2,982 words

Part 1 of 3

The South could “win” the war by not losing; the North could win only by winning. — James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom

Like my father before me
I will work the land.
And like my brother above me,
I took a rebel stand.
He was just 18, young and brave,
But a Yankee laid him in his grave.

— The Band, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”

On my only real trip to the United States (Alaska doesn’t count), I visited the Carolinas and Virginia, including a sightseeing excursion to the American Civil War battlefield at Antietam. I had never seen a battlefield before, and the reality of it came all at once, like cold water in the face. One day in the not-too-distant past, these pretty fields and woodland had been sodden with blood and guts — the real stuff, not the metaphorical version. There was an excellent talk by one of the trustees of the organization which oversees what is now a tourist attraction, but was once host to a decisive battle in one of history’s most tragic civil wars, and the first of its engagements to have been planned in advance by both sides.

Antietam was so called when I visited, although many of the battles were known by different names depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line you were on. The Battle of Antietam was the Battle of Sharpsburg in the South. Perhaps the victors get to name the battles. After our visit, my girlfriend and I went to a secondhand bookstore in Harper’s Ferry, and I asked the proprietor if he could recommend a good book on the American Civil War. After some pleasing rummaging in a back room, the man sold me James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, a book I have treasured ever since and ten bucks well spent. It seems I had visited one of the key battlefields of the war, and McPherson bluntly lays out the appalling aftermath of Antietam:

Night fell on a scene of horror beyond imagining. Nearly 6,000 men lay dead or dying, and another 17,000 wounded groaned in agony or endured in silence. The casualties at Antietam numbered four times the total suffered by American soldiers at the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944. More than twice as many Americans lost their lives in one day at Sharpsburg as fell in combat in the war of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American war combined.

The book is praised by its editor as the most concise one-volume account of the Civil War years available, but it still comes in at around 850 pages. So, this will be a two-part review, the first concerning the war itself, the second concentrating exclusively on the role of slavery in the conflict.

The antebellum years typified America’s founding vision of itself, with territorial expansion producing economic growth which in turn promoted sustainable demographic increase, with the resultant infrastructure beginning the cycle again. Increasing industrialization meant that whereas in the first decade of the nineteenth century most Americans produced goods for their daily needs at home, as the century progressed women would increasingly buy candles and soap, then shoes and clothes, from a store. Also, there was the demographic result of Horace Greeley’s famous exhortation to “Go West, young man,” as one Illinois-bound pioneer lamented that “Old America seems to be breaking up, and moving westward.” It was a time of sheer American exceptionalism, but there was a worm in the apple.

America in the 1850s was a proverbial tinderbox, with the central tension between the North and the South over slavery laws and their implications a constant, and war threatened or warned against by politicians on a regular basis. Kansas was the first flashpoint. The Second Amendment is, as it were, under fire again today, but in the middle of the nineteenth century, freedom to bear arms meant that a shooting war was only an incident away:

Partisans of both side in the territory were walking arsenals. The murder of a free-soil settler by a proslavery man in November 1855 set off a series of incidents that seemed likely to start the war.

That war was actually six years away, but the tension between the two factions made it inevitable, and it remains America’s most tragic self-fulfilling prophecy. Another element in the animosity of the escalation has a familiar ring today. After polling in Kansas:

[T]he initial returns seemed to indicate an astonishing proslavery victory. Closer investigation uncovered the curious phenomenon of two remote districts with 130 legal voters having reported 2,900 ballots. In one case some 1,600 names had been copied onto the voting rolls from an old Cincinatti city directory.

Lincoln famously won, and the 1860 Presidential Election was both “unique in American history” and saturated in cutlass-rattling over the Union. The keystone of the radical divide, slavery, has several aspects and, as noted, will be assessed in the second part. But for Lincoln, preserving the Union meant a qualified end to slavery — and the South would not allow that to stand. A Georgia newspaper foreshadowed the “Never Trumpers” in its editorial:

Let the consequences be what they may — whether the Potomac is crimsoned in human gore, and Pennsylvania Avenue is paved ten fathoms deep in mangled bodies… the South will never submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln himself would deflate this bombast, and he was — as always — clinically clear about his political aims:

The central idea . . . is the necessity of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose.

Lincoln’s own rhetoric reminds us of the paucity of political debate today in terms of pure use of language, as a well-known speech of Lincoln’s exemplifies:

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living hearth and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Joe Biden’s teams of speechwriters could not even attempt such a poetic flight, and British politicians speechify like faulty artificial intelligence.

