Posted on 11/02/2002 11:20:01 AM PST by Aurelius
"Civil War" is at best a misleading name for that conflict. Many Southerners avoid using it because of the implication that there were factions in every locality. "Civil" means "relating to the people within a community." The term describes only one aspect of the event, and subtly discredits Southerners defending home and country, rather than fomenting a political coup.
The typical Southern community was not divided at all. Dixie was that community, and the consensus in Dixie was to defy strangers and meddlers from the North who insisted on ruling and intended to invade. The typical Southerner fought for independence. There were (and still are) more differences between Yankees and Southerners than between Yankees and English-speaking Canadians.
It was a civil war, but not on the battlefield. It was a civil war in New York City when a draft protest turned into a rampaging mob of 70,000. That civil war lasted four days because all the available troops were at Gettysburg, fighting soldiers from another land. It was a civil war when they returned and fired into this New York crowd, killing nearly 2,000 of their own divided "community."
It was a civil war when Illinois' Governor Yates reported an "insurrection in Edgar County. Union men on one side, Copperheads on the other. They have had two battles." It was a civil war for the Union Army when the 109th Illinois had to be disbanded because its men were Southern sympathizers. It was a civil war in Indiana when thousands of draft resisters hid in enclaves. From the governor: "Matters assume grave import. Two hundred mounted armed men in Rush county have today resisted arrest of deserters . . . southern Indiana is ripe for revolution."
The governors of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York reported that they could not enforce the draft without 10-20,000 troops in each state. Violent opposition struck in Wisconsin and Michigan. Four thousand Pennsylvanians refused to march south. Sherman wrote: "Mutiny was common to the whole army, and it was not subdued till several regiments, or parts of regiments had been ordered to Fort Jefferson, Florida, as punishment."
It was not a civil war in those parts of the South removed from the border regions. Had it been a civil war, Lincoln's government could have leveraged local support to subdue those states brutally, as it did in Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia. Union policy was to treat border state combatants as renegades under martial law instead of as legitimate armed forces.
Marylanders were similar to Virginians strongly Southern, but cautious. However, when Lincoln called for troops to coerce the states, Virginia seceded.
Immediately, Lincoln moved to secure Maryland. Habeus corpus was suspended and Southern sympathizers arrested in Baltimore. General Banks dissolved the Baltimore police board. Secretary of War Cameron wrote him: "The passage of any act of secession by the legislature of Maryland must be prevented. If necessary all or any part of the members must be arrested." Arrests were sufficient to prevent a vote. The mayor of Baltimore, most of the city government, and newspaper editors were jailed. One of those editors was the grandson of the author of The Star Spangled Banner. Francis Key Howard wrote of his imprisonment: When I looked out in the morning, I could not help being struck by an odd and not pleasant coincidence. On that same day forty-seven years before, my grandfather, Mr Francis Scott Key, then prisoner on a British ship, had witnessed the bombardment of Fort McHenry. When on the following morning the hostile fleet drew off, defeated, he wrote the song so long popular. . . . As I stood upon the very scene of that conflict, I could not but contrast my position with his, forty-seven years before. The flag which he had then so proudly hailed, I saw waving at the same place over the victims of as vulgar and brutal despotism as modern times have witnessed.
Documents of the period show more than 38,000 political prisoners in northern jails. In The Life of William H. Seward, Bancroft wrote: The person "suspected" of disloyalty was often seized at night, borne off to the nearest fort. . . . Month after month many of them were crowded together in gloomy and damp case mates, where even dangerous pirates captured on privateers ought not to have remained long. Many had committed no overt act. There were among them editors and political leaders of character and honor, but whose freedom would be prejudicial to the prosecution of the war. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus everywhere, arrested candidates, and banished Ohio congressman Vallandigham from the country. More than 300 newspapers were closed. Secretary of War Stanton told a visitor, "If I tap that little bell, I can send you to a place where you will never again hear the dogs bark." Neither habeas corpus nor freedom of the press were ever suspended in the South, even in the most desperate of times. The Raleigh News and Observer wrote after the war "It is to the honour of the Confederate government that no Confederate secretary could touch a bell and send a citizen to prison."
Yankee power was most unrestrained in Missouri. From its initial defiant movement of troops, the Union routinely escalated hostilities. They encouraged atrocities, insidiously veiled behind a facade of inept negligence. They exhibited arrogance and contempt for law, their own constitution, Southerners, and life itself.
The authorities entered private homes without warrant or provocation, seizing arms and other properties. They required written permits for travel. Random "drive-by" shootings of citizens from trains by soldiers were commonplace. Citizens were fined, jailed, banished, and even executed for as little as expressing dissent, or upon the accusation of a government informer.
