Born Fighting (23 page)
What had been created through the extension of the plantation system into the Deep South and Mississippi River basin was not the idyllic, Tara-like antebellum gentility that one finds in wistful novels such as
Gone With the Wind
, but instead a rapacious system based on a false sense of entitlement that looked condescendingly on white and black alike. This system was separate and apart from the daily lives of most Southern whites and especially those in the mountain and backcountry regions. In many ways it represented the creation of a new “hybrid royalty” of the sort brought to Scotland by the Anglo-Normans who intermarried with the Scottish royal families in the era of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. Remnants of this exclusivity and arrogance remained for generations after the Civil War and still persist in many parts of the South today. That the Scots-Irish yeomen could live alongside such a system is as much a comment on their long-held indifference to wealth and power as it is on their views on slavery, or even of their own diminishment as a result of the slave system.
And they were clearly diminished by it. Benjamin Franklin had predicted as much nearly a century before, commenting that with the introduction of slavery, “the Poor are by this Means deprived of Employment, while a few Families acquire vast Estates; which they spend on Foreign Luxuries, and educating their Children in the Habits of those Luxuries; the same Income is needed for the Support of one that might have maintain’d 100.”
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Wilbur Cash confirmed this prophecy, pointing out that the plantation system had kept ordinary white families on the poorer lands, “walled them up and locked them in there—had blocked them off from escape or any considerable economic and social advance as a body . . . Moreover, having driven these people back there, it thereafter left them virtually out of account. . . . Worse yet, it concerned itself but little if at all about making use of them as economic auxiliaries. . . . Following its own interests alone, it always preferred to buy a great part of its hay and corn and beef and wool from the North or the Middle West rather than go to the trouble and expense of opening up the backcountry properly. Roads, railroads, transportation facilities generally, were provided mainly with regard to the movement of cotton. . . . The slaveless yeomen . . . were left more or less to stagnate at a level but a step or two above the pioneers.”
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This remoteness accentuated the historic independence of the Scots-Irish culture, and not wholly in ways that would benefit its people in future generations. The hardscrabble lifestyle of the backcountry was almost wholly lacking in infrastructure such as schools and libraries that would allow intellectual growth. Governmental functions were minimal, leaving most problems to be solved through violent personal confrontations or by a rough system of vigilante justice. And contrary to popular mythology, in the twenty years before the Civil War, more than 90 percent of those hanged or burned by lynch mobs in the South were white.
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The practice of religion took on a harder tone as well. The democracy of the Presbyterian Kirk had eliminated both the formal sacraments and the overarching power of a central church authority, but the transformation of this concept into the Baptist and Methodist backcountry often found whole congregations in the hands of half-educated preachers and traveling evangelists who held every word in the Bible to be absolute and claimed that their voices echoed the lips of God. This fearsome fundamentalism, which sowed the seeds of today’s Bible Belt, was countered on a daily basis by the heavy drinking that had come, along with the stills, from the glens of Ireland and Scotland, and by an equally long addiction to devilish music, sensual pleasures, constant physical challenge, and an inbred defiance of authority.
As was their tradition, the yeoman farmers of the mountains and the Southern backcountry asked for nothing from the propertied, slaveholding class, and as has been their historic fate, nothing is what they received. Left to their own devices by the ravishing plantation owners who controlled the political process and who themselves were addicted to King Cotton, the backcountry folk had grown even tougher and in some degrees poorer than their ancestors. And they had also grown—well, more than a little bit wild. They could hunt. They could fish. They could drink all night and howl at the moon. If you wanted to get past them you had to fight your way through them. And on Sunday they’d stop for a while and let the preacher remind them that there’d be hell to pay “on the other side.”
Economically, except for those who benefited from the slave system, the region had fallen into hard times, even before the Civil War. As David Hackett Fischer points out, “By the mid-nineteenth century, the proportion of farm workers in the north was only 40 percent; in the south it was 84 percent. . . . By 1860 . . . the value of farmland per acre was 2.6 times greater in the north than in the south; the amount of manufacturing capital per capita was nearly four times as great. . . . With only one-third of the white population, the south had nearly two-thirds of its richest men and a large proportion of the very poor. . . . In 1860 seven-eighths of [foreign] immigrants came to the north. . . . In the north, 94 percent of the population was found to be literate by the census of 1860; in the south, barely 54 percent could read and write. Roughly 72 percent of northern children were enrolled in school compared with 35 percent of the same age in the south. The average length of the school year was 135 days in the north and 80 days in the south.”
