Born Fighting

by James Webb

  Fort Sumter folded, instructor surrendering to student. With this act of odd familiarity that would be repeated a thousand times over the course of four horrific years, the bloodiest war in American history was on.

  4

  Attack and Die

  Not for fame or reward,

  not for place or for rank,

  not lured by ambition or goaded by necessity,

  but in simple obedience to duty as they understood it,

  these men suffered all,

  sacrificed all,

  dared all,

  and died.

  —Inscription on the Confederate Memorial

  in Arlington National Cemetery, written by a Confederate veteran

  who later became a minister

  THE WAR, AS David Hackett Fischer put it, “was not a contest of equals. In 1861, the Union outnumbered the Confederacy in total population by 2.5 to 1, and in free males of military age by 4.4 to 1. So different had been the pattern of economic growth in the two sections that the north exceeded the south in railroad mileage by 2.4 to 1, in total wealth by 3 to 1, in merchant ships by 9 to 1, in industrial output by 10 to 1. A much smaller proportion of the northern workers were farmers, but the Union outreached the Confederacy in farm acreage by 3 to 1, in livestock by 1.5 to 1, in corn production by 2 to 1, and in wheat production by 4 to 1.

  “But the south was superior to the north in the intensity of its warrior ethic.”64

  That warrior ethic, which would carry the outnumbered and outgunned Confederacy a very long way, came from the long traditions of service that had begun so many centuries before in Scotland and the north of Britain. The Confederate battle flag itself was drawn from the St. Andrew’s Cross of Scotland, and the unbending spirit of the Southern soldier found its energies in the deeds of the past just as strongly as it looked up to the leaders of the present. These were the direct descendants of William Wallace’s loyal followers of five centuries before, Winston Churchill’s “hard, unyielding spear men who feared nought [sic] and, once set in position, had to be killed.”

  As noted Civil War historian Douglas Southall Freeman put it, “Good cheer was not unnatural in the union regiments after July 1863, but its persistence until the autumn of 1864 in most of the Southern forces . . . is a phenomenon of morale. . . . The graycoats laughed at their wagons and their harness, their tatters and their gaping shoes. . . . They laughed their way from Manassas to Appomattox and even through the hospitals. . . . These Confederate soldiers and nurses and citizens of beleaguered towns had one inspiration that twentieth-century America has not credited to them—the vigorous Revolutionary tradition. . . . Many in the ranks, North and South, had seen old soldiers of the Continental Army; thousands had heard the stories of the sacrifices of 1777 and of the hunger and nakedness at Valley Forge. . . . Many another Southern soldier told himself the road was no more stony than the one that had carried his father and his grandfather at last to Yorktown. If independence was to be the reward, patience, good cheer and the tonic of laughter would bring it all the sooner.”65

  But not only the Revolutionary War spirit drove them. As I wrote of the Scots-Irish tradition in my novel Fields of Fire, the culture even to this day is viscerally fired by “that one continuous linking that had bound father to son from the first wild resolute angry beaten Celt who tromped into the hills rather than bend a knee to Rome two thousand years ago, who would . . . chew the bark off a tree, fill his belly with wood rather than surrender from starvation and admit defeat to an advancing civilization. That same emotion passing with the blood: a fierce resoluteness that found itself always in a pitch against death, that somehow, over the centuries came to accept the fight as birthright, even as some kind of proof of life.”66

  True to the historic militia concept that itself had evolved from the legacy of clan loyalty, the Confederate Army rose like a sudden wind out of the little towns and scattered farms of a still unconquered wilderness, drawing 750,000 soldiers from a population base, male and female, of only 8 million. By contrast, the Northern states drew 2 million soldiers from a population of 22 million, which also benefited from constant immigration throughout the war, including a steady inflow of hardfighting potato-famine Irishmen. In the South the Great Captains called, as they had at Bannockburn and King’s Mountain, and the able-bodied men were quick to answer. This army fought with squirrel rifles and cold steel against a much larger and more modern force. It saw 90 percent of its adult male population serve as soldiers and 70 percent of these become casualties, some 256,000 of them dead, including, astoundingly, 77 of the 425 generals who led them. The North by contrast lost 365,000 soldiers and 47 of its 583 generals, a casualty rate in each case less than half that of the South.67 The men of the Confederate Army gave every ounce of courage and loyalty to a leadership they trusted and respected, then laid down their arms in an instant—declining to fight a guerrilla war—when that leadership decided that enough was enough. And (we shall see later) they returned to a devastated land and a military occupation, enduring the bitter humiliation of Reconstruction and an economic alienation from the rest of this country that continued for a full century, affecting white and black alike.

  History has a way of boiling itself down into generalities. The farther away we move from an event, the more we tend to condense its lessons. In recent decades the reasons for the Civil War have been reduced in the minds of most Americans into a simple sentence or two. The Civil War, we are taught, was about slavery, an institution that at the same time both nurtured and corrupted the South. The Union, we are now told, was on the side of God and the angels, its soldiers dedicated to eliminating this dark stain on the human spirit. The Union Army, we are reminded again and again even in these modern times, marched to a “Battle Hymn,” one that still inundates political and patriotic ceremonies.