Authorities called citizens to their door in the middle of the night and shot them or took them away. Amnesty was promised to partisans, but many who attempted to surrender were executed. Men like Frank and Jesse James witnessed these things and vowed never to accept a pardon from such a government.
Senator Jim Lane, known as "the grim chieftain of Kansas," ravaged Missouri. Halleck wrote McClellan: "I receive almost daily complaints of outrages committed by these men in the name of the United States, and the evidence is so conclusive as to leave no doubt of their correctness . . . Lane has been made a brigadier-general. I cannot conceive of a more injudicious appointment . . . offering a premium for rascality and robbing." McClellan gave the letter to Lincoln. After reading it, Lincoln turned it over and wrote on the back, "An excellent letter, though I am sorry General Halleck is so unfavourably impressed with General Lane."
September 1862 brought executions for refusing to swear allegiance to the U.S. In October at Palmyra, Missouri, ten political prisoners and POWs were executed because a Union informer disappeared. Soon afterwards, Lincoln promoted to brigadier-general the man responsible.
In 1863 General Ewing imprisoned as many wives, mothers, and sisters of Quantrill's Confederate partisan band as could be found. The building housing most of them collapsed in August, killing many. Ewing had been warned that the building was in danger of collapse, and the guerrillas believed that it had been deliberate. In retaliation Quantrill sacked and burned Lawrence, Kansas. Ewing then issued an order forcing all persons in four counties of western Missouri living more than a mile from a military base to leave the state. They were forced from their homes at gunpoint and escorted away. Then all property was destroyed. Cass County, which had a population of 10,000 was reduced to 600 by this "ethnic cleansing." Union Colonel Lazear wrote his wife that the ensuing arson was so thorough that only stone chimneys could be seen for hundreds of miles. "It is heart sickening to see what I have seen since I have been back here. A desolated country, men, women, and children, some of them almost naked. Some on foot and some in wagons. Oh God."
Loyalty oaths and bonds were required of all citizens. If guerrillas attacked, property in the area was confiscated and sold at auction. Suspects were imprisoned and by 1864 the mortality rate of Union-held prisoners had reached fifty percent. Union Surgeon George Rex reported: Undergoing the confinement in these crowded and insufficiently ventilated quarters are many citizen prisoners, against whom the charges are of a very trivial character, or perhaps upon investigation . . . no charges at all are sustained.
The Union implemented Sherman's philosophy of war against civilians. He wrote: "To the petulant and persistent secessionist, why, death is mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better. . . . There is a class of people . . . who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order." To General Sheridan, Sherman wrote: ". . . the present class of men who rule the South must be killed outright rather than in conquest of territory. . . a great deal of it yet remains to be done, therefore, I shall expect you on any and all occasions to make bloody results."
To General Kilpatrick he wrote: "It is petty nonsense for Wheeler and Beauregard and such vain heroes to talk of our warring against women and children. If they claim to be men they should defend their women and children and prevent us reaching their homes." In a moment of candor he wrote Grant: "You and I and every commander must go through the war justly chargeable with crimes."
While ransacking Georgia, Sherman removed two thousand women, children, and elderly to Ohio where they were forced to work in Union war factories. Families were separated, property confiscated, and even wedding bands taken from their hands. The U.S. never tried to reunite them.
Crimes were committed on both sides, but the Confederate offenses were a fraction of the Federals'. The Southern leadership spoke and acted against abuses, while Lincoln ran a "loose ship" of administration, under which authorities could tacitly countenance abuses while professing to be against them. Lincoln once asked McClellan if he could get close enough to Richmond to shell the civilian population of the city.
When Jefferson Davis was urged to retaliate in kind, and adopt a cruel war policy like the U.S., cabinet member Judah P. Benjamin said "he was immovable in resistance to such counsels, insisting that it was repugnant to every sentiment of justice and humanity that the innocent should be made victims for the crimes of such monsters."
America lost the "civil war" because she lost her soul. You opine that those were necessary war measures? Then why were they never employed by the Confederacy even in the dark days of imminent defeat? It was because the South still adhered to the transcendence of principle. The South did not believe that the end justified the means. Most Southerners believed that right and wrong and truth were God-given, and not man's creation.
Therefore, man had to submit to them. It was not man's place to decide that principles could be abandoned when expedient. Robert E. Lee said it best: "There is a true glory and a true honour; the glory of duty done the honour of the integrity of principle."
Transcendence means "above and independent of, and supreme." To recognize the transcendence of principle is to recognize that there are absolutes, and that absolutes must come from a Creator. It is to acknowledge that these absolutes are not social constructs that have evolved over time or situational posits that can be altered when fashionable. This humility leads men to respect authority, honor their heritage, and submit to the wisdom that has preceded them, acknowledging their own dependence, and not imagining that they are autonomous, without accountability.
