority, but the transformation of this concept into the Baptist and Methodist backcountry often found whole congregations in the hands of half-educated preachers and traveling evangelists who held every word in the Bible to be absolute and claimed that their voices echoed the lips of God. This fearsome fundamentalism, which sowed the seeds of today’s Bible Belt, was countered on a daily basis by the heavy drinking that had come, along with the stills, from the glens of Ireland and Scotland, and by an equally long addiction to devilish music, sensual pleasures, constant physical challenge, and an inbred defiance of authority.

  As was their tradition, the yeoman farmers of the mountains and the Southern backcountry asked for nothing from the propertied, slaveholding class, and as has been their historic fate, nothing is what they received. Left to their own devices by the ravishing plantation owners who controlled the political process and who themselves were addicted to King Cotton, the backcountry folk had grown even tougher and in some degrees poorer than their ancestors. And they had also grown—well, more than a little bit wild. They could hunt. They could fish. They could drink all night and howl at the moon. If you wanted to get past them you had to fight your way through them. And on Sunday they’d stop for a while and let the preacher remind them that there’d be hell to pay “on the other side.”

  Economically, except for those who benefited from the slave system, the region had fallen into hard times, even before the Civil War. As David Hackett Fischer points out, “By the mid-nineteenth century, the proportion of farm workers in the north was only 40 percent; in the south it was 84 percent. . . . By 1860 . . . the value of farmland per acre was 2.6 times greater in the north than in the south; the amount of manufacturing capital per capita was nearly four times as great. . . . With only one-third of the white population, the south had nearly two-thirds of its richest men and a large proportion of the very poor. . . . In 1860 seven-eighths of [foreign] immigrants came to the north. . . . In the north, 94 percent of the population was found to be literate by the census of 1860; in the south, barely 54 percent could read and write. Roughly 72 percent of northern children were enrolled in school compared with 35 percent of the same age in the south. The average length of the school year was 135 days in the north and 80 days in the south.”60

  But the debate had turned so lividly along sectional lines that even the poorer whites in the South circled their wagons. A quintessential unease hit the key chord in the Scots-Irish experience. In their eyes, an outside force was not only telling them how to live their lives, but also threatening to force solutions on them if they disagreed. They would solve their own problems, if problems there were. The debate over slavery was becoming a threat to how they perceived their very independence. To the leaders of the North and the ever-emerging West, the issues were more clear-cut: slavery was an evil that needed to be done away with, and during the 1850s the new Republican Party was formed with the elimination of slavery as a key plank in its platform. To the leaders of the South, the Northern-dominated federal system promised in due time to simply outvote their way of life and, through the force of a collective national majority, change their entire existence. John C. Calhoun had predicted as much when he attempted to establish the principle of nullification during the debates over the tariff acts.

  In 1856 the Republicans “swept every state in the northern tier from New England to upstate New York, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa. This pattern of Republican support . . . was a map of greater New England. Every state that voted Republican had been colonized by the descendants of the Puritan migration.” In 1860 they nominated Abraham Lincoln, who although born in Kentucky and reared in Illinois was the descendant of New England Puritans and Pennsylvania Quakers. He won “every New England county, most of the northern tier, all but three electoral votes in the middle tier from the Delaware Valley west to the Pacific. And at the same time he lost every electoral vote in the southern states.”61

  The Southern states, led predictably by South Carolina, were prepared for this possibilit
y. On December 20, 1860, the South Carolina legislature voted out an Ordinance of Secession, followed four days later by a Declaration of Causes. That document assailed “the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States by the Federal Government, and its encroachments on the reserved rights of the States,” asserting that the nonslaveholding states “have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions, and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of Slavery.” It pointed out that, “A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to Slavery.” It condemned the Republican Party as having announced in its platform that “a war must be waged against Slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States. The guarantees of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The Slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government.” It then concluded that “South Carolina has resumed her position among the nations of the world, as a separate and independent state.”62

  On February 4, 1861, representatives of six Southern states met in Montgomery, Alabama, to organize the government of the Confederacy, estimating that once war began they would number thirteen seceded states—thus, the thirteen stars on the Confederate battle flag, although only eleven states eventually seceded. As this was happening, the Confederacy took over all but four of the federal forts, arsenals, and military posts in the South. The Union Army’s Maj. Robert Anderson, commander of the federal forces in Charleston, moved his headquarters to the small island of Fort Sumter and declined to turn the fort over to the Confederates. On April 11, Confederate general Pierre G. T. Beauregard, a native Louisianan, opened fire on Fort Sumter. Anderson, a native Kentuckian married to a Georgian, had been Beauregard’s artillery instructor many years before at West Point.63