Posted on 01/07/2004 2:58:42 PM PST by quidnunc
2003 was a big year for Civil War movies. Gods and Generals, based on Jeff Shaara's novel of the same name hit theaters in the spring. Gods and Generals was a paean to the Old Confederacy, reflecting the "Lost Cause" interpretation of the war. This school of Civil War historiography received its name from an 1867 book by Edward A. Pollard, who wrote that defeat on the battlefield left the south with nothing but "the war of ideas."
I know from the Lost Cause school of the Civil War. I grew up in a Lost Cause household. I took it for gospel truth that the Civil War was a noble enterprise undertaken in defense of southern rights, not slavery, that accordingly the Confederates were the legitimate heirs of the American Revolutionaries and the spirit of '76, and that resistance to the Lincoln government was no different than the Revolutionary generation's resistance to the depredations of George III. The Lost Cause school was neatly summarized in an 1893 speech by a former Confederate officer, Col. Richard Henry Lee: "As a Confederate soldier and as a Virginian, I deny the charge [that the Confederates were rebels] and denounce it as a calumny. We were not rebels, we did not fight to perpetuate human slavery, but for our rights and privileges under a government established over us by our fathers and in defense of our homes."
Cold Mountain, based on Charles Frazier's historical novel, was released on Christmas Day. It too is about the Civil War but Cold Mountain is a far cry from Gods and Generals. This is the "other war," one in which war has lost its nobility and those on the Confederate home front are in as much danger from other southerners as they are from Yankee marauders. Indeed, Cold Mountain can be viewed as the anti-Gods and Generals.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
If Virginia had the right to go from the Union - does that mean West Virginians had the right to leave Virginia?
That is incorrect. Maryland had several units fighting on both sides.
The disputed border states, Kentucky and Missouri, also sent soldiers to the south and north alike.
and every Southern state but one had pro union units fighting for the North.
That is partially true but also highly misleading. The number of soldiers in those units were tiny. The entire state of Georgia, for example, provided only 195 troops to the north and Mississippi provided about 500. The rest of the confederate states save two provided only a few thousand a piece. The two exceptions were Tennessee whose eastern counties sent 30K and Virginia, where the region now known at West Virginia sent another 30K.
Problem with criticising TEP is at times the people who did like it for some unaccountable reason always accuse people who didn't like it of being uneducated low-lifes...
Your first point is exactly right - the two main people do the wrong thing at every turn and I hated them as well. Your second point is the problem with most movies loved by the pervert movie critic/artist crowd. Its the same reason I will never see "American Beauty".
That's an interesting theory and it is certainly an issue worth investigating. Jeffrey Hummel did not shy away from documenting southern abuses of liberty during the war in a book that heavily criticized Lincoln's cause and similar abuses. From my own reading and research I have to conclude that, while abuses did indeed occur in the south, they were comparatively lesser than those in the north on several counts.
You mention Bensel's conclusions on taxation, which strikes me as odd after having studied the tax laws of both countries. Statutorily, northern tariff rates - the primary source of revenue for countries in the 19th century - ranged some three to four times the southern rate on the exact same product.
The habeas corpus issue is interesting and also widely misunderstood in both the north and the south. Both at times suspended the writ but they also did so through very different procedures. The north suspended it by a unilateral, not to mention unconstitutional, decree from the president. Attempts to reign in its use through the federal court system all resulted in rulings against Lincoln's authority to do this but he simply ignored them and continued carrying out the suspension. The south, by contrast, passed a suspension of habeas corpus through the Congress for limited areas and periods during the war. Though any suspension of the writ is no friend of freedom, the confederate suspension was a lesser offense than the union suspension for one key reason: the confederates did it constitutionally by act of the legislature.
In my experience, a common misunderstanding of the southern political system has led many to incorrectly overstate the degree of southern abuses. I have not read Bensel's book though I do suspect he may suffer from the same simply because this error is so widespread. It is widespread because the concept it mistakes is largely foreign to modern day concepts of American government. So what is this misunderstanding? The neglect to accurately represent and account for the presence of state sovereignty-oriented federalism within the confederacy's political factions. A strong and sizable portion of the confederate congress subscribed to this ideology throughout the war, leading them to constant political fights with the contrasting ideology, which closer resembles what we think of as the federal system today.
On the one hand they had a faction, represented in action by Davis and his allies, which saw the CSA federal system through a national orientation with national sovereignty reigning supreme. It battled the states-righters, who literally saw the CSA as a confederation of independent and equal sovereign nations. These were the types who subscribed to theories of nullification and the sort. They were represented in the governors of several states, such as Pendleton Murrah of Texas. They also had a significant and sometimes majority faction led by Louis Wigfall, also of Texas, in the CSA senate. This second faction weighed in heavily on several of the areas where national abuses of liberty are commonly cited: habeas corpus, the draft, the role of a court system. The states right senators and several state governments believed that the federal legislature only had the power to suspend habeas corpus in the federal courts. Thus they supported the bill to suspend it nationally yet continued to issue writs in the state court systems, in some cases undermining the national policy. They also supported the national draft but in doing so argued that members of state military units (militias and home guards) were already in the service of their respective states and thus exempt.
Some modern scholars have also railed against the confederacy for not establishing a supreme court system as if this deprived its citizens of judicial recourse for their rights. They do so because they view the judiciary through the lenses of a modern post-Earl Warren ACLU driven U.S. Supreme Court. Put differently, they see the entire purpose of courts as being a place for people to go and sue for something that they feel they are entitled to own or use but have been unjustly denied. Sadly, this modern rendering could not be further from the understanding of courts as seen through they eyes of confederate states-righters.