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But the debate had turned so lividly along sectional lines that even the poorer whites in the South circled their wagons. A quintessential unease hit the key chord in the Scots-Irish experience. In their eyes, an outside force was not only telling them how to live their lives, but also threatening to force solutions on them if they disagreed. They would solve their own problems, if problems there were. The debate over slavery was becoming a threat to how they perceived their very independence. To the leaders of the North and the ever-emerging West, the issues were more clear-cut: slavery was an evil that needed to be done away with, and during the 1850s the new Republican Party was formed with the elimination of slavery as a key plank in its platform. To the leaders of the South, the Northern-dominated federal system promised in due time to simply outvote their way of life and, through the force of a collective national majority, change their entire existence. John C. Calhoun had predicted as much when he attempted to establish the principle of nullification during the debates over the tariff acts.
In 1856 the Republicans “swept every state in the northern tier from New England to upstate New York, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa. This pattern of Republican support . . . was a map of greater New England. Every state that voted Republican had been colonized by the descendants of the Puritan migration.” In 1860 they nominated Abraham Lincoln, who although born in Kentucky and reared in Illinois was the descendant of New England Puritans and Pennsylvania Quakers. He won “every New England county, most of the northern tier, all but three electoral votes in the middle tier from the Delaware Valley west to the Pacific. And at the same time he lost every electoral vote in the southern states.”
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The Southern states, led predictably by South Carolina, were prepared for this possibility. On December 20, 1860, the South Carolina legislature voted out an Ordinance of Secession, followed four days later by a Declaration of Causes. That document assailed “the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States by the Federal Government, and its encroachments on the reserved rights of the States,” asserting that the nonslaveholding states “have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions, and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of Slavery.” It pointed out that, “A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to Slavery.” It condemned the Republican Party as having announced in its platform that “a war must be waged against Slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States. The guarantees of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The Slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government.” It then concluded that “South Carolina has resumed her position among the nations of the world, as a separate and independent state.”
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On February 4, 1861, representatives of six Southern states met in Montgomery, Alabama, to organize the government of the Confederacy, estimating that once war began they would number thirteen seceded states—thus, the thirteen stars on the Confederate battle flag, although only eleven states eventually seceded. As this was happening, the Confederacy took over all but four of the federal forts, arsenals, and military posts in the South. The Union Army’s Maj. Robert Anderson, commander of the federal forces in Charleston, moved his headquarters to the small island of Fort Sumter and declined to turn the fort over to the Confederates. On April 11, Confederate general Pierre G. T. Beauregard, a native Louisianan, opened fire on Fort Sumter. Anderson, a native Kentuckian married to a Georgian, had been Beauregard’s artillery instructor many years before at West Point.
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Fort Sumter folded, instructor surrendering to student. With this act of odd familiarity that would be repeated a thousand times over the course of four horrific years, the bloodiest war in American history was on.
4
Attack and Die
Not for fame or reward,
not for place or for rank,
not lured by ambition or goaded by necessity,
but in simple obedience to duty as they understood it,
these men suffered all,
sacrificed all,
dared all,
and died.
—Inscription on the Confederate Memorial
in Arlington National Cemetery, written by a Confederate veteran
who later became a minister
THE WAR, AS
David Hackett Fischer put it, “was not a contest of equals. In 1861, the Union outnumbered the Confederacy in total population by 2.5 to 1, and in free males of military age by 4.4 to 1. So different had been the pattern of economic growth in the two sections that the north exceeded the south in railroad mileage by 2.4 to 1, in total wealth by 3 to 1, in merchant ships by 9 to 1, in industrial output by 10 to 1. A much smaller proportion of the northern workers were farmers, but the Union outreached the Confederacy in farm acreage by 3 to 1, in livestock by 1.5 to 1, in corn production by 2 to 1, and in wheat production by 4 to 1.
“But the south was superior to the north in the intensity of its warrior ethic.”
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That warrior ethic, which would carry the outnumbered and outgunned Confederacy a very long way, came from the long traditions of service that had begun so many centuries before in Scotland and the north of Britain. The Confederate battle flag itself was drawn from the St. Andrew’s Cross of Scotland, and the unbending spirit of the Southern soldier found its energies in the deeds of the past just as strongly as it looked up to the leaders of the present. These were the direct descendants of William Wallace’s loyal followers of five centuries before, Winston Churchill’s “hard, unyielding spear men who feared nought [
sic
] and, once set in position, had to be killed.”
As noted Civil War historian Douglas Southall Freeman put it, “Good cheer was not unnatural in the union regiments after July 1863, but its persistence until the autumn of 1864 in most of the Southern forces . . . is a phenomenon of morale. . . . The graycoats laughed at their wagons and their harness, their tatters and their gaping shoes. . . . They laughed their way from Manassas to Appomattox and even through the hospitals. . . . These Confederate soldiers and nurses and citizens of beleaguered towns had one inspiration that twentieth-century America has not credited to them—the vigorous Revolutionary tradition. . . . Many in the ranks, North and South, had seen old soldiers of the Continental Army; thousands had heard the stories of the sacrifices of 1777 and of the hunger and nakedness at Valley Forge. . . . Many another Southern soldier told himself the road was no more stony than the one that had carried his father and his grandfather at last to Yorktown. If independence was to be the reward, patience, good cheer and the tonic of laughter would bring it all the sooner.”
