A History of the World (69 page)

This is the South of
Gone with the Wind
and romantic cavalier-generals, tresses waving and moustaches bristling, charging the Union infantry, as if Prince Rupert of the Rhine had been born again to ride through Virginia, or Bonnie Prince Charlie were fighting for Kentucky. This is also, of course, the South of Lost Causes, but it cannot be stated too strongly that nothing about this war, despite the industrial imbalance, was inevitable.

One of the best and least partisan historians of the conflict, James McPherson, points out that to win the war as it had developed by 1863, the North had to conquer vast territories, cripple the southern economy and destroy its armies; a tough task – so that ‘Northern superiority in manpower and resources was a
necessary
but not
sufficient
cause of victory.’ The South only had to hang on and survive. McPherson argues that there is a plausible parallel world in which, with a few twists of fate, the rebel states could have won the war – in which case history would have careered off in a very different direction.

Had Lincoln, the steely Kentucky lawyer and political genius, not been elected in the first place – or had he lost the presidency, as he very nearly did, halfway through the war – the North might have had to come to terms with slavery. Had the brilliant southern generals
‘Stonewall’ Jackson and Robert E. Lee had a little more luck, they might have defeated the northern armies so decisively, before the arrival of better northern generals such as Sherman, that the Union side’s will to fight could have collapsed. It came close to doing so in any case. There were moments when incompetent Union generalship and rising discontent about Lincoln and the war – including the worst riots in US history in New York, killing 120 people during protests against the draft – came close to winning political victory for the Confederacy.

Eventually the sheer force of the more populous, industrial, better organized North, which avoided the food shortages and the rampant inflation plaguing the South, brought devastation to its cities along with Lee’s surrender. But it was a close-run thing – as close-run as the near-German victory in the Great War just as US forces began arriving in Europe. That really was a war whose outcome revolved on particular battles and personalities, one reason why it continues to exert such a grip on historians’ imaginations.

So why did they fight, that majority of southern manhood who were neither slave-owners nor wealthy, but a quarter of whom perished, leaving many of the rest mutilated? In the end, their letters suggest that it was loyalty to home, family, local traditions that mattered most. They were fighting against what they saw as the arrogant assumptions of alien cities, against a threatening and colder future of wages, factory bosses and hypocritical Yankee preachers. Some of the Confederate soldiers were themselves opposed to slavery. Robert E. Lee thought it a pernicious institution and owned no slaves of his own. He resigned his Union commission and fought on the Confederate side only because he could not desert his home, Virginia, and his family. Many felt similarly. They were fighting for Georgia or Tennessee or South Carolina, for their drinking friends and their cousins and parents. They were fighting for locality against nationhood.

Their defeat not only soldered the South and North together under the rule of a federal government that had become far more powerful as a consequence of the war; it also allowed the last big surge west, as the US we know today finally took shape. The railroad whose Kansas track had helped provoke the war would bring settlements right across the central plains and deserts of America. Demobbed
soldiers from both armies headed west, looking for a fresh start. The native Americans of the Plains – people including the Sioux, the Cheyenne and the Arapaho, who when they embraced the horse in the early 1700s had changed their culture, becoming superb hunters – would be pressed ever further back until they were finally torn apart by US soldiers. Unfortunately for them, the war had hardened and brutalized European-American attitudes: in 1864 a particularly horrific massacre of native women and children was perpetrated at Sand Creek, Colorado.

Once the war was over, the destruction of native culture accelerated, particularly once gold had been discovered in the Black Hills of Dakota. The 1870s saw relentless attacks on the Plains Indians and their attempts to fight back, which culminated in Crazy Horse’s superb defeat of that Civil War hero General George Custer at the battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. Yet even the Sioux, the boldest and most aggressive of the tribes – it could almost be said, the Zulu of America – had no chance against the much larger, better armed and disciplined soldiers sent against them. And these were merely the advance party of a teeming migration of farmers, hunters, cattle-ranchers, bartenders and shopkeepers. Had the Confederacy survived intact, then no doubt the Native American peoples would still have succumbed to the guns and sheer numbers of the incomers; but it would not perhaps have happened quite so quickly.