In reality, it was the pro-national faction of the CSA - Davis, Benjamin, the administration - who fought for and advocated the establishment of a strong supreme court. They did so not because the court would be an agent of recourse against the federal government. They desired the court so that it could overrule state governments that obstructed national policy. The states-righters did NOT want the court and successfully blocked the bill establishing it. This not because they wanted to deny recourse against the government. Rather they desired to prevent the federal government from centralizing power at the expense of the state governments. They feared a CS supreme court doing what John Marshall had done in McCulloch v. Maryland so they prevented it from being established and routed all the cases through the court systems of their originating states.
Absent an understanding of the state-oriented federalism theories in the CSA one would not know this to be the case of the supreme court. Viewed through modern Earl Warren glasses the absence of a court seems like an eggregious violation of liberty and recourse. But viewed through the eyes and judicial philosophies of the mid 19th century and the exact opposite is true. Sadly, modern academia tends to prefer the Warren glasses at the greater expense of historical accuracy.
To note one example of this that comes to mind - and beyond this I won't bore you anymore in this increasingly lengthy post - there have been two biographies written of Wigfall, who was arguably the most influential member of the confederate senate. One is written by his daughter and contains her personal recollections through the war. The other is a standard modern biography by a scholar. His modern biographer, though a thorough researcher, failed miserably to even breach into the basic mindset of his subject. Instead he sees virtually everything from a modern post-1960's understanding of government. He rails on end about Wigfall's successful efforts to block the CSA supreme court and his support of the national habeas corpus suspension while failing to substantially account for what I have just written of. The resulting picture is of a power-wielding agent of harsh government policy when the real Wigfall was a radical states-rights advocate who constantly worked to oppose the centralizing forces of the administration that, to him, came at state expense.
Then you do not accurately make your case. The border states were a dividing line for the war and, as such, provided the axis around which loyalties became increasingly blurred. Practically every substantial unionist region within the CSA was on or near this dividing line. The largest, found in the WV panhandle around Wheeling, is wedged between the borders of two indisputably northern states - PA and OH. The other major unionist region, eastern tennessee, runs right up against a border state that had neighbors fighting neighbors, Kentucky. Move away from this region though and the unionist pockets within the CSA become small, isolated, and inconsequential to the major events of the war. Deep south states like Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina as well as secession hotbeds like Texas provided very few if any soldiers to the union ranks.
The North never produced a Kingdom of Jones
No, but it did produce Fernando Wood who, as mayor of New York City attempted to secede Manhattan island away from the union. IIRC, rioters in that same city numbering several times the entire population of rural Jones County similarly displayed their lack of enthusiasm for the Lincoln cause circa 1863 to the point that armies to supress them.
No government is ever in tune with the will of all of its people. The secessionist government of Virginia, however, was in tune with what may be considered a landslide majority of its people in any given election. The only sizable opposition was that faction in west virginia centered around Wheeling.
If Virginia had the right to go from the Union - does that mean West Virginians had the right to leave Virginia?
Arguably it does to the extent that they truly desire to leave. The problem with the state of West Virginia as it formed during the civil war is the absence of this desire in about half of its territory if not more. If the Ohio River and panhandle counties around Wheeling had simply met and asserted their desire to leave Virginia I believe it is likely that the state government would have lodged only nominal protests against it and would not have made any serious effort to stop it. They did not get along politically with the panhandle as things stood for decades, plus it was geographically isolated from the rest of the state.
A problem arose because the Wheeling counties decided that when they left they were going to take a couple dozen other counties to their south and east with them. Several of those counties had voted overwhelmingly for secession just like the rest of Virginia and most had absolutely zero representation at the Wheeling conventions that claimed them as WV territory.
ROTFL! Lack of imagination?
One area that Bensel points out that is nearly totally overlooked is that the North fought the war almost entirely with private resources, paid for by the government (i.e., Sharps, Shays, Gatling, Ericsson, Winchester, Colt, etc. were all private companies, as were all the uniform makers, boot companies, and so on.) The Confederacy had only ONE private munitions maker; the government owned the salt companies and owned many of the war-related industries, often building them from scratch. There was no real Southern private shipping business to draw upon to build boats.
As B. puts it, the North "skimmed off the top" of the private sector while the South engaged in quasi-socialist war production. That is just another reason the North made more, and more superior, weapons.
I know Hummell---we've had some real disagreements. You might look at my review of his book in "Continuity" (I can't recall the edition, but, obviously, after his book.) I challenged his notions that the Dems, for example, were the party of "states' rights" and "small government," especially during the Van Buren years that he waxes romantic about. I did so with rather specific statistics. He was offered a chance to respond, asked for all my research, then declined to respond.
There is no question if I was a free white person in 1862, leaving aside which side I thought MIGHT win the war, which section I would choose to be in for maximum personal liberties, and it wouldn't be the Confederacy.
Not to mention that slavery was quite specifically stated as a cause for secession by Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina.
In retrospect, probably the best course would have been to declare all Confederates who served in the army or government as "traitors," then confiscated the land, THEN given them pardons on an individual basis.
Nope. At the time the Confederate Constitution (which was, as Bensel notes, considerably more statist that the US Constitution) was written, it seemed entirely possible that the Union would just let the seceding states go.
The greater political autocracy of the Confederacy reflected the greater social autocracy of the semi-feudal plantation system.
40 acres and a mule wasn't "cheap" liberal claptrap---it was a reasonable (indeed wise) response to the problem of two centuries' worth of oppression and at the same time to dumping onto society 3 million people with few skills, no education, and no opportunity. Course, I guess you prefer generations of welfare and race wars.
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