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But not only the Revolutionary War spirit drove them. As I wrote of the Scots-Irish tradition in my novel
Fields of Fire
, the culture even to this day is viscerally fired by “that one continuous linking that had bound father to son from the first wild resolute angry beaten Celt who tromped into the hills rather than bend a knee to Rome two thousand years ago, who would . . . chew the bark off a tree, fill his belly with wood rather than surrender from starvation and admit defeat to an advancing civilization. That same emotion passing with the blood: a fierce resoluteness that found itself always in a pitch against death, that somehow, over the centuries came to accept the fight as birthright, even as some kind of proof of life.”
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True to the historic militia concept that itself had evolved from the legacy of clan loyalty, the Confederate Army rose like a sudden wind out of the little towns and scattered farms of a still unconquered wilderness, drawing 750,000 soldiers from a population base, male and female, of only 8 million. By contrast, the Northern states drew 2 million soldiers from a population of 22 million, which also benefited from constant immigration throughout the war, including a steady inflow of hardfighting potato-famine Irishmen. In the South the Great Captains called, as they had at Bannockburn and King’s Mountain, and the able-bodied men were quick to answer. This army fought with squirrel rifles and cold steel against a much larger and more modern force. It saw 90 percent of its adult male population serve as soldiers and 70 percent of these become casualties, some 256,000 of them dead, including, astoundingly, 77 of the 425 generals who led them. The North by contrast lost 365,000 soldiers and 47 of its 583 generals, a casualty rate in each case less than half that of the South.
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The men of the Confederate Army gave every ounce of courage and loyalty to a leadership they trusted and respected, then laid down their arms in an instant—declining to fight a guerrilla war—when that leadership decided that enough was enough. And (we shall see later) they returned to a devastated land and a military occupation, enduring the bitter humiliation of Reconstruction and an economic alienation from the rest of this country that continued for a full century, affecting white and black alike.
History has a way of boiling itself down into generalities. The farther away we move from an event, the more we tend to condense its lessons. In recent decades the reasons for the Civil War have been reduced in the minds of most Americans into a simple sentence or two. The Civil War, we are taught, was about slavery, an institution that at the same time both nurtured and corrupted the South. The Union, we are now told, was on the side of God and the angels, its soldiers dedicated to eliminating this dark stain on the human spirit. The Union Army, we are reminded again and again even in these modern times, marched to a “Battle Hymn,” one that still inundates political and patriotic ceremonies.
As He died to make men holy
Let us fight to make men free
His truth is marching on . . .
By implication, the soldiers of the Confederacy were with the forces of darkness and evil, fighting to preserve a system that denigrated the human spirit and made mules out of men. But the truth is, as always, far more turgid, and to understand it one must go to the individual soldier. Why did he fight? What loyalties propelled him? What issues, political and otherwise, demanded that loyalty? Those are the key questions, and as they say in the law, all else is
dicta
. The debates in Washington and in the state capitals during the years leading up to the Civil War were clearly dominated by the issue of slavery, but when one looks at the breakup of the Union and the rallying of both the Confederate and Federal armies, a paradox immediately emerges.
How did all of this confusion present itself inside the mind of a typical young man called into action to fight for the Confederacy? First, the odds are overwhelming that he did not own slaves at all. Was he then merely a pawn, a simple agent of those who did? These were loyal and uncomplicated people, but their history could never mark them as either stupid or passive. Civil War historian Henry Steele Commager commented that, “The war required the subordination of the individual to the mass . . . but both Federals and Confederates indulged their individualism in the army and out, rejected military standards and discipline, selected officers for almost any but military reasons, pursued local and state interest at the expense of the national.”
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Wilbur Cash amplifies this point, reminding us that the Confederate soldiers came from a culture that had produced “the most intense individualism the world has seen since the Italian Renaissance.”
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As Cash points out, “To the end of his service this soldier could not be disciplined. He slouched. He would never learn to salute in the brisk fashion so dear to the hearts of the professors of mass murder. His ‘Cap’n’ and his ‘Gin’ral’ were likely to pass his lips with a grin. . . . And down to the final day at Appomattox his officers knew that the way to get him to execute an order without malingering was to flatter and to jest, never to command too brusquely and forthrightly. And yet—and yet—and by virtue of precisely these unsoldierly qualities, he was, as no one will care to deny, one of the world’s very finest fighting men.”
