Posted on 08/25/2008 9:11:18 AM PDT by Colonel Kangaroo
Valdosta State professor pens ‘Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War’
Generations of students have been taught that the South lost the Civil War because of the North’s superior industry and population. A new book suggests another reason: Southerners were largely responsible for defeating the Confederacy.
In “Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War” (New Press, $27.95), historian David Williams of Valdosta State University lays out some tradition-upsetting arguments that might make the granite brow of Jefferson Davis crack on Stone Mountain.
“With this book,” wrote Publishers Weekly, “the history of the Civil War will never be the same again.”
Actually, historians have long fallen into two camps in explaining the Confederacy’s demise — one stressing the Union’s advantages, the other the South’s divisions. Williams gives vivid expression to the latter view, drawing on state and local studies done primarily in the past two decades.
The 49-year-old South Georgia native discussed his interpretations in an interview from Valdosta.
Q: You write that most Southerners didn’t even want to leave the Union.
A: That’s right. In late 1860 and early 1861, there were a series of votes on the secession question in all the slave states, and the overwhelming majority voted against it. It was only in the Deep South, from South Carolina to Texas, that there was much support for secession, and even there it was deeply divided. In Georgia, a slight majority of voters were against secession.
Q: So why did Georgia secede?
A: The popular vote didn’t decide the question. It chose delegates to a convention. That’s the way slaveholders wanted it, because they didn’t trust people to vote on the question directly. More than 30 delegates who had pledged to oppose secession changed their votes at the convention. Most historians think that was by design. The suspicion is that the secessionists ran two slates — one for and one supposedly against — and whichever was elected, they’d vote for secession.
Q: You say the war didn’t start at Fort Sumter.
A: The shooting war over secession started in the South between Southerners. There were incidents in several states. Weeks before Fort Sumter, seven Unionists were lynched in Tallahatchie County, Miss.
Q: Was the inner civil war ever resolved?
A: No. As a result, about 300,000 Southern whites served in the Union army. Couple that with almost 200,000 Southern blacks who served, and that combined to make almost a fourth of the total Union force. All those Southerners who fought for the North were a major reason the Confederacy was defeated.
Q: In the spring of 1862, the Confederacy enacted the first draft in American history. Planters had an easy time getting out of it, didn’t they?
A: Very easy. If they owned 20 or more slaves, they were pretty much excused from the draft. Some of them paid off draft officials. Early in the war, they could pay the Confederate government $500 and get out of the draft.
Q: You use the phrase “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” several times. Does this history anger you?
A: I don’t think it would be unfair to say that. It seems like the common folk were very much ignored and used by the planter elite. As a result, over half a million Americans died.
My great-great-grandfather was almost one: John Joseph Kirkland. He was a poor farmer in Early County, no slaves. He was 33, just under draft age, and had five children at home. He went ahead and enlisted so he could get a $50 bonus. A year later, he lost a leg at the Battle of Chancellorsville.
Q: One of the biggest problems for the South was a lack of food. Why?
A: That does seem strange, because we think of the South as a vast agricultural region. But the planters were growing too much cotton and tobacco and not enough food. Cotton and tobacco paid more.
Q: You say the Confederate army stripped the fields of much of the produce and livestock there was, leaving civilians hungry. That sounds like Sherman’s troops marching through Georgia.
A: It was very much like that.
Q: When they couldn’t feed their families, Southern women started food riots. There was a big one in Richmond. Were there any in Georgia?
A: Every major city in Georgia had food riots. We’ve documented more than 20. In Atlanta, a woman walked into a store on Whitehall Street and drew a revolver and told the rest of the women to take what they wanted. They moved from store to store.
Q: The deprivations at home led to a very high desertion rate among Confederates. How bad was it?
A: By 1864, two-thirds of the Army was absent with or without leave. It got worse after that.
Q: There was a sort of Underground Railroad for deserters?
A: Yes. It surprised me that many Confederate deserters could count on the support of slaves to hide them and move them from one location to another.
Q: How important were black Southerners in the outcome of the war?
A: They were very important to undermining the Confederate war effort. When slaves heard that Abraham Lincoln had been elected, many of them thought they were free and started leaving plantations. So many eventually escaped to Union lines that they forced the issue. As other historians have said, Lincoln didn’t free the slaves; the slaves freed themselves.
Q: If there was so much division in the South and it was such an important part of the Confederacy’s downfall, why isn’t this a larger part of our national memory?
A: The biggest reason is regional pride. It gratified white Southerners to think the South was united during the Civil War. It gratified Northerners to believe they defeated a united South.
Q: Why do you think so much Southern identity has been wrapped up in the Confederacy? We’re talking about four of the 400 years since Jamestown was settled. It seems like the tail wagged the dog — and now you tell us the tail is pretty raggedy.
