Posted on 05/23/2002 8:52:25 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
The New York Review of Books
June 13, 2002
Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America
by William C. Davis
The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War
by William W. Freehling
Lee and His Army in Confederate History
by Gary W. Gallagher
The War Hits Home: The Civil War in Southeastern Virginia
by Brian Steel Wills
The field of Civil War history has produced more interpretative disputes than most historical events. Next to debates about the causes of the war, arguments about why the North won, or why the Confederacy lost (the difference in phraseology is significant), have generated some of the most heated but also most enlightening recent scholarship. The titles of four books reveal just some of the central themes of this argument: Why the North Won the Civil War (1960); How the North Won (1983); Why the South Lost the Civil War (1986); Why the Confederacy Lost (1992).
Answers to these why and how questions fall into two general categories: external and internal. Exter-nal interpretations usually phrase the question as Why did the North win? They focus on a comparison of Northern and Southern population, resources, economic capacity, leadership, or strategy, and conclude that Northern superiority in one or more of these explains Union victory. Internal explanations tend to ask, Why did the South lose? They focus mainly or entirely on the Confederacy and argue that internal divisions, dissensions, or inadequacies account for Confederate defeat.
The most durable interpretation is an external one. It was offered by General Robert E. Lee himself in a farewell address to his army after its surrender at Appomattox: "The Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources."[1] This explanation enabled Southern whites to preserve their pride, to reconcile defeat with their sense of honor, even to maintain faith in the nobility of their cause while admitting that it had been lost. The Confederacy, in other words, was compelled to surrender not because its soldiers fought badly, or lacked courage, or suffered from poor leadership, or because its cause was wrong, but simply because the enemy had more men and guns. The South did not lose; Confederates wore themselves out whipping the Yankees and collapsed from glorious exhaustion. This interpretation became the mainstay of what has been called the Myth of the Lost Cause, which has sustained Southern pride in their Confederate forebears to this day. As one Virginian expressed it:
They never whipped us, Sir, unless they were four to one. If we had had anything like a fair chance, or less disparity of numbers, we should have won our cause and established our independence.[2]
In one form or another, this explanation has won support from scholars of Northern as well as Southern birth. In 1960 the historian Richard Current provided a succinct version of it. After reviewing the statistics of the North's "overwhelming numbers and resources" two and a half times the South's population, three times its railroad capacity, nine times its industrial production, and so on Current concluded that "surely, in view of the disparity of resources, it would have taken a miracle...to enable the South to win. As usual, God was on the side of the heaviest battalions."[3]
In 1990 Shelby Foote expressed this thesis in his inimitable fashion. Noting that many aspects of life in the North went on much as usual during the Civil War, Foote told Ken Burns on camera in the PBS documentary The Civil War that "the North fought that war with one hand behind its back." If necessary "the North simply would have brought that other arm out from behind its back. I don't think the South ever had a chance to win that war."[4]
At first glance, Current's and Foote's statements seem plausible. But upon reflection, a good many historians have questioned their explicit assertions that overwhelming numbers and resources made Northern victory inevitable. If that is true, the Confederate leaders who took their people to war in 1861 were guilty of criminal folly or colossal arrogance. They had read the census returns. They knew as much about the North's superiority in men, resources, and economic capacity as any modern historian. Yet they went to war confident of victory. Southern leaders were students of history. They could cite many examples of small nations that won or defended their independence against much more powerful enemies: Switzerland against the Hapsburg Empire; the Netherlands against Spain; Greece against the Ottomans. Their own ancestors had won independence from mighty Britain in 1783. The relative resources of the Confederacy vis-à-vis the Union in 1861 were greater than those of these other successful rebels.
