The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (34 page)

Thus the traditional judgment of Confederate culture as sterile is valid—as far as it goes. There was, however, creative expression and intellectual vitality in the Confederate South, more so in fact than in the periods which came before and after.
³⁸
Those historians and others who have searched in vain for “culture” in the Confederacy have looked for it in the wrong places. For example the most-read novel produced in the Confederacy, Augusta Jane Evans’s
Macaria or Altars of Sacrifice,
is not a fair sample of Southern writing in the sixties. The best, and indeed the most characteristic, Confederate literature was the product of periodicals and newspapers, and of the individuals who penned the letters and diaries of the era. Certainly both professional and unprofessional Southern writers produced a great deal of prose distinguished only by the authors’ ability to say so little in so many tight clauses and genteel phrases, and the literature of the period contained much doggerel verse devoid of form or content or both, but the best of Confederate writing deserves rereading. War correspondents such as John Esten Cooke, for instance, sent the weekly periodical
Southern Illustrated News
vigorous, on-the-spot battlefield material which was as good as his earlier and later novels were bad.
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Editors of the South’s daily newspapers engaged in lively and literate debate on topics ranging from war strategy to turtle soup. The strength and passion of editorials by Henry Watterson of the Chattanooga
Rebel
and John M. Daniel of the Richmond
Examiner,
to cite only two of numerous examples, rendered them a worthy literature.
⁴⁰

The richest of Confederate literature was never written for publication. The letters of otherwise obscure people such as the Joneses of Georgia and the Smiths of South Carolina read like epistolary novels; and the diaries of such diverse personalities as Benny Fleet, Mary Chesnut, and Phoebe Pember rank among the best of American literature in any period.
⁴¹

The most engaging feature of the lesser
belles-lettres
is the unromantic and articulate honesty which they display. The war experience was real and immediate to a large percentage of Confederate Southerners. It is little wonder that their response to wartime should have been realistic instead of romantic or artificial.
⁴²

Other flashes of creative energy and intellectual vigor distinguished the Confederate mind, but, as was the case with wartime literature, Confederates exhibited their talents in unorthodox ways and obscure places. Southern contributions to science and technology, for example, were not displayed in academic papers or debated in centers of learning. Instead the Confederacy’s “traditional” intellectuals put their talents to practical work and most often displayed them in war-related activity. Matthew Fontaine Maury’s torpedo mines and John M. Brooke’s ironclad ship were good examples. The maps of peacetime schoolmaster Jedediah Hotchkiss were masterpieces of cartographic art.
⁴³
The Confederates also produced an operational submarine. The
Hunley,
after delivering a mortal blow to the
Housatonic
off Charleston in December 1863, had the bad fortune to have its enemy sink on top of it. The disaster convinced the Navy Department that submarines were too risky, and the
Housatonic
sinking was the only triumph of the South’s undersea endeavors.
⁴⁴

With these examples, the small triumphs of rebel ingenuity also deserve mention. Faced with a shortage of grease for the working parts of ordnance machinery, one enterprising Confederate kept his shop in production by using lard. Instead of using rubber for drive belts, Confederates were able to fabricate an acceptable substitute from bands of cotton cords.
⁴⁵

At the same time that Southerners were adjusting the ways in which they thought about themselves, both corporately and individually, they also began to rethink their relationships with others. Wars, especially unsuccessful wars, have often unsettled social mores, and the Confederate war was no exception. In 1861 the planter, slaveholding class exercised aristocratic dominance of the Southern body social. That same class in its best interest led the South into the Confederacy and claimed the first places in the new nation. In 1865, when the Confederacy was a failure, Southerners for the most part resisted the temptation to repudiate the leadership of their old ruling class. The strength and staying power of the slaveholders was remarkable indeed, but the dominance of the planter class in 1861 and 1865 has obscured the considerable social ferment which characterized the intervening years.
⁴⁶

