The War for Southern Independence, 1861-1865 


Americans generally miss the point in considering the great war of 1861-1865. The simple fact is that it was an unprovoked war of invasion, conquest, and exploitation of some Americans by a minority party in control of the federal machine. The invasion does not fit any of the requirements of a “just war.” It destroyed, probably forever, the founding American principle of “consent of the governed,” Despite all the noise about saving a vaguely understood “Union” and freeing the slaves, it did not begin with the intention of emancipating slaves and it replaced “Union” with unappealable centralized authority. Ending or preserving African American slavery was not the primary motive of either side and Americans did not kill each other over them.

 
It is impossible to over-estimate the importance of this period in American and especially Southern history. Warfare was waged almost entirely on Southern soil. Let’s think of it in terms of the experience of the Southern people. In the Confederacy Southerners mobilized nearly their entire manpower to a degree no large group of Americans has ever done. They fought harder and longer, most often outnumbered in men and materiel, and took more casualties (nearly a fourth of the white men dead) than any large group of Americans has ever done, saw much of their territory overrun and civilian lives and property threatened and destroyed on a vast scale unknown in modern warfare at that time.

 
Supposedly backward Southerners carried out miracles of innovation and industrialism - ironclad ships, torpedoes, submarines, blockade runners, production of cannon and gunpowder. Northern victory depended on things the South did not have - a blockading fleet, gunboats to control the rivers, and a large industry (although it was shot through with corruption). A suppressed aspect of the War is that Northern opponents were always much stronger and more respectable than is assumed. Lincoln had to resort to illegal arrests of his critics, suppression of newspapers, army control of elections, military coup and occupation of the Border States, to fielding an army with 1/4th of its men foreigners, and total war against civilians. The Confederate people were as unified as was possible under extreme conditions.

 
The Southern people fought a defensive war against a power with four times the population and resources. The party in control in Washington regarded the Southern states as conquered provinces to be exploited. The invading Union army did not treat black Southerners with friendship or equality. Many thousands were driven from their homes and means of living and others forcibly recruited as labour or soldiers. It has recently been estimated that a million African Americans died of disease, hardship, and starvation in the disruption of war, an astonishing revelation about what Americans boast of as a holy crusade.

 
The struggle of the South for independence is a heroic epic in human history, admired by civilised people over many generations. Despite masses of false history by the victors, The Confederate epic and its outstanding leaders are permanently admirable symbols for the world, not just for their descendants.
 

Here is a comment on the history of the war by an honest Union General, Don Carlos Buell. Here is what he told Northerners to keep in mind when tempted to boast about their victory:

 
“It required a naval fleet and 15,000 troops to advance against a fort, manned by less than 100 men, at Fort Henry; 35,000 with naval cooperation, to overcome 12,000 at Fort Donelson; 60,000 to secure victory over 40,000 at Shiloh; 120,000 to enforce the retreat of 65,000 after a month’s fighting and maneuvering at Corinth; 100,000 were repelled by 60,000 in the first campaign against Richmond; 70,000 with a powerful naval force to inspire the campaign which lasted nine months against 40,000 at Vicksburg; 90,000 to barely withstand the assault of 60,000 at Gettysburg; 115,000 sustaining a frightening repulse from 60,000 at Fredericksburg; 100,000 attacked and defeated by 50,000 at Chancellorsville; 85,000 held in check for two days by 40,000 at Antietam; 70,000 defeated at Chattanooga, and beleaguered by 40,000 at Chattanooga to Atlanta; . . . and finally 120,000 to overcome 60,000 with exhaustion by a struggle of a year in Virginia.”

 

​When the war was over, they had to face the reality of defeat despite having exerted such effort and sacrifice in what they believed to be a very American struggle for liberty. Forty per cent of the value of property was gone, not counting slave property. They were under military occupation—meaning all civil law and rights could be disregarded by any army officer. Far from a restored “Union,” the States were now occupied territories under military dictatorship and their people without citizenship.
 
 

Most Confederates never felt that they had been wrong. Richmond editor and historian Edward Pollard observed that Southerners surrendered in good faith, but still believed that they were the better men. 

Middle Period, 1789—1860


We can only paint in very broad strokes a period that was marked by a vast expansion of the South and the U.S. in territory, population, economy, and culture. The Era of Expansion is an apt name.

 
A major aspect of this period is the westward movement. New States admitted to the Union: 1790s: TN and KY; 1810s: LA, MS, and ALA; 1820s: MO; 1830s: AR; 1840s: FL and TX. The South moved west and re-established itself constantly in new lands. In 1860, half the people born in the Carolinas, black and white, were living somewhere further south or west. Southerners played a major role also in the early settlement and government of OH, IN and IL until they were outnumbered in the 1850s by northeastern and German incomers.