The Confederacy waged a strategically defensive war to protect from conquest territory it already controlled and to preserve its armies from annihilation. To "win" that kind of war, the Confederacy did not need to invade and conquer the North or destroy its army and infrastructure; it needed only to hold out long enough to compel the North to the conclusion that the price of conquering the South and annihilating its armies was too great, as Britain had concluded with respect to the United States in 1781 or, for that matter, as the United States concluded with respect to Vietnam in 1972. Until 1865, cold-eyed military experts in Europe were almost unanimous in their conviction that Union armies could never conquer and subdue the 750,000 square miles of the Confederacy, as large as all of Western Europe. "No war of independence ever terminated unsuccessfully except where the disparity of force was far greater than it is in this case," pronounced the military analyst of the London Times in 1862. "Just as England during the revolution had to give up conquering the colonies so the North will have to give up conquering the South."[5]
Even after losing the war, many ex-Confederates stuck to this belief. General Joseph E. Johnston, one of the highest-ranking Confederate officers, insisted in 1874 that the Southern people had not been "guilty of the high crime of undertaking a war without the means of waging it successfully."[6] A decade later General Pierre G.T. Beauregard, who ranked just below Johnston, made the same point: "No people ever warred for independence with more relative advantages than the Confederates."[7]
If so, why did they lose the war? In thinly veiled terms, Johnston and Beauregard blamed the inept leadership of Jefferson Davis. That harried gentleman responded in kind; as far as he was concerned, the erratic and inadequate generalship of Beauregard and especially Johnston was responsible for Confederate defeat. In the eyes of many contemporaries and historians there was plenty of blame to go around. William C. Davis's Look Away! is the most recent "internal" study of the Confederacy that, by implication at least, attributes Confederate defeat to poor leadership at several levels, both military and civilian, as well as factionalism, dissension, and bickering between men with outsize egos and thin skins. In this version of Confederate history, only Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson remain unstained.
For any believer in the Myth of the Lost Cause, any admirer of heroic Confederate resistance to overwhelming odds, the story told by Davis (no relation to the Confederate president) makes depressing reading. It is a story of conflicts not on the battlefields of Manassas or Shiloh or Gettysburg or Chickamauga or the Wilderness they are here, but offstage, as it were but conflicts between state governors and the Confederate government in Richmond, between quarreling Cabinet officers, between Jefferson Davis and prominent generals or senators or newspaper editors and even his vice-president, Alexander Stephens. Davis chronicles different examples of internal breakdown under the stresses not only of enemy invasion but also of slave defections to the Yankees, of Unionist disloyalty in the upcountry, particularly in such states as Tennessee, of galloping inflation and the inability of an unbalanced agricultural society under siege to control it, of shortages and hunger and a growing bitterness and alienation among large elements of the population.
These problems seemed more than sufficient to ensure Confederate failure, but they were greatly exacerbated by the jealousies and rivalries of Confederate politicians, which remain Davis's principal focus. He does not explicitly address the question of why the Confederacy lost, but his implicit answer lies in the assertion that "the fundamental flaw in too many of the big men of the Confederacy... [was] 'big-man-me-ism.'"
There are, however, two problems with this interpretation. In two senses it is too "internal." First, by concentrating only on the Confederacy it tends to leave the reader with the impression that only the Confederacy suffered from these corrosive rivalries, jealousies, and dissensions. But a history of the North during the Civil War would reveal similar problems, mitigated only by Lincoln's skill in holding together a diverse coalition of Republicans and War Democrats, Yankees and border states, abolitionists and slaveholders which perhaps suggests that Lincoln was the principal reason for Union victory. In any event, Look Away! is also too "internal" because the author is too deeply dependent on his sources. It is the nature of newspaper editorials, private correspondence, congressional debates, partisan speeches, and the like to emphasize conflict, criticism, argument, complaint. It is the squeaky wheel that squeaks. The historian needs to step back and gain some perspective on these sources, to recognize that the well-greased wheel that turns smoothly also turns quietly, leaving less evidence of its existence available to the historian.