It is chiefly social and familial accountability, enabled by the presence of law written in the conscience of humanity, which restrains the evil that is present within man, thereby establishing civilization. The reality of evil within humanity is evident in the corrupting effect of power, since power is of itself neither good nor evil. Power, in its simplest form, is the lack of restraint, while restraint is accountability in some form. Enduring and benevolent civilizations have recognized this and embraced restraints to ensure that human power would not be concentrated to their detriment. The Constitution was a codified restraint of this kind.
Restraints on the central government are as necessary to protect us from tyranny as the balance between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The limits are proportional to the power retained by the states, because the states are the only entities capable of enforcing meaningful restraint upon the federal government. Although they originally delegated limited power to that government, it has usurped all the power. That usurpation became unstoppable after the South lost, because the tenth amendment became a dead letter, and all the states lost. The possibility of secession was the only deterrent sufficient to guarantee states the sovereignty necessary to hold the central power accountable.
The victors justified themselves to the world and history by brute force and sly obfuscation. The elimination of slavery was trumpeted as the justifying crown of victory. As to saving the Union, is that not like preserving a marriage by beating the wife into submission?
The result is the humanist monster-state, and activist judges who reinvent what the constitution means. They have lost the ability to understand and receive it, since they have abandoned the transcendence of principle. They will always find a way to make themselves the final authority. New amendments designed to strengthen the plain intent of the Founding Fathers will eventually fail, because no loophole can be drawn so tight as to eliminate a scoundrel.
Both sides lost. The U.S. lost its character and began the abandonment of transcendent foundations. Dixie lost its will to live. Yet where principles remain- under cold ashes, deeply buried remains an ember of hope. And where there is a smoldering hope, the fire may yet burn again.
Mr. Rudulph is the SL Southwest Alabama District Chairman.
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One of the more disreputable aspects of both confederate campaigns in the North were the habit of taking Northern blacks that they came across and sending them back south.
The North has not yet won culturally, but they have made great headway. They still use Blacks as pawns, and pit Blacks and Whites against each other to wield power. Like many Southerners until Reagan, you have not noticed that the parties have switched philosophies (remember Thomas Jefferson was a Democrat, too). The GOP seems to be returning to its old self, though, unfortunately, and the Dems are, well, we all know what they are.
As to LOLs, bloody Bill Anderson obviously wasn't laughing about things going on then, either, nor were any Southerners, Black or White. Look into it all, if you dare - you'll be surprised.
I know it really wasn't that long ago (my father knew of Civil War veterans) but a lot has changed culturally since then, to say the least. Understanding just HOW it has changed increases our understanding of all aspects of that great (I don't mean "good") conflict.
That falls considerably short of complete accuracy. The legislature did not "vote secesion down" at that session. The lower house voted to denounce and to have no part of the war "which the Federal Government had declared on the Confederate States." They did not consider an ordinance of secession at that time. When it appeared that a secession ordinance might be voted in in the fall session of the legislature, Lincoln had the legislators who were expected to support secession arrested; this was a completely illegal act.
My source is McPherson, pp. 287-289.
I think that is the beginning of a slippery slope. In my own view, wars are generally between governments of nations, not peoples of nations. And I don't care how much they mouth the word "democracy", our government is not us.
That depends on how you define "community." There were unionists in West Virginia, East Tennessee, Northern Alabama, Northwest Arkansas, Texas and even in Mississippi. There was fighting and partisan activity and repression of Unionists by Confederate authorities. By the war's end, every state except South Carolina had regiments in the Union Army.
Rudulph definition of "civil war" is a little too pat. Surely different regions had their different loyalties in the English or Spanish or Russian Civil Wars. It wasn't a case of everyone going out and shooting at everyone else in every town or village, though at times it may have looked like that. And if you lived in the Border States, no one could have convinced you that there weren't two factions fighting for control of the same governments.
It was not a civil war in those parts of the South removed from the border regions. Had it been a civil war, Lincoln's government could have leveraged local support to subdue those states brutally, as it did in Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia.
This makes no sense. Lincoln could no more "leverage local support" behind Confederate lines to subdue the rebels than Davis could do so in Southern Illinois or in New York City to securely establish Confederate control there. Once Union authority was reestablished in Tennessee many mountain Unionists who had been persecuted by the Confederate regime were certainly glad of it, though.
Neither habeas corpus nor freedom of the press were ever suspended in the South, even in the most desperate of times. The Raleigh News and Observer wrote after the war "It is to the honour of the Confederate government that no Confederate secretary could touch a bell and send a citizen to prison."
Learn your own history, Rudulph! 4,000 political prisoners held in the CSA.
The governors of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York reported that they could not enforce the draft without 10-20,000 troops in each state.
How about taking a look at the whole picture, North and South? The Governor of Georgia disputed the Confederacy's right to impose a draft and didn't want it to be carried out.