 
So the westward experience, settling a raw land and bringing it into settled Southern civilization was a widespread experience. This is really what the work of the talented “Southwestern humourists,” much of William Gilmore Simms’s work, and other Southern literature of the time is all about. Southerners were pioneering realistic American literature while New Englanders like Longfellow, Bryant, etc. were writing about brooks and rills and sleigh rides to Grandma’s house; or like Emerson, egotistical essays explaining the universe. The Southerner Poe was certainly the first great creative genius of American literature.


 
This was also a period, at least to the 1850s, when Southerners dominated national politics, the most honourable and uncorrupt period of the U.S. government. Southerners were responsible for the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican Cession. Southerners thought of the Union in terms of republican virtue. Northerners thought of it as a source of profit. Eight of the first twelve Presidents were Southern plantation owners, and another, Harrison, though elected from the Midwest, was Virginia-born. Most of the prominent statesmen and soldiers and explorers, as well as the leaders and bulk of the rank and file of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democracy were Southern.


 
During the period 1815-1860, Southern cotton and other products made up 60 per cent or more of the value of exports from the United States. The foreign commerce of the U.S. was Southern. New York enjoyed the shipping, financing, and insuring of Southern agricultural products and enjoyed good relations with the South. There was some industry in the South but not a lot—not because Southerners were too stupid and lazy to imitate New Englanders but because they didn’t need to. They could enjoy more prosperity and a better way of life without it. Some Northerners liked to claim then and now that the South was impoverished and dominated by a small elite of the wealthiest planters, which they called “the Slave Power.” This is not true. The South had universal white male voting and widespread property ownership and prosperity. The large planters had less power than the bankers and industrialists did in the North and they were often non-political.

 
Slavery
 

Slavery died out gradually in the North, though this did not indicate any benevolence toward the black people. In fact, free blacks in the North had almost no rights and some States, like Lincoln’s IL, refused even to allow them to settle there. There were more black people living in freedom in the South than the North in 1860. The foreign importation of slaves was forbidden after 1808, which Southerners favoured and forwarded. The black population grew greatly by natural increase almost equal to the white, more than anywhere else in the world. The slaves in the Caribbean and South America did not naturally increase and more were constantly imported right up to the Civil War and after. New England ship owners engaged extensively in this trade to Cuba and Brazil though it was illegal for Americans.

 
It would be good if some Southern defenders would stop saying that only 1 in 10 of Confederate soldiers owned slaves. There were plenty of sons and brothers-in-law of slaveowners in the Confederate army. The correct way to view the Old South is that about 1/4th of families held slaves. Most of them owned only a few families who lived and worked with the owners. There can be no doubt that the end of slavery would have come in due time in a form infinitely better than emancipation as a war measure.
 

 
A basic economic conflict between the North and South was evident to everybody from the early 1790s when Alexander Hamilton proposed and pushed through his national debt and national bank. The political program of many Northerners from Hamilton to Lincoln was what was called “the American System.” The American System was fought by the South from Jefferson onward because it clearly profited industry and banking at the expense of agriculture. The tariff meant that high taxes were put on manufactured goods imported from outside the country. This forced Southerners (and others) to buy from New England factories at higher prices and also discouraged foreign buyers of Southern exports. The “national bank” was not really national but was to be a cartel of government-empowered private bankers, i.e., Northern capitalists, who would have control of credit and currency expansion and contraction for the whole country. “Internal improvements” involved spending the tax money from Southerners to build up the infrastructure of the North and buy political support with patronage. These issues went back and forth for years. When the Southerners left Congress in 1861, the Republicans put in “the American System” permanently. By the 1850s the business interests of the North were determined to break the political power of the South as an obstacle to Northern “progress,” i.e., profit. Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago, which had been insignificant villages not long before, had become burgeoning industrial centers run by capitalists who demanded a helpful government.

 
The way to do that was to make sure that Southerners had no more new States to settle. Thus the issue of “free soil.” The face of this was to forbid slavery in all territories not yet States. This did not free a single slave and was also designed to keep black people out of the North whether slave or not. But it guaranteed that Southern influence would grow less and less. There were some sincere abolitionists in the North, but they were a small group. Much of the history of this period is a struggle over control of territory, which was really a struggle about political control of the federal government between opposed interests. Abolitionists filled the air with malicious hate of everything Southern with never a constructive suggestion. The Northern interest is restricting slavery had NOTHING to do with the welfare of African Americans.

 
In the midst of the economic and political conflicts the two sections became more and more aware of cultural differences, not to mention a great gap in Constitutional interpretation as well. When The U.S. was founded nobody doubted that the sovereign people of a State could decide to leave the Union just as they had decided to enter it, but the North increasingly opposed this idea—national centralization was one of the great tendencies of the 19th century, in Europe as well as America. Germany and Italy were unified by force in the same decade that the U.S. Civil War was fought. The Union meant a confederacy of States with a central government of limited powers. Lincoln did not save the Union but made the federal government eternal and all-powerful over the people and the States and the object of mystical worship. And remember, the federal government is nothing more than the instrument of the leaders of the political party that controls it.

