A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom

A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom

by David Williams
A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom

A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom

by David Williams

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Overview

“Does for the Civil War period what Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States did for the study of American history in general.” —Library Journal
 
Historian David Williams has written the first account of the American Civil War as viewed though the eyes of ordinary people—foot soldiers, slaves, women, prisoners of war, draft resisters, Native Americans, and others. Richly illustrated with little-known anecdotes and firsthand testimony, this path-breaking narrative moves beyond presidents and generals to tell a new and powerful story about America’s most destructive conflict.
 
A People’s History of the Civil War is a “readable social history” that “sheds fascinating light” on this crucial period. In so doing, it recovers the long-overlooked perspectives and forgotten voices of one of the defining chapters of American history (Publishers Weekly).
 
“Meticulously researched and persuasively argued.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781595587473
Publisher: New Press, The
Publication date: 07/19/2019
Series: New Press People's History
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 322
Sales rank: 628,511
File size: 6 MB

About the Author

David Williams is the author of Rich Man's War and Plain Folk in a Rich Man's War. He is a professor of history at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

"All for the Benefit of the Wealthy"

But whoever waited for the common people when a great move was to be made — We must make the move and force them to follow.

— ALFRED P. ALDRICH, SOUTH CAROLINA SECESSIONIST

There was an undoubted majority of the people who desired to remain in the Union. ... The election machinery was all in the hands of the secessionists, who manipulated the election to suit their end.

— JOHN FRANCIS TENNEY, FLORIDA VOTER

"Shameless and Unconcealed Intimidation"

In November 1860, in the heart of Georgia's cotton belt, a large crowd of local citizens gathered at Crawfordville to declare: "We do not consider the election of Lincoln and Hamlin as sufficient cause for Disunion or Secession." A mass meeting in Walker County expressed the same sentiment: "We are not of the opinion that the election of any man in accordance with the prescribed forms of the Constitution is sufficient cause to disrupt the ties which bind us to the Union." In Harris County, the newspaper editor stated firmly that "we are a Union loving people here, and will never forsake the old 'Star Spangled Banner.'" To stress the point, he printed the names of 175 local men, all pledged to "preserve the honor and rights of the South in the Union."

Mechanics in Frederick County, Virginia, met to denounce the "folly and sinister selfishness of the demagogues of the South." Workers in Portsmouth were equally stirred: "We look upon any attempt to break up this Government or dissolve this Union as an attack upon the rights of the people of the whole country." A convention of laborers in Nashville, Tennessee, declared their "undying love for the Union" and called secessionist efforts "treason ... by designing and mad politicians." At Lake Jackson Church near Tallahassee, Florida, there assembled a crowd of four hundred "whose heart beat time to the music of the Union." In the Confederacy's future Virginia capital, Union supporters organized a mass meeting of the "working men of Richmond" and called on the government to put secession down. All across the South, thousands of worried plain folk did their best to head off secession. While most had opposed Lincoln's candidacy, a similar majority saw no reason to destroy the country over his election. Three-fourths of southern whites held no slaves and tended to believe, as one of Georgia's plain folk put it, "that this fuss was all for the benefit of the wealthy."

Still, secessionists pressed their advantage for all they could in the face of popular opposition. Alfred P. Aldrich, a South Carolina legislator and staunch secessionist, acknowledged that most southern plain folk opposed disunion. "But," he asked, "whoever waited for the common people when a great move was to be made — We must make the move and force them to follow." Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia likewise expressed his determination to see the South out of the Union whether most southerners supported it or not. "Give me the sword!" he blustered. "But if you do not place it in my hands, before God I will take it!" When he learned of Toombs's threat, one Georgia newspaper editor wrote: "Let him take it, and, by way of doing his country a great service, let him run about six inches of it into his left breast."

Secessionists employed more than words in pursuit of disunion. One southerner recalled that secessionists "used the most shameless and unconcealed intimidation" to suppress their opponents. A secession meeting in Richmond turned violent when twenty or so "muscular young men" attacked several unionists who tried to disrupt a secessionist speech by whistling "Yankee Doodle." That was hardly the worst of it. In Mississippi's Panola County, a group of vigilantes announced their intention to "take notice of, and punish all and every persons who may ... prove themselves untrue to the South, or Southern Rights, in any way whatever." There was no mistaking their meaning. In Tallahatchie County, a secessionist gang of "Minute Men" lynched seven local unionists. In Florida, secessionists formed armed bands of "Regulators" who ambushed Union men by night. So the Civil War did not begin at Fort Sumter. It did not begin as a war between North and South. It began, and continued throughout, as a war between southerners themselves.

Animosities that tore the South apart from within had been building for decades and had much to do with a widening gap between rich and poor. On the Civil War's eve, nearly half the South's personal income went to just over a thousand families. The region's poorest half held only 5 percent of its agricultural wealth. Land and slave ownership dominated the South's economy, but most white southerners held no slaves and many owned no land. According to one antebellum resident, in southwest Georgia's Early County "there was a body of land east of Blakely ... which made 216 square miles, and not one foot of it was owned by a poor man." John Welch, a poor farmer in western Tennessee, complained that the slaveholders of his district "owned nearly all the land and they wanted to keep it."