The war also greatly advanced American industrial capitalism. Among the men who dodged service with the Union armies by buying themselves stand-ins were the oil-refining mogul John D. Rockefeller, the uberbanker J.P. Morgan and the steel giant Andrew Carnegie. The war economy had created a bottomless need for steel for armaments, for oil as a source of lighting and lubricants, for coal to power the Union’s trains and ships; it also allowed clever speculators to make fortunes manipulating commodity prices, and bankers to form close new relationships with Washington politicians. The concentration of power in relatively few hands that was characteristic of American capitalism in its ‘heroic’ era, and the brutal treatment of strikers and trade-unionists, can largely be traced back to wartime attitudes.

There is a final, essential, point to be made about the Civil War. Although it soldered the Union together and paved the way for American hegemony, it did not provide the salvation for black Americans
that those people greeting Lincoln at the Richmond riverside had hoped for. Some 180,000 blacks had left the South and enlisted in the Union armies during the war, many fighting heroically. But Lincoln had moved towards ending slavery only cautiously, in stages, driven by the demands of an increasingly desperate conflict. In the North, the fear that the war might be lost increased the influence of hardline abolitionists. At the front line, slave escapees became steadily more significant. Lincoln told his cabinet in 1862 that emancipation had become ‘a military necessity . . . We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.’ (The Confederate army, by the end, was using black soldiers too.) His 1863 Declaration of Emancipation applied to the slaves in the ten rebel states, and was designed in part to undermine the southern economy and its ability to fight; only towards the end of the conflict was slavery made illegal throughout the US, in the Thirteenth Amendment to the constitution.

Yet legally freeing the four million slaves of the South, and thus ending America’s ignominious status as the world’s largest slave nation, was a long way from giving those blacks security or prosperity. During the ‘Reconstruction’ which followed the war, the defeated southern states were put under direct military control before being allowed back into the Union. Towns and plantations destroyed, white soldiers imprisoned and the northern influence of the ‘carpetbagger’ suggested for a while that the old order really had gone for good. Many former slaves quickly left for other parts of the US, ignoring their old owners’ pleas to stay and work for cash. After his estate-burning, town-torching, crop-trampling march through the South, the Union general William Sherman had begun a policy of handing land directly to ex-slaves, the ‘forty acres and a mule’ policy. In some states, blacks began to advance in politics.

All this was, however, largely illusory. ‘Reconstruction’ also meant corruption. Northern politicians had neither appetite nor capital to actually run the southern states. Nor were they happy about tearing up the constitutional right to property involved in land redistribution. There is an interesting parallel with the Russian emancipation of the serfs. In both places, the land without the serfs or the slaves to work it was almost valueless; but both serfs and former slaves found there was very little work available except the old, hard field-work. So how real was their freedom?

A delegation of freed slaves from South Carolina complained to the Union authorities: ‘We are left in a more unpleasant condition than our former . . . We have property in homes, cattle, carriages, and articles of furniture but we are landless and homeless . . . This is not the condition of really free men.’
²⁸
Disillusioned Russian peasants, back on their land, back making payments in grain and chickens to landowners, could not have put it better.

Many American blacks would eventually settle in northern and north-western industrial cities, becoming the ‘factory niggers’ their former masters had mocked. In the South, many others became subject to a form of extortion known as share-cropping. They got land, a shack and tools to work the land from a landowner or shopkeeper – sometimes the same person – advanced on credit. The terms were such that they had little chance of working their way to profit, and a poor harvest or two could make them economic slaves, if not legal ones.