  As He died to make men holy

  Let us fight to make men free

  His truth is marching on . . .

  By implication, the soldiers of the Confederacy were with the forces of darkness and evil, fighting to preserve a system that denigrated the human spirit and made mules out of men. But the truth is, as always, far more turgid, and to understand it one must go to the individual soldier. Why did he fight? What loyalties propelled him? What issues, political and otherwise, demanded that loyalty? Those are the key questions, and as they say in the law, all else is dicta. The debates in Washington and in the state capitals during the years leading up to the Civil War were clearly dominated by the issue of slavery, but when one looks at the breakup of the Union and the rallying of both the Confederate and Federal armies, a paradox immediately emerges.

  How did all of this confusion present itself inside the mind of a typical young man called into action to fight for the Confederacy? First, the odds are overwhelming that he did not own slaves at all. Was he then merely a pawn, a simple agent of those who did? These were loyal and uncomplicated people, but their history could never mark them as either stupid or passive. Civil War historian Henry Steele Commager commented that, “The war required the subordination of the individual to the mass . . . but both Federals and Confederates indulged their individualism in the army and out, rejected military standards and discipline, selected officers for almost any but military reasons, pursued local and state interest at the expense of the national.”68 Wilbur Cash amplifies this point, reminding us that the Confederate soldiers came from a culture that had produced “the most intense individualism the world has seen since the Italian Renaissance.”69 As Cash points out, “To the end of his service this soldier could not be disciplined. He slouched. He would never learn to salute in the brisk fashion so dear to the hearts of the professors of mass murder. His ‘Cap’n’ and his ‘Gin’ral’ were likely to pass his lips with a grin. . . . And down to the final day at Appomattox his officers knew that the way to get him to execute an order without malingering was to flatter and to jest, never to command too brusquely and forthrightly. And yet—and yet—and by virtue of
precisely these unsoldierly qualities, he was, as no one will care to deny, one of the world’s very finest fighting men.”70

  It is impossible to believe that such men would have continued to fight against unnatural odds—and take casualties beyond the level of virtually any other modern army—simply so that the 5 percent of their population who owned slaves could keep them or because they held to a form of racism so virulent that they would rather die than allow the slaves to leave the plantations. Something deeper was motivating them, something that appealed to their self-interest as well.

  Second, the Confederate soldier knew that slave-owners in Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky, the slaveholding states that remained in the Union, were allowed to keep their slaves when the war began. This was also true of West Virginia when it broke off from Virginia in 1862 and became a separate state. The consequence of this reality was that in virtually every major battle of the Civil War, Confederate soldiers who did not own slaves were fighting against a proportion of Union Army soldiers who had not been asked to give theirs up. So, what did this say to the individual soldier about the importance of the slavery issue to President Lincoln and the Union government itself?

  Third, this soldier was aware that when President Abraham Lincoln ostensibly ended slavery on January 1, 1863, through the Emancipation Proclamation, his order specifically exempted all the slaves in the North as well as those slaves in areas of the South that had previously been conquered. This included vast stretches of Louisiana and eastern Virginia—ironically, the birthplace of the American slave system.71 Thus, all the slaves on Union territory as of that date remained slaves for the duration of the war, and the only slaves who were freed by this proclamation were those residing in areas of the South subsequently conquered by the Union Army. It does not take a cynical mind to conclude that President Lincoln, having suffered numerous defeats as well as serious morale problems to this point in the war, needed a mission for his soldiers beyond the original goal of forcing the Southern states to rejoin the Union.

  And fourth, the more learned among these Confederate soldiers, like their political leaders, believed strongly that the Constitution was on their side when they chose to dissolve their relations with the Union. This does not imply that America would have been a better place a hundred years on if they had succeeded. Nor does it suggest that the South’s leaders might not have decided to end slavery and even rejoin the Union in later years. But the states that had joined the Union after the Revolution considered themselves independent political entities, much like the countries of Europe do today. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reserved to the states all rights not specifically granted to the federal government, and in their view the states had thus retained their right to dissolve the federal relationship.

  This argument was best articulated by Alexander B. Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy. Vernon Louis Parrington, whose views on this matter were hardly rejected by the intellectual paragons of his time,72 actually supported the constitutional validity of Stephens’s views. Parrington begins by pointing out the greatest irony of the Civil War—that “Love of the Union, and of the Constitution as a guarantee of that Union, was far stronger in the South before the Civil War than in the North.”73 He then summarizes Stephens’s argument: “that state government existed prior to the Union, that it was jealously guarded at the making of the Constitution, that it had never been surrendered, and hence was the constitutional order until destroyed by the Civil War.”74

  In a fourteen-hundred-page document that the Illinois-born, Kansas-raised, Harvard-educated Parrington characterized as “wholly convincing,” Stephens laid out the South’s view that the constitutional compact was terminable.75 Parrington went on to comment that, “Stephens rightly insisted that slavery was only the immediate casus belli. The deeper cause was the antagonistic conceptions of the theory and functions of the political state that emerged from antagonistic economic systems.”76

  Importantly, Parrington laments that Stephens as well as other Southern slaveholders gave no consideration to the argument that slavery as a system was economically ruinous to the poor white.77 But to tar the sacrifices of the Confederate soldier as simple acts of racism, and reduce the battle flag under which he fought to nothing more than the symbol of a racist heritage, is one of the great blasphemies of our modern age.