Opportunities for upward mobility had not been so limited just a generation earlier. Land was relatively cheap in the 1820s and '30s after the Indians were forced into western exile. Wealthy men from crowded coastal regions bought much of the land, but small farmers too could get loans to buy land and slaves. Cotton prices were on the rise, and there was every reason to expect that loans could easily be repaid. Some yeoman farmers who were lucky enough to have good land and good weather became affluent slaveholders and even planters.

But with a single act, Congress put an end to the hopes of millions. So did a resulting economic depression, the Panic of 1837. The year before, at the urging of Andrew Jackson — proclaimed friend of the common man — Congress passed the Specie Circular Act, which made it difficult for small farmers to buy land. No longer would the government accept bank notes in payment for the stolen Indian real estate it held. Only gold or silver would do. Few plain folk had the required "hard money" on hand, nor did they have the collateral with which to borrow it. Successful loan applications fell dramatically and small banks across the country began to fail. The resulting depression helped drive cotton prices under as well, and they continued falling into the 1840s. With their staple-crop income cut nearly in half, debt-ridden farmers found it impossible to keep up loan payments. Their land and slaves were repossessed and sold at auction, usually to already well-established slaveholders. The sheriff in Henry County, Alabama, auctioned off so many small farms that enraged plain folk demanded his resignation.

Some farmers were able to keep a few acres and eke out a living as lesser yeomen. But many lost everything and fell into tenancy and sharecropping. When the cotton market finally recovered, affluent slaveholders held nearly all the South's best land. Most other farmers found themselves trapped in a system of poverty from which few could ever escape even with a move to cheaper lands toward the west. Historian Victoria Bynum recently noted that "most poor whites' geographic mobility grew out of class immobility rather than frontier opportunities. ... Many moved time and again in search of elusive prosperity."

"The slaveholders buy up all the fertile lands," recalled a disgruntled Mississippian who witnessed the process firsthand. "Hence the poor are crowded out, and if they remain in the vicinity of the place of their nativity, they must occupy the poor tracts whose sterility does not excite the cupidity of their rich neighbors." That gap between rich and poor continued to widen through the 1850s. Planters bought up more and more land, forcing a rise in land prices and making it nearly impossible for smaller farmers to increase their holdings or for tenant farmers to buy any land at all. Wealth in terms of slaveholding was also becoming concentrated in fewer hands. During the last decade of the antebellum period, the proportion of slaveholders in the free population dropped by 20 percent. Economic circumstances beyond their control forced many yeomen into landless tenancy — so many that some commentators predicted the complete disappearance of small independent farmers from the South. By 1860 at least 25 percent of southern farmers were tenants, and more were joining their landless ranks every day.

"To Obtain the Liberty of My Countrymen"

At the bottom of the social scale in a caste of their own, separate and distinct from the white class structure, were free blacks and slaves. Numbering roughly four and a half million in 1860, they made up nearly a sixth of the nation's population and well over a third of that in the slave states. About four million were held in slavery.

Despite the social chasm between them, living and working conditions for slaves were not altogether different from those of many southern whites. In describing a typical day's labor, one slave remembered getting up every morning before sunrise to work in the fields. After a short dinner break at noon, it was back to the fields until dark. And the women, she said, worked just like the men. The same was true among white tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and lesser yeomen of both genders. Similarly, neither slaves nor poor whites had much hope of ever improving their condition. Poor whites may have been free in the strictest sense, but freedom meant little without opportunities for economic improvement. On the other hand, African Americans held by law as property bore physical and psychological burdens from which poor whites were mercifully free. Threats of violence and forced separation from loved ones were constantly present in the slave's world.

Slaveholder claims to the contrary, the "wise master," as historian Kenneth Stampp put it, "did not take seriously the belief that Negroes were natural-born slaves. He knew better. He knew that Negroes freshly imported from Africa had to be broken into bondage; that each succeeding generation had to be carefully trained. This was no easy task, for the bondsman rarely submitted willingly. Moreover, he rarely submitted completely. In most cases there was no end to the need for control — at least not until old age reduced the slave to a condition of helplessness." Control of elderly slaves was hardly a concern in any case. Less than four in a hundred ever lived to see age sixty.

Slave resistance took many forms, the most celebrated of which was the underground railroad. Harriet Tubman, perhaps the most successful of the railroad's "conductors," led hundreds of slaves to freedom. Rewards offered for her capture totaled upwards of $40,000, but she was never caught. Neither was Arnold Gragston, an enslaved Kentuckian who over several years ferried hundreds of fellow bondsmen and women across the Ohio River before making his own escape. Harry Smith helped escapees cross the river at Louisville, but never escaped himself because he did not want to leave his family. Thanks to Tubman, Gragston, Smith, and many others like them, by 1860 more than one hundred thousand enslaved people had escaped.