Look Away! falls within one tradition of internal explanations for Confederate defeat. More prevalent, especially in recent years, have been studies that emphasize divisions and conflicts of race, class, and even gender in the South. Two fifths of the Confederate population were slaves, and two thirds of the whites did not belong to slaveholding families. What stake did they have in an independent Confederate nation whose original raison d'être was the protection of slavery? Not much stake at all, according to many historians, especially for the slaves and, as the war took an increasing toll on non-slaveholding white families, very little stake for them either. Even among slaveholding families, the women who willingly subscribed to an ethic of sacrifice in the war's early years became disillusioned as the lengthening war robbed them of husbands, sons, lovers, and brothers. Many white women turned against the war and spread this disaffection among their menfolk in the army; in the end, according to Drew Gilpin Faust, "it may well have been because of its women that the South lost the Civil War."[8]
If all this is true if the slaves and some nonslaveholding whites opposed the Confederate war effort from the outset and others including women of slaveholding families eventually turned against it, one need look no further to explain Confederate defeat. In The South vs. the South, however, William W. Freehling does not go this far. He says almost nothing about women as a separate category, and he acknowledges that many nonslaveholding whites had a racial, cultural, and even economic stake in the preservation of slavery and remained loyal Confederates to the end. But he maintains that, properly defined, half of all Southerners opposed the Confederacy and that this fact provides a sufficient explanation for Confederate failure.
Freehling defines the South as all fifteen slave states and Southerners as all people slave as well as free who lived in those states. This distinction between "the South" and the eleven slave states that formed the Confederacy is important but too often disregarded by those who casually conflate the South and the Confederacy. Admittedly, some 90,000 white men from the four Union slave states (Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware) fought for the Confederacy, but this number was offset by a similar number of whites from Confederate states (chiefly Tennessee and the part of Virginia that became West Virginia) who fought for the Union.
But Freehling's central thesis that "white Confederates were only half the Southerners" raises problems. This arithmetic works only if virtually all black Southerners are counted against the Confederacy. At times Freehling seems to argue that they should be so counted. At other times he is more cautious, maintaining that "the vast majority" of Southern blacks "either opposed the rebel cause or cared not whether it lived or died." Freehling does not make clear how important he considers that qualifying "or cared not." In any event, let us assume that all three million slaves who remained in the Confederacy (as well as the one million in the border states and in conquered Confederate regions) sympathized with the Union cause that would bring them freedom. Nevertheless, their unwilling labor as slaves was crucial to the Confederate economy and war effort, just as their unwilling labor and that of their forebears had been crucial to building the antebellum Southern economy. These Confederate slaves worked less efficiently than before the war because so many masters and overseers were absent at the front. Unwilling or not, however, they must be counted on the Confederate side of the equation, which significantly alters Freehling's 50/50 split of pro- and anti-Confederates in the South to something like 75/25.
Freehling draws on previous scholarship to offer a succinct narrative of the political and military course of the war, organized around Lincoln's slow but inexorable steps toward emancipation, "hard war," and the eventual mobilization of 300,000 black laborers and soldiers to work and fight for the Union. This narrative is marred by several errors, including the repeated confusion of General Charles F. Smith with General William F. "Baldy" Smith, the conflation of combat casualties with combat mortality, the mislabeling of a photograph of Confederate trenches at Fredericksburg as Petersburg, and the acceptance at face value of Alexander Stephens's absurd claim, made five years after Lincoln's death, that the Union president had urged him in 1865 to persuade Southern states to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment "prospectively," thereby delaying the abolition of slavery five years. Nevertheless, Freehling has made a strong case for the vital contribution of the two million whites and one million blacks in the South who definitely did support the Union cause. Without them, "the North" could not have prevailed, as Lincoln readily acknowledged.
Freehling does not take a clear stand on the question of whether Union victory was inevitable. At times he seems to imply that it was, because the half of all Southerners whom he claims supported the Union (actively or passively) doomed the Confederacy. But at other times he suggests that this support was contingent on the outcome of military campaigns and political decisions. No such ambiguity characterizes the essays in Gary Gallagher's Lee and His Army in Confederate History. In this book and in his earlier The Confederate War, Gallagher has argued forcefully and convincingly that Confederate nationalism bound most Southern whites together in determined support for the Confederate cause, that the brilliant though costly victories of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia reinforced this determination, and that morale even in the face of defeat and the destruction of resources in 1864 1865 remained high until almost the end.