  Why, then, did he fight?

  It might seem odd in these modern times, but the Confederate soldier fought because, on the one hand, in his view he was provoked, intimidated, and ultimately invaded, and, on the other, his leaders had convinced him that this was a war of independence in the same sense as the Revolutionary War. For those who can remove themselves from the slavery issue and examine the traits that characterize the Scots-Irish culture, the unbending ferocity of the Confederate soldier is little more than a continuum. This was not so much a learned response to historical events as it was a cultural approach that had been refined by centuries of similar experiences. The tendency to resist outside aggression was bred deeply into every heart—and still is today.

  Rome conquered Britain and tried to subjugate its people, but the “brave and proud” fell back into the mountains of what later became Cornwall, Wales, and especially Scotland. King Edward marched into Scotland to subjugate its people, but he was resisted and ultimately expelled. The Jacobite Irish and the French laid siege to Derry and tried to starve a people into submission, but as the death toll mounted, those same people, men, women, and children alike, wrote their vow in blood: No Surrender. The British sent an expedition into the Appalachian Mountains to punish and lay waste to whole communities for not supporting the Crown, and their predictable reward was to be stalked, surrounded, and slaughtered. And now a federal government, whose leadership and economic systems were dominated by English-American businessmen and intellectuals, was sending armies into the sovereign territory of the Southern states in order to compel them to remain inside a political system that their leaders had told them they had every right to reject.

  On this point it is interesting to note that when the South fired on Fort Sumter, beginning the war, there were eight slave states in the Union and only seven in the Confederacy. But when Lincoln called for an invasion of the South, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas left the Union.78 Even the states with Scots-Irish heritage that remained in the Union reacted to this call with outrage. The governor of Kentucky contemptuously replied that his state would furnish no troops “for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern States.”79 Claiborne Fox Jackson, Missouri’s governor, sent a wire claiming that such an idea was “illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its object, inhuman and diabolical, and cannot be complied with.”80

  Perhaps the best proof of this rather idiosyncratic truth is to examine what happened when it was applied in reverse. At the outset of the Civil War, Kentucky’s sympathies were with the South, but when Lincoln guaranteed the continuation of slavery in the Union, the state decided to remain neutral. In the early months of 1861 the governor and both houses of the state legislature announced that Kentucky would defend her borders against invasion by either side.81 Then on September 4 of that year the Confederates occupied the Mississippi River town of Columbus, Kentucky, in a move actually designed to prevent a Union force under Ulysses S. Grant from moving into the town. Although the Union followed suit by occupying Paducah, forty miles farther north along the Ohio River, the Confederates had moved into Kentucky first, and the political reaction was immediate. On September 11, the Kentucky legislature demanded that the Confederates withdraw. When they had not done so by September 18, Kentucky tossed aside its neutrality, joined the Union, and authorized the creation of a military force to expel the Confederates.82

  Even the arrival of famed Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston in mid-September to take over the Army of Tennessee failed to sway most Kentuckians. With the war now on in Kentucky, Johnston pushed his forces along a line in the southern part of the s
tate, reasoning that he would provoke an upsurge of support for the Confederate cause. Johnston’s logic was well considered and his credentials were beyond question. A native Kentuckian who had later settled in Texas (and is thus claimed by both as a favored son), at the outset of the Civil War, Johnston was ranked above even Robert E. Lee as the greatest general to align himself with the Confederate cause. Confederate president Jefferson Davis, two years behind Johnston at West Point, idolized him. Mexican War hero (and later president) Zachary Taylor called him the finest soldier he had ever commanded.

  Johnston’s skills as a combat leader were so valued by the South and so feared in the North that when he decided to leave the Union Army and join the Confederacy, the Union attempted to hold him in confinement in California. His escape and two-thousand-mile journey over the desert to link up with the Confederates is the stuff of legend, and ended with a train ride from New Orleans to Richmond where thousands cheered his passing along the way. His death while commanding the Confederate attack at Shiloh in April 1862 turned that battle to the benefit of the Union forces led by another general of Scots-Irish descent, Ulysses S. Grant, and in many eyes changed the complexion of the entire war in the “Southwest theater.”

  Johnston was growing an army from scratch in Tennessee, and he needed soldiers. He gambled that his personal charisma would swell the ranks in his native state and possibly even pull Kentucky into the Confederacy. Indeed, one of the thirteen stars on the Confederate battle flag had been reserved for Kentucky. In the months before Shiloh, Johnston made his move into southern Kentucky. But the reaction to his invasion was again the opposite, as many Kentuckians considered the Confederate presence to be a further violation of their sovereignty.