Though most blacks remained in bondage, they still resisted. Slaves engineered work slowdowns. They feigned illness and ignorance. They sabotaged or destroyed equipment, or used the threat of it as a bargaining chip for better treatment. When they failed to get it, suicide was not uncommon. Some slaves were treated so badly that death was a welcomed relief. One Georgia slave took her own life by swallowing strychnine. In another case, two enslaved parents agreed to "send the souls of their children to Heaven rather than have them descend to the hell of slavery." After releasing their children's souls, they released their own. Another enslaved mother killed all thirteen of her children "rather than have them suffer slavery." Two boatloads of Africans newly arrived in Charleston committed mass suicide by starving themselves to death.

Sometimes slaves killed their oppressors. Most famous for its violence was Nat Turner's 1831 Virginia rebellion in which well over fifty whites died. There were many others who fought back or conspired to do so. In 1800, over a thousand slaves marched on Richmond. The governor called out hundreds of armed militiamen to turn them back. When asked why he had rebelled, one slave calmly replied: "I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British officers and put to trial by them. I have ventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am willing to sacrifice to their cause; and I beg, as a favour, that I may be immediately led to execution. I know that you have predetermined to shed my blood, why then all this mockery of a trial?" There were similar efforts to obtain liberty in Petersburg and Norfolk.

In 1811, four hundred Louisiana slaves rose up for freedom. A year later, there was rebellion in New Orleans. In 1837, slaves near that city formed a rebel band and killed several whites before they were captured. Slaves fought back individually too. In 1849, a slave in Chambers County, Alabama, shot his owner. In Macon County, a slave "violently attacked with a knife and cut to pieces" his overseer. A Florida slave killed his owner with an axe as the white man attempted to administer "punishment." When Edward Covey tried to bind and beat Frederick Douglass, Douglass fought Covey off. From that day forward, Douglass later wrote, "I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me." Covey never touched him again.

Douglass was fortunate to escape slavery before resistance cost him his life. Most others were not so lucky. Slaves were defined as property by slave-state courts and, in the Dred Scott case of 1857, by the United States Supreme Court. As personal property, slaves were subject to the absolute authority of slaveholders and to whatever controls they chose to employ. As one member of the Georgia Supreme Court insisted, "subordination can only be maintained by the right to give moderate correction — a right similar to that which exists in the father over his children."

There were, however, laws limiting abusiveness of parents over their children. Slaves enjoyed no such legal protection. And the definition of "moderate correction" was left entirely to the slaveholder. "Should death ensue by accident, while this slave is thus receiving moderate correction," recalled a British visitor, "the constitution of Georgia kindly denominates the offence justifiable homicide." The Reverend W.B. Allen, a former Alabama slave, personally knew those in bondage who were beaten to death for nothing more than being off the plantation without written permission. Other offenses that might result in extreme punishment were lying, loitering, stealing, and "talking back to —'sassing'— a white person."

Because slaves had monetary value, death as a direct result of discipline was unusual. More often, the objective of physical punishment was to inflict as much pain as possible without doing permanent damage. Scarring or mutilation might decrease the slave's resale value or ability to work. In 1859, a student at East Alabama Male College (now Auburn University) wrote home advising his mother not to purchase a slave who obviously had "been very much abused." Wide leather straps or perforated wooden paddles were more common than whips. They were just as painful but left no permanent marks that might identify the slave as a "troublemaker" to potential buyers.

Overseers frequently administered beatings to slaves in the "buck" or "rolling Jim" positions. In each case the slave was stripped naked and bound tight. One former slave remembered the buck as "making the Negro squat, running a stout stick under his bended knee, and then tying his hands firmly to the stick — between the knees. Then the lash was laid on his back parts."

Another common torture was to hoist slaves up by their thumbs, with only their toes touching the ground, and beat them. The slave might be "further tormented by having his wounds 'doctored' with salt and red pepper." One former slave remembered that his owner's "favorite form of punishment was to take a man (or woman) to the edge of the plantation where a rail fence was located. His head was then placed between two rails so that escape was impossible and he was whipped until the overseer was exhausted. This was an almost daily occurrence, administered on the slightest provocation." After recalling the variety of tortures inflicted on slaves, one freedman told an interviewer in the 1930s: "Sir, you can never know what some slaves endured."

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "A People's History of the Civil War"
by .
Copyright © 2005 David Williams.
Excerpted by permission of The New Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

SERIES PREFACE by Howard Zinn,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
Introduction: "The People at War",
1 "All for the Benefit of the Wealthy",
2 "The Brunt Is Thrown upon the Working Classes",
3 "The Women Rising",
4 "We Poor Soldiers",
5 "Come In Out of the Draft",
6 "My God! Are We Free?",
7 "Indians Here Have No Fight with the Whites",
8 "Was the War in Vain?",
Afterword,
NOTES,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
INDEX,

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