Events themselves began to overtake rhetoric. The Dred Scott case began in 1850 and continued until the war, becoming “the most notorious cause célèbre in American constitutional history.” Scott was a slave who married another slave, with whom he had a child born on free soil, and his prolonged lawsuit exacerbated the inevitable tensions between slave owners and free-soilers, as did the Runaway Slave Act, which incentivized escaped slaves to make it to a free state.

Then there was the short-lived campaign at Harper’s Ferry led by one of the war years’ stranger characters, John Brown, but that will be for the next part. In the real world (which Brown seems not to inhabited), the standoff at Charleston’s Fort Sumter in 1860 provides a twist which exemplifies the war. Sumter did not start hostilities simply because a certain Major Robert Anderson did not return fire during a skirmish. Anderson led the Northern garrison at Fort Sumter, although he himself was a Kentuckian and former slave owner “who sympathized with the South but remained loyal to the flag he had served for thirty-five years.” Eventually, it was to be the Battle of Shiloh which “launched the country onto the floodtide of total war.”

The conflict was not precisely North versus South. The problem of the Upper South — which was, as McPherson puts it, “facing both ways” — meant that the division had a corridor of uncertainty. As with many civil wars — plus the Berlin Wall — America’s internal conflict divided families. One example from many was “North Carolinian John Gibbon, who became one of the best division commanders in the Army of the Potomac while three of his brothers fought for the South.”

Military historians will find much to savor here, and the accounts of battles, of courageous advances and strange failures in the field, and of course the sheer savagery of warfare are both meticulous and rendered raw. Generals “led from the front, not the rear,” and were 50% more likely to be killed than privates, being an obvious target for a new aspect of war in sharp-shooters. Many of the men, and some of their leaders in the field, were constantly drunk. Alcoholism, writes McPherson, was seen as a moral weakness then rather than today’s view of it as a treatable illness.

But along with the decisive events in the field, there is also an economic and social back-story to the conflict I found fascinating and might be called “meta-warfare.”

Logistics were on the side of the South:

Confederate forces operated close to the source of many of their supplies. Invading armies, by contrast, had to maintain long supply lines of wagon trains, railroads, and port facilities.

The Southern countryside itself also became a weapon of war, with bridge-burning, tree-felling to block roads, and the tearing up of rail tracks all part of standard military practice. And for those familiar with its bounty, the South was a living pantry. The natural ability of troops to forage gave the South an advantage for the logistical reasons noted.

The economics of essentials also played a part, with salt at $2 a bag before the war and up to $60 by 1862. The usual suspects were much in evidence, as:

[S]outherners focused on Jews as the worst “extortioners.” Jewish traders had “swarmed here as the locusts of Egypt,” declared a congressman. “They ate up the substance of the country, they exhausted its supplies, they monopolized its trade.” Jews were said to be more numerous in Charleston than in Jerusalem.

The Civil War was also fought on ocean and inland waterways, making Britain’s naval expertise a factor in terms of foreign assistance. Britain was close to joining the war in favor of the South several times, and “commerce raiders built in Britain represented an important part of Confederate naval strategy.” Liverpool, in McPherson’s view, was made as a port city by American slavery. The closest to British engagement was the imprisonment of two Confederate diplomats en route to London and Paris, which caused an irate Prime Minister Palmerston to send troops to Canada and augment the Atlantic fleet. The railroads, while relatively new, played a large part in troop transit, with the “largest Confederate railroad movement of the war” taking place appropriately at Chattanooga.

The war had social effects for women. Inspired by Britain’s famous nurse Florence Nightingale (despite current attempts to replace her in the national consciousness with the black Mary Seacole), many women turned to nursing, decrying their apparent societal position as unfit to attend to men at war. Kate Cumming of Mobile wrote of a field hospital in 1862 that:

[t]he foul air from this mass of human beings at first made me giddy and sick. We have to walk, and when we give the men anything kneel, in blood and water; but we think nothing of it.

Although twice the number of Civil War fatalities died from disease than from bullet or bayonet, McPherson compares this with the ratios for the Napoleonic Wars (eight to one) and America’s own Mexican War (seven to one).

Women also played a less honorable part in the war, as with the bread riots of 1863, in which

[g]roups of women, many of them wives of soldiers and some armed with knives or revolvers, marched in a body to shops owned by “speculators” and asked the price of bacon or flour. When informed, they denounced such “extortion,” took what they wanted, and marched away.

These ladies would be right at home in the shopping malls of today’s America.