It was because the South still adhered to the transcendence of principle. The South did not believe that the end justified the means.
Nonsense. Whether the issue was slavery or expropriating property or burning down New York, or imposing a draft or suspending habeus corpus or dragging free blacks back to slavery or firing on one's own countrymen or former countrymen, there was no shortage of "end justifies the means" thinking in the old Confederacy.
Look at some of the theories of absolute state sovereignty developed by defenders of the Confederacy, before accusing others of hypocrisy or brutal pragmatism or power worship. For there is enough nihilism and brutal state worship in radical state's rights theories to call such assaults on others into question.
This, of course, did not end the supporters of rebellion in Maryland and those members of the legislature that still advocated secession were eventually jailed. It wasn't until Governor Augustus Bradford was elected in November 1861 that Maryland was firmly in the Union camp. There remained significant southern support and like other border states Maryland provided troops to both sides. But that does not negate the fact that secession was proposed in April 1861 and voted down.
There is no governemnt without the people.
Even the most toptalitarian government will fall if enough people stand up. You cannot hold the Germand or Russians free of guilt or responsibility for what their governments did.
That is true and an important truth at that. But it does not justify the slaughter, rape, or terrorizing of civilians. Some may accidently be killed, some may be intentionally killed when they take up arms, and all will be "terrorized" in general by the war, of course, but intentional targeting and harrassment of civilians is always ignoble. Modern American forces are famous for their restraint in this regard, and I'm glad they are.
I had hoped his article might shed light on a small puzzle I’ve pondered for some time. Levi Miller was one of six slaves owned by the McBride family in southwestern Virginia. He served through the war as body servant to Captain John J. McBride, my ancestor, in Company C of the Fifth Texas Regiment. In 1907 J. E. Anderson, who became captain of the company after McBride was wounded in the Wilderness, wrote to B. C. Shull, chairman of the Confederate Pension Board of Frederick County, Virginia, in support of Miller’s application for the pension he did receive:
He was in the Pennsylvania campaign and at New Castle and Chambersburg he met several negroes whom he knew (I think some of them were related to him) and who had run away from Virginia. They tried to get Levi to desert but he would not.
At first glance this strikes one as Confederate propaganda, and it is likely enough that Captain Anderson included this episode in his letter to emphasize Levi Miller’s commitment to the Confederate cause (or at least to the Confederate Army). That Anderson simply made up this story seems unlikely, however, for two reasons. One is the pride that shines through in his final paragraph:
My company was Company C, Fifth Texas Regiment, Texas Brigade, Hood’s Division, Longstreet’s Corps, Army of Northern Virginia. Out of a company of 142 men I had but nine left to surrender with me at Appomatox, Va.
The other reason for accepting Anderson’s sincerity is that Levi Miller presumably had a good case for a pension anyway. He had been active in Confederate veterans’ activities; we have a picture of him with the Turner Ashby Camp in 1895, a solitary black face among the eighty or so white ones.
Assuming then that Anderson’s description is of something that really happened, what can we make of it?
One immediate conclusion is that Levi Miller himself had to have been the source of Anderson’s knowledge of the event. If runaway slaves did indeed approach Miller to entice him to desert, they would scarcely have done so in the presence of Confederate soldiers. But the “zone of control” of Lee’s army marching through Pennsylvania could not have been much further than from the road to the nearest horizon or tree line – or perhaps a bit more for Confederate cavalry. One can imagine a body servant such as Miller carrying a dozen canteens down to a creek or across a field to a well, still within sight of his regiment but a hundred yards away, and “meeting” there some other blacks. And one can imagine the white soldiers of his company seeing this from afar and asking Miller who they were and what was going on. That Miller “met several negroes whom he knew” seems very unlikely, but it is perhaps the sort of story he might tell his company when questioned.
Anderson’s account indicates, moreover, that Miller met fellow blacks more than once (“at New Castle and Chambersburg”) and in numbers greater than two (“I think some of them were related to him”). And they “had run away from Virginia.” This surely does not sound like the fugitive slaves were trying very hard to avoid the Confederate column, which one would think they could easily have done. Nor does it sound like the Texans were making any effort to capture such fugitives.
Is it possible that there was some organized effort by abolitionists or Pennsylvania authorities or Federal agents to weaken Lee’s invading army by encouraging its black members to desert? Every black wagon driver or camp servant performed work that would otherwise have required a white soldier, and there were evidently thousands of such support troops with the Army of Northern Virginia. It would have been a daring deed to sneak close enough to the Confederate columns to have the kind of conversations that Anderson describes Miller having, but it seems a plausible tactic nonetheless. I have not been able to find any evidence that such attempts at suborning desertion occurred, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t.
It is hard to know what or how much to make of this episode. But it does seem to indicate, at the very least, that some parts of Lee’s army took no part in any “regular slave hunt.”
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