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It is impossible to believe that such men would have continued to fight against unnatural odds—and take casualties beyond the level of virtually any other modern army—simply so that the 5 percent of their population who owned slaves could keep them or because they held to a form of racism so virulent that they would rather die than allow the slaves to leave the plantations. Something deeper was motivating them, something that appealed to their self-interest as well.
Second, the Confederate soldier knew that slave-owners in Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky, the slaveholding states that remained in the Union, were allowed to keep their slaves when the war began. This was also true of West Virginia when it broke off from Virginia in 1862 and became a separate state. The consequence of this reality was that in virtually every major battle of the Civil War, Confederate soldiers who did not own slaves were fighting against a proportion of Union Army soldiers who had not been asked to give theirs up. So, what did this say to the individual soldier about the importance of the slavery issue to President Lincoln and the Union government itself?
Third, this soldier was aware that when President Abraham Lincoln ostensibly ended slavery on January 1, 1863, through the Emancipation Proclamation, his order specifically exempted all the slaves in the North as well as those slaves in areas of the South that had previously been conquered. This included vast stretches of Louisiana and eastern Virginia—ironically, the birthplace of the American slave system.
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Thus, all the slaves on Union territory as of that date remained slaves for the duration of the war, and the only slaves who were freed by this proclamation were those residing in areas of the South subsequently conquered by the Union Army. It does not take a cynical mind to conclude that President Lincoln, having suffered numerous defeats as well as serious morale problems to this point in the war, needed a mission for his soldiers beyond the original goal of forcing the Southern states to rejoin the Union.
And fourth, the more learned among these Confederate soldiers, like their political leaders, believed strongly that the Constitution was on their side when they chose to dissolve their relations with the Union. This does not imply that America would have been a better place a hundred years on if they had succeeded. Nor does it suggest that the South’s leaders might not have decided to end slavery and even rejoin the Union in later years. But the states that had joined the Union after the Revolution considered themselves independent political entities, much like the countries of Europe do today. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reserved to the states all rights not specifically granted to the federal government, and in their view the states had thus retained their right to dissolve the federal relationship.
This argument was best articulated by Alexander B. Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy. Vernon Louis Parrington, whose views on this matter were hardly rejected by the intellectual paragons of his time,
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actually supported the constitutional validity of Stephens’s views. Parrington begins by pointing out the greatest irony of the Civil War—that “Love of the Union, and of the Constitution as a guarantee of that Union, was far stronger in the South before the Civil War than in the North.”
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He then summarizes Stephens’s argument: “that state government existed prior to the Union, that it was jealously guarded at the making of the Constitution, that it had never been surrendered, and hence was the constitutional order until destroyed by the Civil War.”
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In a fourteen-hundred-page document that the Illinois-born, Kansas-raised, Harvard-educated Parrington characterized as “wholly convincing,” Stephens laid out the South’s view that the constitutional compact was terminable.
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Parrington went on to comment that, “Stephens rightly insisted that slavery was only the immediate
casus belli
. The deeper cause was the antagonistic conceptions of the theory and functions of the political state that emerged from antagonistic economic systems.”
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Importantly, Parrington laments that Stephens as well as other Southern slaveholders gave no consideration to the argument that slavery as a system was economically ruinous to the poor white.
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But to tar the sacrifices of the Confederate soldier as simple acts of racism, and reduce the battle flag under which he fought to nothing more than the symbol of a racist heritage, is one of the great blasphemies of our modern age.
Why, then, did he fight?
It might seem odd in these modern times, but the Confederate soldier fought because, on the one hand, in his view he was provoked, intimidated, and ultimately invaded, and, on the other, his leaders had convinced him that this was a war of independence in the same sense as the Revolutionary War. For those who can remove themselves from the slavery issue and examine the traits that characterize the Scots-Irish culture, the unbending ferocity of the Confederate soldier is little more than a continuum. This was not so much a learned response to historical events as it was a cultural approach that had been refined by centuries of similar experiences. The tendency to resist outside aggression was bred deeply into every heart—and still is today.
Rome conquered Britain and tried to subjugate its people, but the “brave and proud” fell back into the mountains of what later became Cornwall, Wales, and especially Scotland. King Edward marched into Scotland to subjugate its people, but he was resisted and ultimately expelled. The Jacobite Irish and the French laid siege to Derry and tried to starve a people into submission, but as the death toll mounted, those same people, men, women, and children alike, wrote their vow in blood:
No Surrender
. The British sent an expedition into the Appalachian Mountains to punish and lay waste to whole communities for not supporting the Crown, and their predictable reward was to be stalked, surrounded, and slaughtered. And now a federal government, whose leadership and economic systems were dominated by English-American businessmen and intellectuals, was sending armies into the sovereign territory of the Southern states in order to compel them to remain inside a political system that their leaders had told them they had every right to reject.