Wars also produce new language. Northern textile manufacturers were able to convert recycled wool into a material called “shoddy,” undoubtedly reflecting its appearance. If you have ever worn sideburns, you are obliged to General Burnside, who wore a vast set of mutton-chop whiskers, and those rogue deserters who stole and filched became known as “bummers.”

Whereas television coverage of Vietnam made it the first “real-time” war, and Gulf War I was the first “Star Wars” conflict, with high-resolution missile strikes resembling video games appearing on the nightly news, the American Civil War was one of the first photographed, and some haunting shots are reproduced in McPherson’s book. Old war photographs have a special poignancy.

Surrender was both inevitable and sudden. Lee’s last resort was too desperate even for him, as it was proposed that his army should disperse into the woods and fight on as guerillas. Lee reportedly balked at the idea of marauding gangs destroying rural Virginia as they had done to Shenandoah, and sent a note to Grant offering to accept terms. The meeting of the two men, Lee in full dress uniform, Grant fresh from the field and spattered with mud and blood, showed a social aspect of the war, which has been called a rich man’s/poor man’s war, not least in Britain with its ingrained class system. Even Karl Marx, sponging from Britain as he then was, weighed in on the Democrat side. At the scene of formal surrender, social standing was reversed as “the son of an Ohio Tanner dictated surrender terms to the scion of a First Family of Virginia.”

The American Civil War was both world-historic and a lesson for America on the visceral horror of warfare. One of the casual, media-friendly phrases tossed around today is that something or other is “an existential threat.” The account of a Northern Bluecoat at Antietam could find its way into any collection of existentialist writings:

The truth is, when bullets are whacking against tree-trunks and solid shot are cracking skulls like eggshells, the consuming passion in the breast of the average man is to get out of the way. Between the physical fear of going forward and the moral fear of turning back, there is a predicament of exceptional awkwardness.

The South lost not only in blood but in treasure, being left an “economic desert” after surrender and the end of the war:

The war not only killed one-quarter of the Confederacy’s white men of military age. It also killed two-fifths of southern livestock, wrecked half of the farm machinery, ruined thousands of miles of railroad, left scores of thousands of farms and plantations in weeds and disrepair, and destroyed the principal labor system on which southern productivity had been based.

Even the battles won by the eventual losers of a war become Pyrrhic.

The US Constitution was forever changed by the war, and not to the benefit of the people:

Eleven of the first twelve amendments to the Constitution had limited the powers of the national government; six of the next seven, beginning with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 [effectively ending slavery], vastly expanded those powers at the expense of the states.

It may still be too early to assess the effects of the ominously numbered Thirteenth Amendment, but the role of blacks in the American Civil War was the catalyst for larger concerns over property rights. The threat of, and Northern warnings against, secession as a result of slavery and opposition to it had been the fuse slavery lit.

As a segue into the next part, it might be wise to consult the men who actually did the fighting on the subject of slave emancipation:

While northern soldiers had no love for slavery, most of them had no love for slaves either. They fought for Union and against treason; only a minority in 1862 felt any interest in fighting for black freedom.

McPherson quotes an Illinois soldier “not in favor of freeing the negroes and leaving them to run free among us”. The troopers were in favor of colonization for blacks, as was Lincoln himself. To the men who fought on the blood-soaked turf of Antietam/Sharpsburg and elsewhere, the high ideals of office were a luxury, and they were deaf to any humane argument on the basis of an equality in which few of them believed. It was as though, as Bluecoats did in the field, they had stuffed their ears with plantation cotton to lessen the roar of the big guns. However much slavery is currently being placed at the center of the American Civil War, there was at the time just as much surrounding politicking as you would expect that had nothing to do with skin color, and a close watch was kept on the economic side of the war as well as ideological concerns.

British schoolchildren learned no American history when I was at school, and what little they learn now will be both spurious and confined to the subject of slavery and the inherent evil of the white man. Most of the British who have heard of Abraham Lincoln will have done so because Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for playing him, and if we know the names of Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant it will be via other movies. So I have nothing to set Battle Cry of Freedom against, I can only recommend it. American readers will be familiar with the subject in a way the British are not. There has been some chatter over the last few years about a second American Civil War, and some might say it has already begun. If so, and it devolves into a race war, it might be that slavery is still a causal factor.

The American Civil War was fought over slaves and slavery, but at a secondary level. It was ultimately about property and property rights because slaves were considered to be legally held property in the antebellum, Democrat South. When we come to look at the role of slavery in the war that divided the world’s greatest nation, we will also see how it became a circumstance no white man in the West will ever be allowed to forget.