A: I think popular memory got wrapped up in race. Most white Southerners opposed secession, but they were also predominantly racists. After the war, they wanted to keep it a white man’s country and maintain their status over African-Americans. It became easy for Southerners to misremember what happened during the war. A lot of people whose families had opposed the Confederacy became staunch neo-Confederates after a generation or two, mainly for racist reasons.
Q: Has this knowledge affected your feelings about Southern heritage? Did you have an opinion about the former Georgia flag?
A: I had a graduate student who did his thesis on that. He looked into the origins of the 1956 state flag and concluded that the Confederate battle emblem was put there not to honor our ancestors but as a statement against school integration.
Q: So you saw no reason to defend that flag?
A: No, not in the least.
Q: Have the Sons of Confederate Veterans been to see you?
A: Yes. They didn’t really deny anything I had to say, but they weren’t real happy to hear it. I told them, “Well, I’m not making this up.”
Divisions in the North were produced by the Democrat Party, Copperheads. They led the Draft Riots in New York which slaughtered any Black the rioters got their hands on even trying to murder the children in an orphanage.
As for as I no the numbers of Northerners enlisting in the CSA army were lowerer than the reverse.
Grant’s “butchery” does not approach that of Lee’s at Gettysburg and his continuation when it was clear the war was lost. Nor does it approach that imposed by the defenders of a dead economic structure.
Whining is not a very convincing argument.
Shelby Foote says pretty much the same thing in his notes at the end of Vol. 1 of his trilogy.
The Mexican War was just as divisive.
In terms of geographic control the Confederacy was about 20% of its original size when Lee surrendered.
In many areas of the South, the Confederacy was a two year phenomenon, not a four year one.
Back to the concept of the book. There were many disagreements within the CSA government, the state representatives, and local politicians. They fought over troop deployments, funding, resrouces, etc. CSA management was not exactly united. Anyway, I don't see anything new with this.
W.C. Davis and the Bruce Catton have done a thorough job documenting the dynamics and politics during the formation of the CSA.
Where did you get the idea that “everyone” opposed it? Nothing in this thesis claims that.
11 days new
What do you think gents? I’ve got a list of 20+ books so far so why not make it 21+ or so?
Sherman's taking of Atlanta in 1864 probably clinched Lincoln's victory in his bid for re-election. A clear victory in Iraq during the next two months will do likewise for McCain.
Not familiar with Williams' work, but I can recommend other sources that well researched. But I would stick with Bruce Catton's Coming Fury where he covers the Democrat and GOP conventions. You will read about the splinters in the Democratic party and Lincoln's agents brokering for the nomination.
William C. Davis' Look Away is a good source with a negative view of the CSA government. He covers the problems, the politics, the issues, with documented resources. Southern-folk may not like this one and it's a bit wordy.
Also, someone mentioned Foote's work which I believe you are working through now.
It’s on my ‘to do’ list. First I’ve got to finish Noah Andre Trudeau’s new book on Sherman’s campaign in Georgia.
Joesph Glatthaar touches on a lot of these same points - supplies, desertion, treatment of local population - in his book “Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse”.
Grant was a wise enough strategist to know that numbers could only be a positive factor if he harried the enemy enough to prevent him from adopting static defenses that would neutralize his numerical advantages.
So his strategy was not just mindless attrition or butchery - it was a strategy of continuous tactical engagement for the strategic purpose of eliminating the adversary's defensive advantage.
Had Lee been a commander of average rather than exceptional skill, the casualties lists would have been much more even.
Back to the concept of the book. There were many disagreements within the CSA government, the state representatives, and local politicians. They fought over troop deployments, funding, resrouces, etc. CSA management was not exactly united. Anyway, I don't see anything new with this.
That isn't the book's thesis, although you are absolutely right to say that neither the divisions within the Confederate government nor the book's actual thesis are new.
The book's thesis is not just that there was dissension among Confederates, but that there were plenty of Southerners who did not consider themselves Confederates - these were not Southerners who were merely dissatisfied with the policies or actions of the Confederate government, but Southerners who were opposed to the existence of the Confederate government in the first place.
Plenty of Southerners refused to sign up to fight their country - i.e. the United States. There were plenty of white non-slaveholding farmers in Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama who had a lot more in common with white non-slaveholding farmers in Wisconsin, Indiana and Pennsylvania than they had in common with the wealthy planters in Charleston who started the whole secession business.
In many areas, the "Home Guards" were little more than common criminals.
In many areas, the “Home Guards” were little more than common criminals”
The same held true for the North, as well...
In many places, ESPECIALLY Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois, just being CALLED a Southern Sympathiser was cause for a late-night hanging...
In Kansas and Missouri that went both ways. Being pegged as a Unionist to the wrong people was usually fatal.
As for Illinois, I don't know about that. Down state was a hot-bed of Copperhead loyalties, especially in Little Egypt.
I don't think that the author is implying that everyone down South was for the rebellion. On the other hand, he does appear to destroy the oft-repeated Southron myth that everyone was for it, too. The confederacy was actually a ramshackle structure of divided loyalties from day one.
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