Gallagher does not slight the problems of slave defections to the Yankees, class tensions among whites, personal rivalries and jealousies among Confederate leaders, and other internal divisions that have occupied historians who see these problems as preordaining defeat. But he emphasizes the degree of white unity and strength of purpose despite these faultlines. Plenty of evidence exists to support this emphasis. A Union officer who was captured at the Battle of Atlanta on July 22, 1864, and spent the rest of the war in Southern prisons wrote in his diary on October 4 that from what he had seen in the South "the End of the War...is some time hence as the Idea of the Rebs giving up until they are completely subdued is all Moonshine they submit to privatations that would not be believed unless seen."[9]
"Until they are completely subdued." That point came in April 1865, when the large and well-equipped Union armies finally brought the starving, barefoot, and decimated ranks of Confederates to bay. Gallagher revives the overwhelming numbers and resources explanation for Confederate defeat, shorn of its false aura of inevitability. Numbers and resources do not prevail in war without the will and skill to use them. The Northern will wavered several times, most notably in response to Lee's victories in the summer of 1862 and winter spring of 1863 and the success of Lee's resistance to Grant's offensives in the spring and summer of 1864. Yet Union leaders and armies were learning the skills needed to win, and each time the Confederacy seemed on the edge of triumph, Northern victories blunted the Southern momentum: at Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Perryville, Kentucky, in the fall of 1862; at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863; and at Atlanta and in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley in September 1864. Better than any other historian of the Confederacy, Gallagher understands the importance of these contingent turning points that eventually made it possible for superior numbers and resources to prevail. He understands as well that the Confederate story cannot be written except in counterpoint with the Union story, and that because of the multiple contingencies in these stories, Northern victory was anything but inevitable.
Much of the best scholarship on the Civil War during the past decade has concentrated on the local or regional impact of the war. A fine example is Brian Steel Wills's The War Hits Home, a fascinating account of the home front and battle front in southeastern Virginia, especially the town of Suffolk and its hinterland just inland from Norfolk. No great battles took place here, but there was plenty of skirmishing and raids by combatants on both sides. Confederates controlled this region until May 1862, when they were compelled to pull back their defenses to Richmond. Union forces occupied Suffolk for the next year, staving off a halfhearted Confederate effort to recapture it in the spring of 1863. The Yankees subsequently fell back to a more defensible line nearer Norfolk, leaving the Suffolk region a sort of no man's land subject to raids and plundering by the cavalry of both armies.
Through it all most white inhabitants remained committed Confederates, while many of the slaves who were not removed by their owners to safer territory absconded to the Yankees, adding their weight to the Union side of the scales in the balance of power discussed by Freehling. White men from this region fought in several of Lee's regiments, suffering casualties that left many a household bereft of sons, husbands, fathers. Yet their Confederate loyalties scarcely wavered.
Northern occupation forces at first tried a policy of conciliation, hoping to win the Southern whites back to the Union. When this failed, they moved toward a harsher policy here as they did elsewhere, confiscating the property and liberating the slaves of people they now perceived as enemies to be crushed rather than deluded victims of secession conspirators to be converted.
Wills does not make a big point of it, but his findings stand "in sharp rebuttal" to the arguments of historians who portray a weak or divided white commitment to the Confederate cause as the reason for defeat. "These people sought to secure victory until there was no victory left to win." In the end the North did have greater numbers and resources, wielded with a skill and determination that by 1864 1865 matched the Confederacy's skills and determination; and these explain why the North won the Civil War.
[1] The Wartime Papers of R.E. Lee, edited by Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin (Little, Brown, 1961), p. 934.
[2] Quoted in Why the North Won the Civil War, edited by David Donald (Louisiana State University Press, 1960), p. ix.
[3] Richard N. Current, "God and the Strongest Battalions," in Why the North Won the Civil War, p. 22.
[4] "Men at War: An Interview with Shelby Foote," in Geoffrey C. Ward with Ric Burns and Ken Burns, The Civil War (Knopf, 1990), p. 272.
[5] London Times, August 29, 1862.
