Posted on 11/02/2002 11:20:01 AM PST by Aurelius
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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