Yet this was only the start. Southern states would bring in segregationist ‘Jim Crow’ measures, which humiliated the black population and relegated them to second-class status, a shrill echo of slavery itself. Given, also, the emergence of white-terrorist movements such as the Ku Klux Klan, for decades after the war to free them the life of black Americans was almost as bleak as before the conflict started – and, as we have seen, some thought bleaker. Relations between black and white Americans would simmer unhappily for a century, until they confronted each other again in the 1960s: many would say the old wound is not healed today.

All that said, the war changed the United States irrevocably, and for the better. The republic had not begun as anything resembling a democracy, or even as a conventionally centralized state. The postal service was the only federal institution most Americans came into contact with. But now that huge westwards expansion introduced a new, rawly democratic tone, and the influx of millions of poor European migrants turned the new nation’s cities into energetic melting-pots. As well as empowering capitalist moguls, the war had required a national army in the North, conscription, direct taxation, more powerful federal courts and the start of social welfare.

The defeat of the South enabled the original constitution to be reinterpreted as a democratic document, giving citizenship rights to all
men (though women remained excluded from politics). Abraham Lincoln started to use the word ‘nation’ rather than ‘union’, and in his Gettysburg Address his promise of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ became something of a new founding declaration for American republicanism.

American capitalism ensured that the power of the rich elites continued to chafe, angering farmers, factory workers and those who lost everything in periodic crises and crashes. By the late 1860s, America was neither culturally united, nor a true democracy. But she was on the way to becoming the Titan that would emerge in the twentieth century.

Samurai Agony

The last stand of Saigo Takamori and his samurai fighters against the modern army of Japan, on 24 September 1877, took place at the moment when, on the other side of the Pacific, the Plains Indians were being shot down by the US army.

Like the battles of Crazy Horse, this was one of the great set-pieces of romantic military futility. The sword-wielding, sake-drinking, poem-writing, ancestor-worshipping and essentially medieval warriors of Takamori’s rebellion charged a conscript army whose ranks were filled with the sons of peasants, but which possessed modern rifles, cannon and mines. After terrible slaughter in the early hours of the morning, Saigo had no more than about forty men left. They had already celebrated their coming deaths, and flung themselves one last time at the bullets. Saigo himself, hit in the right hip, fell, then called on his comrade Beppu Shinsuke to help him to an honourable death – to commit hara-kiri. In fact, it seems that Saigo was too badly injured and shocked to disembowel himself, but Beppu sliced his master’s head off, as custom demanded. After the battle, it took some time to locate the missing head, so that it could be laid with Saigo’s bodies for the victorious Japanese officers to contemplate.
²⁹

This is a very Japanese story, from the sight of the archaic samurai warriors charging down the hillside to its emphasis on the honour of ritual suicide. After his death, Saigo Takamori became a kind of saint for many Japanese, a symbol of tradition and honour, who had
ascended to the heavens; or, alternatively, he had not died but had been exiled in Russia – or perhaps India – whence he would return in victory. Twelve years after his death, his popularity was such that he was posthumously pardoned by the Japanese emperor for his rebellion, and became an enduring national hero. Yet the Japaneseness of these events should not be overdone. The true story is more complicated than just aristocratic sword-fighters versus the modern world; this was indeed a confrontation between old ways and the mercantile and industrial world that has parallels elsewhere.

It is reminiscent of the charge of the Scottish Gaelic clans at the muskets and cannon of the Hanoverian army at Culloden in 1746. Bonnie Prince Charlie, who really did go into exile, was also for some a symbol of a lost and somehow finer world. In different ways, the more recent defeat of the American Confederacy was also comparable, a contemporary civil war about modernization and the power of capitalism. Though slavery was never involved, Saigo’s ‘Satsuma rebellion’ was an attempt to restore traditional values and defy the new times. In the Japanese case, the modernizing government had come about because of a dramatic overseas intervention – the arrival of European warships, and in particular of Commodore Matthew Perry’s US fleet in 1853–4.