 
The sections grew apart in other ways. The South remained overwhelmingly rural. The South, though divided into many denominations, became more and more conservative and orthodox in its Christianity, while the North moved in the opposite direction, developing Unitarianism, Mormonism, and other radical sects. The South received small and manageable immigration. After 1848 the North received immense numbers of new people from Ireland and Germany who had no sense of American traditions and Constitutional understandings and knew nothing about the South except hostile propaganda. In the North education became more utilitarian--- public schools were developed to provide a disciplined work force and to “Americanise” immigrants. In the South education remained more classical and decentralized.

 
By 1860, with Lincoln’s election, thoughtful Southern realized that they were caught in a “Union” with those, no longer fellow countrymen, who intended for the South economic exploitation and everlasting slander. Southerners were conservative in inclination and except in the Deep South were hesitant about decisive action like secession. But when Lincoln called for troops, treating the solemn acts of the people of States as some bunch of criminals to be put down, the issue became clear.
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This merely touches a few high points in a complex and interesting period of American history in order to put Southern culture and thought of the time in context.
 

Introduction

 
There is a vast and often contradictory literature describing and explaining the South. Various theories have been put forth to describe Southern distinctiveness. We might note that the greater part of this literature is written by outsiders who have found the South to be a problem—either the South was evil or it had by some peculiar twist of fate managed not to be completely “American.” Thus Southern distinctiveness has been explained as due to slavery and white supremacy, poverty, persistence of the frontier, preponderant rural life, a Celtic rather than an Anglo-Saxon culture. Although the North through most of American history has been as white supremacist as the South and before the defeat in war the South was quite prosperous. Which is to say, it is assumed that if people are not like Northerners then there is something wrong with them that needs to be discovered and explained. It is now near universally assumed that “the South” was entirely a product of black slavery. That is not true. Why not consider the South as itself? Why not read what the South had to say for itself rather than hostile latter day interpretations?

 
The Colonial Period, 1607–1775.

 
This is quite a long period in which a relatively small number of settlers populated and developed MD, VA, NC, SC, and GA. After the first settlements there was a small continuous arrival of new settlers but no major groups except the Scots-Irish in the early 1700s, French Huguenots, and some German communities. Much of the growth was natural increase of the population. (George Washington was already the fourth generation of his family in Virginia.).

 
At the time of the Revolution the South was the most dynamic and fastest growing part of the 13 colonies and the region most actively expanding westward. Tobacco was by far the most important export of North America, supplemented by other Southern crops such as rice, indigo, sea-island cotton, and naval stores. There was black slavery in all the 13 colonies (as well as in all other European colonies in the New World) but in what became the U.S. they were most concentrated in the Southern colonies. So the South has always been a biracial society, whereas the North had few black people before the 20th century. At the time of the Revolution slaves were a majority of the population in SC and a third or fourth in the other Southern colonies. But, as should not be forgotten, as much as 10 per cent in NY, CT, and RI where the holding of slaves as house servants and agricultural workers was common and completely respectable. For instance, Sam Adams and John Hancock of MA had bonded servants with them in Philadelphia when they signed the Declaration of Independence. Few Southerners engaged in importation of slaves from outside the colonies. This was the lucrative business of MA and RI.
 

The plantation became a distinctive and prominent feature of the South, though it must always be remembered that always the majority of Southern white families were independent small farmers. What is a plantation?. Originally it meant a new settlement, and the English spoke of “plantations” in Ireland and of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, the official name of that state. In time it came to describe a particular kind of agricultural establishment—a large establishment where slave labor resided and produced “staple crops.” Meaning crops that were not for home or local consumption but for sale in quantity as exports to the world market----in the 18th century tobacco and the other crops mentioned; in the 19th century cotton. (Plantations existed also in the Caribbean and South America for sugar, coffee, etc.) In the Old South large plantations were comparatively few. Most plantations were under 50 slaves and many under 20. The small plantation with a few slave families was the most common, where the whites lived, worked, and worshipped with their “people.”
 

 
Americans joined together for the Revolution and in a Union under the Articles and then the Constitution and they had a considerable amount of fellow feeling. They also had a strong realisation that in some respects they had different values and interests and lifestyles that might come into conflict. John Adams referred to Massachusetts as “my country” and General Washington and Thomas Jefferson had uncomplimentary things to say about New Englanders.