In ways both obvious and subtle the planters were unable to maintain their hegemony in the Confederate South without a fight. War compelled the planters to reconfirm their pretensions to leadership under novel circumstances. Land, slaves, and
noblesse oblige
became secondary prerequisites for power and deference. The cause demanded that its advocates become soldiers, and the slaveholders vied with each other for field commands in order to defend their plantations. For the most part plànters dominated the Confederate officer corps just as they had dominated in peacetime.
⁴⁷

The fortunes of war dictated that a large percentage of Southern officers did not survive. Death from battle or disease was the most absolute way in which slaveholders surrendered status. Too, many planters discovered that their command of a local militia regiment during peacetime was inadequate preparation for command in combat. By 1863 the war had winnowed out numbers of planter-officers who had been capable of supervising a militia muster of the county seat but had proven less competent on one or more battlefields.
⁴⁸
Finally, the acts of Congress authorizing elections of captains and lieutenants for company-size units had a democratizing effect upon the junior level of the officer corps.
⁴⁹

At the same time death and military incompetence took their toll of aristocratic Confederates, the wartime aristocracy of military merit opened the way for “new people” By 1863 Confederate officers were not all gentlemen, and neither were all gentlemen among the Southern officers. And the unsettling ways of wartime admitted new people to the government as well. Many of these new people in army and government had wealth, but their money was new, and the war offered them social advancement and prominence beyond the status prescribed by time and family connections.
⁵⁰

The Confederate circumstance challenged the South’s ante-bellum elite and shuffled its membership considerably. Nevertheless planters and planter interests, variously defined, retained control of the revolutionary South. They did so not only in the face of the external challenge offered by a war and new government but also in the face of a heightened sense of class consciousness among yeoman and laboring classes of Confederate Southerners. Food riots and draft evasion were two indications of this social ferment. The riots may have been economic in origin, but they fed on the resentment of have-nots for the relative comfort and insulation presumably enjoyed by the haves. Nor were draft evaders simply cowards; many were farm boys who wanted no part of risking their lives for the sake of planter interests. Their slogan was the familiar description of the conflict as a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.

Efforts on the part of the yeoman class to avoid taxes and impressment were further evidence of heightened class awareness or, more precisely, identification of the planters with a government grown too meddlesome. Overt Unionism in the Confederacy, too, tended to be strongest in those subregions, mountains, and swamps inhabited almost exclusively by nonplanters. Class interest was one of the motivations behind some Southerners’ decisions to enlist in the Union army or aid Federal troops when they entered the South as invaders.
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The degree and nature of disaffection in the wartime South and the precision with which dissenters identified the cause with planter interests inimical to their own are open to question. The masses who risked their lives in Confederate armies were of the same class as those who engaged in anti-Confederate activity. The Confederate quest for home rule never became a contest over who should rule at home. Yet the fact of disaffection and its identification with the yeoman-poor white class are empirical evidence of a quickened sense of class consciousness in the Confederate South.

Class resentment inspired disloyal activity to an unknown degree in the Confederate countryside; in the urban Confederacy, however, indications of class awareness were more direct and more easily defined. Skilled laborers were rarer in the South than in the North, and many of them realized their value in the marketplace. Working people in Southern cities at one time or another engaged in strikes, attempted collective bargaining, applied class-inspired political pressure, and on occasion, as mentioned, resorted to food riots. These actions were neither numerous nor widespread, and they were never completely successful. That they occurred at all in any numbers was significant.
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Perhaps the instance which best revealed the depth and sophistication of a nascent labor movement in the Confederacy occurred in Richmond in the fall of 1863. The Virginia General Assembly was debating a bill to fix maximum prices for items of food. State Senator for the Richmond area George W. Randolph declared that he intended to vote against the measure unless instructed otherwise by his constituents. Accordingly a mass meeting of working men convened to express their approval of statewide price controls. In the course of the meeting, on October 10, the “very large crowd” adopted a series of resolutions, one of which proclaimed:

As free men we do abhor and detest the idea that the rich must take care of the poor, because we know that without labor and production the man with his money could not exist, from the fact that he consumes all and produces nothing: and that such a dependence would tend to degrade rather than elevate the human race.
⁵³

This classic statement of the labor theory of value did not impress a majority of Richmond’s burgers, however. In a poll taken several days later, voters rejected the price control scheme by better than a three-to-one majority.
⁵⁴
The General Assembly, too, defeated the bill. The Confederacy never became a haven for the proletariat, nor was it seething with unrest among the working class. In the cities, as in the army and in the countryside, the planter class overcame challenges to its hegemony. Still there was ferment, more than there had been before or would be again for some years to come.

The most obvious reason why most white working-class Confederates were unable to take better advantage of the South’s need for labor was the pressure of black Confederates. The classic example of the effect of black labor upon white occurred in a Richmond cemetery in August 1864. One morning a crew of white gravediggers went on strike against the city in hopes of getting higher wages. Almost immediately the municipal authorities hired a crew of blacks to dig the graves. When the white gravediggers learned of their replacement, they returned to the cemetery, drove the blacks away, and resumed digging graves. The black men had broken the strike and then absorbed the anger of the white workers, all within a single day.
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Black Southerners served the cause in more important ways than as scabs and whipping boys. Only because slaves remained in the fields could such a large percentage of white men fight in Southern armies. More directly, the Confederacy employed or impressed black laborers to construct fortifications, drive supply wagons, and cook for the troops. In hospitals both bonded and free blacks worked as nurses and orderlies. Just as in peacetime, wherever there was work, black Southerners were involved, and Confederate blacks were draft exempt. Accordingly Confederate, state, and local governments, as well as private enterprises, hired or impressed black workers in large numbers.
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Black labor was vital to the Confederacy and the black impact upon Southern life was, if anything, greater in wartime than in peacetime. Yet the converse was true as well. The Confederate experience had a profound effect upon black life in the South—so much so that by mid-1863 the Southern black experience had undergone subtle but profound metamorphoses.
⁵⁷

At the base of the slave system during the ante-bellum period was an interdependent human relationship. In relatively stable times before 1861, the institutional norm, if such a thing existed, prescribed a dependence of slaveholder upon slave for labor and deference, and a dependence of slave upon slaveholder for paternal mastery and maintenance. Within this essentially seignioral institution, the crucial equation was human.

During its early months, the Confederacy witnessed little change in the master-slave relationship. Instead, white Southerners responded to fears, at times approaching paranoia, for slavery’s institutional sanctity. The hysteria which followed John Brown’s raid in 1859 did not suddenly disappear, and many slaveholders perceived of Union armies and the threat of invasion as abolitionism reaching its violent extreme. The external threat to slavery triggered concern for its internal security. Accordingly many Confederate communities took elaborate precautions against insurrections. Slave patrols were active, and rumors of plots among slaves led in many places to mass arrests and trials by ordeal for the unfortunate accused. When white men of a community marched off to war, those whites who remained doubled their vigilance and found meaning in “shifty looks” and “downcast eyes” among blacks, but when the direst predictions of racial blood bath failed to materialize, white fears and repressive measures abated somewhat.
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For black Southerners did not mount any mass slave revolts during the Confederate period. An estimated 180,000 black men joined Union armies and fought the slaveholders, but Southern blacks en masse never fought the Confederacy from within. The common explanation for this has been the legendary advice given by an older slave to a younger one. The old man drew an analogy between the war and two dogs fighting over a bone. The dogs were Northern and Southern armies and the bone black people. In both cases the bone had no part in the fight. There was truth in the analogy, and for the most part Southern slaves adopted the advice and pursued a policy of wait and see. Yet, the myth of the “loyal darky” concocted by Southern whites after the war was indeed myth.
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The black experience in the wartime South was more subtle and complex than the simplistic alternatives of mass revolt, passive “bone,” or “Uncle Tom” loyalty.