[6] Joseph E. Johnston, Narrative of Military Operations (Appleton, 1874), p. 421.
[7] Pierre G.T. Beauregard, "The First Battle of Bull Run," in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 4 volumes, edited by Robert U. Johnson and Clarence C. Buel (Century, 1887), Vol. 1, p. 222.
[8] Drew Gilpin Faust, "Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War," The Journal of American History, Vol. 76, No. 4 (March 1990), p. 1228.
[9] "The Civil War Diary of Colonel John Henry Smith," edited by David M. Smith, Iowa Journal of History, Vol. 47 (April 1949), p. 164.
Your head would hurt a lot worse if the secessionists had had their way.
Walt
Where does the Constitution EXPLICITLY forbid the president from suspending the Writ?
Foul! Irrelevant conclusion: the argument you assert for presidential prerogative is a misapplication of the argument about reservation of powers. The secessionists argued that the right of secession is among the rights reserved by the Ninth Amendment explicitly, and by the body of the Constitution implicitly because the Constitution doesn't delegate to the federal government any power to forbid secession.
The President has no power that is not delegated to him by the Constitution.
At best is right.....I'm not hear to refight that war but I (we) must take a stand against the do-gooders who at times lack truth or clarity. To deny one's heritage is a sign of weakness...IMHO. If the do-gooders left us alone...why should anyone care if we wish to have a Rebel flag or whistle Dixie or hang a portrait of a Confederate in our home....I do (Forrest of course). Perhaps most troubling is while they feast and sate their need to feel good about themselves on the bones of my fallen ancestors, they completely ignore their own hypocrisy by leaving out or omitting unpleasantries of their own past. Unlike them, I will be there when the do-gooders come for our shared American heritage which they most assuredly will. Something these dunderheads refuse to acknowledge or don't care either way. Lots and lots of what we in the senstive modern world call atrocities were carried out by the US of A and under said flag....reams of victims just waiting to be tapped.
Incorrect -- statement directly contrary to facts. If the secessionists had won, our government, wherever we lived, would be a lot more closely based on the Constitution, not on the woolly-booger theory of federal omnipotence foisted on us by Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln used the pretext of a Civil War illegally to overthrow and displace the federal model with a Hamiltonian one, melted and founded complete with millions of sets of chains, in the lower compartments of Hell.
Lincoln, the supposed humanitarian with such incredible oratory and critical-thinking skills had 4,5,6 months after his election in which to devise the most effective way of "saving the union", chose to rely on inflammatory and divisive tariff increases, constitutionally questionable, unilateral executive actions (after inauguration), culminating in antagonistic use of force of arms, rather than following the example of his supposed idol Henry Clay, using his incredible skills for compromise, peace, and union.
Rather revealing when you look at it that way. Thank you for the inspiration. It seems that Mr. Lincoln had his own vision of a "more perfect union" by "any means necessary", as did the Southern Hot-heads, that precluded a peaceful solution.
Lots of food for thought, many thanks.
Nope. Please. Where does the word "secession" appear in the document?
What is EXPLICITLY stated in the Constitution is that the laws of the federal government are supreme over all state laws. Nothing in a state law can withstand the supremacy clause.
It is just as reasonable to ask where the Constitution forbids the executive to suspend the Writ as it to ask where it forbids secession.
You can't have it both ways.
Walt
Not really. What the 'planters' wanted was expansion and that is the only area where Lincoln could not, and would not compromise. There was no chance in hell that emancipation could have passed under Lincoln or any other president without the agreement of the South. The 3/4 state majority required for an amendment with 15 slaves states voting against made it a mathematical impossibility. (It would still be impossible today) The idea that Lincoln could somehow make it happen was pure propaganda.
What you propose may have 'pacified' the non-slaveholding whites who had been propagandized to the point of fear and loathing for the "Black Republicans" but I doubt it. The slaveocrats had done too thorough a job of building hatred and terror to roll it back that easily.
I think so too. But it is the CSA apologists who make a fetish of it.
Walt
It doesn't have to, and it doesn't. That's the whole idea of the Ninth Amendment -- in case guys like you "kinda forgot" which powers were delegated to your favorite war machine or police state, and which not.