 
Here is a broad description of American regions in the colonial and early national period.
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New England (NH, MA, CT, RI) definitely was regarded and regarded itself as distinct. The core population were Puritans from eastern England (later they became Congregationalists and then Unitarians). They were strong on religious conformity, the clergy were civic leaders, and their civic life tended to be tightly organised. When Southerners moved west, an extended family went out and staked out new land, New Englanders tended to move as whole communities or townships. Economically, New England was of little value to the outside world, producing little that Europe could not produce for itself. It turned to shipping, i.e., carrying the goods produced by other colonies. In the 19th century manufacturing took off -  there was plenty of water power, capital, surplus labour, and raw material from the South.

 
The Middle States (NY, NJ, PA, DE) were diverse in population, religion, and economy. To English and Welsh from western and Midlands England were added Germans in PA and Dutch in NY and various other groups. Pennsylvania pioneered in religious tolerance. There were so many different sects they had to tolerate each other—Anglican, Quaker, Baptist, various German sects, etc. The economy was diverse with shipping, fur trade, growing of wheat and other food crops for export, and an early start on iron industry and related manufactures. The North was by no means culturally united until the decade before the Civil War. Remember that Washington Irving’s Hudson Valley Dutch people in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” disliked Ichabod Crane who had come over from New England. And the great early American writer, James Fenimore Cooper, extensively satirised the “Yankees” who invaded his NY State.


 
The South (MD, VA, NC, SC, GA), aside from the black people, had a more diverse population than New England and a less diverse population than the Middle States. The core population of the original lowcountry settlements were people of all social classes predominantly from the Counties south and west of London. There were considerable numbers of Germans, and some French Huguenots and Highland Scots. The Southern population was greatly expanded in the decades before the Revolution by Scots-Irish settling in the relatively empty piedmont regions of VA and the Carolinas, but it is an error to claim that the origins of the South are mostly “Celtic.” Scots-Irish were Protestants from the Scottish Lowlands who had pioneered in Ireland and then suffered economic discrimination from the English, and came to America in large numbers—such as the extended families of Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun. The Southern colonies were officially Anglican before the Revolution but Presbyterians, Baptists, Lutherans, and a little later Methodists were abundant and influential. Maryland was a haven for Catholics, and when in the early 1800s French Louisiana became American, the South had the largest Catholic population in the U.S. until the massive Irish immigration began in the 1840s. The South was also dynamic in its westward push. Charleston traders were sending pack trains regularly by the early 1700s to Mobile, Natchez on the Mississippi River. and the civilised Indian tribes beyond the Appalachians. Boone and others had already explored KY and TN by the time of the Revolution.
 

 
There has always been a lot of comment about aristocracy in the South, in relation to the plantation, both by those who think that such is valuable and attractive and those who think it is awful and unAmerican. We could understand Southern and American history better if we forgot about aristocracy and used the term GENTRY. By the time of American settlement England did not have much hereditary aristocracy (people of noble blood) because the aristocrats had killed each other off pretty well in the Wars of the Roses. The predominant social class in England was the gentry—meaning people who owned and made a good living from substantial land-holdings, whose bloodlines were not noble (i.e., related to royalty) but were long established and substantial, who had tenants and retainers, and who exercised local leadership—in morals, customs, justice, militia, etc. They often had coats of arms and they were recognised as leaders but they were not dictators to the independent small farmers, merchants, skilled artisans, and professionals who were much of the population. They had lots of younger sons ready to make their fortunes in America. We can think of the Southern planter class, who were infinitely important in the founding and development of the United States, best as gentry.
 
 
Much of American history writing explains separate Southern identity as simply a matter of the defense of slavery and racism. This assumes that the North and South were alike until Southerners about 1820 stopped criticising slavery and began defending it. It also assumes, falsely, that the North was never guilty of slavery and racism. But that is propaganda and nonsense. Cultural separateness was evident and recognized from earliest colonial times and long before the North abandoned slavery. All one has to do is to read the diaries of two Americans from the late 1600s-early 1700s. Cotton Mather, leading clergymen, scholar, and influential public man of Massachusetts, and William Byrd II, large landowner and prominent man of Virginia. Both were born in America of English descent. Mather’s diary is about how God is perpetually favouring him or thwarting him (but at any rate is always concerned with him), about the reception of his books and sermons, about the evil doings of other people. It is a depressing read—the record of an arrogant, self-centered, and self-righteous man with no apparent affection for or real interest in others. The hallmark of the Massachusetts elite to this day. Byrd’s diary records his devotions and studies, but it also records a lively social life, a strong interest in nature and other folks, a sense of humour about himself and the world, and even admissions of his own sins and shortcomings. It is a delightful and informative read.
 

​New Englanders made a deliberate and concerted effort in the 19th century to create the belief that they deserved most of the honour of the American War of Independence, which was far from the truth. The South resisted Great Britain out of principle, the North for economic reasons. The War of Independence was stalemated in the North with the major cities occupied. The war was won in the South, by Southerners.