What is EXPLICITLY stated in the Constitution is that the laws of the federal government are supreme over all state laws. Nothing in a state law can withstand the supremacy clause.
Right as rain. Absolutely true. As long as you're still in the Union. Oh, and notice that you're talking about state laws and state governments. You aren't talking about the States themselves, who are the People of those States. Different league, kid -- different ball game.
Walt, the Supremacy Clause doesn't give the Prince supremacy over the Sovereign. That just isn't gonna happen, and it didn't. Except when Lincoln made illegal war on the States, and warred them down to be his slaves. The Great Emancipator, taking millions of free men captive, and making them slaves of the federal government, and the Northern Interests that owned it. What a thought!
It is just as reasonable to ask where the Constitution forbids the executive to suspend the Writ as it to ask where it forbids secession.
No, it isn't. Slothful induction. I already 'splained that to you, Lucy.
You can't have it both ways.
I'm not. The Supremacy Clause doesn't bind the People, neither the People of the United States nor the People of Virginia. You are talking about the People in a condition beyond categories, in their sublime position as Sovereign. You don't lay hands on them unless you are exactly what I said Lincoln was -- a soul-catcher, an enslaver.
But the arrangements of statal power among the organs of government are indeed the meat and drink of the Constitution. They are inferior to Sovereign power. You are confounding two different things.
[WP] I think so too. But it is the CSA apologists who make a fetish of it.
Not really.....their activity is a response to demonization and ethnic cleansing of the hallowed halls of memory by the NAACP.
The NAACP has undertaken a course of action, seconded powerfully by liberal and black corporate executives and board members, which is aimed at driving Southern heritage underground. The NAACP leadership's motive is a smoldering, implacable hatred that they've never had to own up to......look at Kweisi Mfume, who changed his name because his given name was too white, and exchanged it for some khufikentous made-up thing, that had as its particular virtue that it was not white. That is the significance, too, of the ubiquitous "X"; and you needn't look any further for signs of this malevolence than the movie screens on which Spike Lee keeps posting his. Do the Right Thing came down to burning out a white pizzeria owner, didn't it? That was the "right thing". For guys like Mfume and Lee, two of the most important and influential men in the black community over the last ten years, there is no such thing as a good white person, who hasn't been remade and purged of his "whiteness". Liberals speak openly of "whiteness" as objectively evil: well, who the f&#k asked them to propound on it? Gunnar Myrdal, smug in his monoculture homeland of Sweden, could write books about An American Dilemma all he wanted: it was just theory to him. Well, ask Reginald Denny -- if he's recovered his wits yet, and he may not have -- what he thinks the American Dilemma is.
These secessionists you complain about are just a bunch of people who know they're better than their press, and who know a fraud is being carried forward because God gave them a sense of smell. Beyond that, they are aware of, and do not accept, Northern custodianship of the causes and effects and labels of history, and Northern triumphalist theories of government. Neither do they accept the lesser status assigned to Southerners ever since the Civil War as unclean losers, social and cultural lepers marked out by imputations of pellagra, hookworm, and lynch-law, and less than full participants in the government of their own country, reduced on merit and tolerated only when humble.
No...nothing comes to mind. Brown was out of the mainstream at the time. He did what he did and he paid the price for it. In his own way he isn't much different than those people who go around murdering abortionists. One can be against abortion and still disavow their actions.
Why, did you actually think that I would support Brown's act?
As far as individuals who are non-residents charged and executed by the state (or nation for that matter)for treason , there are plenty of English examples from history....(the Papal assassins sent to kill QEI). Here in the US, hmmmm...I can't think of one offhand but I have not been able to find any prohibition of non-residents tried for treason
On the other hand, prior to the war Sickles also murdered Philip Barton Key, son of the author of the Star Spangled Banner. Key was having an affair with Sickles' wife. Sickles got himself off by pleading temporary insanity. Maybe it wasn't so temporary after all?
Damn Walt, the only fetishes I know of involve leather and latex.
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