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Was the American Civil War inevitable? Why was the Battle of Gettysburg so important? What were the lives of women like in the North and the South during the Civil War? Was slavery the root cause of the Civil War? What are Civil War reenactors? Historian Peter Carmichael of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro answers these and other questions in this question-and-answer series. Carmichael also discusses the post-Civil War Reconstruction Period in some detail.
Q: Where should I go to try to find information about a relative who fought in the American Civil War?
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A: Once you have the full name of your ancestor, it is important to find the designation of his unit, such as 2nd Virginia infantry, 5th New Jersey Cavalry, etc. Once you have that basic information, the best place to turn is Broadfoot Publishing Company in Wilmington, North Carolina. They have compiled an index to all the service records for Union and Confederate soldiers in the American Civil War. Broadfoot’s published volumes can be found at most university libraries. Some of this information can also be found at Civil War National Parks where public terminals, connected to the Broadfoot databases, are available to the public at a nominal fee. You can also contact Broadfoot directly.
Q: Why do some Civil War battles have two names, such as the Battle of Bull Run and the Battle of Manassas?
A: During the American Civil War, Confederates routinely named a battle after the nearest town, whereas the Federals used the name of the nearest stream. For instance, the Federals called the September 17, 1862 battle in Maryland the Battle of Antietam, after a nearby creek, while the Confederates called it the Battle of Sharpsburg after the nearby town.
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Q: What were the black codes of 1865?
A: The black codes, initially created in Mississippi and copied by most of the South, created a labor system that replicated slavery.
Although the codes did grant blacks some rights that they did not enjoy as slaves, such as legalized marriages, the codes severely limited their social mobility by making it impossible for black workers to sell their labor to competing landlords.
White Southerners not only used the codes to recreate gang labor, but they also used the codes to strip blacks of their newly gained political rights. In Mississippi, for instance, blacks could not buy or rent farmland. The black codes demonstrated to the North and the Republican-controlled Federal government that the ex-slaveholders were not going to abandon their way of life just because Confederate armies had capitulated.
Stronger measures from the Federal government were required, many Republicans realized, if the fruits of victory were to be realized. After fours years of bloodshed, Northerners did not want the divisive issues of slavery to reappear in the South in a new guise. Northerners wanted the South to be remade in the image of a free labor society, in which workers could sell their labor as a means to social mobility.
By 1867, the start of Congressional Reconstruction, the black codes were successfully overturned in large part due to the occupation of Federal troops and the Freedmen’s Bureau.
Q: What are some of the best books that provide a general overview of the American Civil War?
A: The finest one-volume overview of the American Civil War is James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. Not only does it cover the coming of the war, offering a terrific discussion of the political and social differences between the North and South, but it also examines the military campaigns within their proper political context. A terrific overview for young people is The American Heritage New History of the Civil War by Bruce Catton. This volume is full of wonderful illustrations and battle maps, and it is written in an accessible style for any age group.
Q: Do you think the American Civil War was avoidable or inevitable?
A: Inevitability is something that I personally shy away from because it takes away the possibilities of history. It creates a model in which human decision and actions are lost in grand, sweeping events.
With that said, it seems to me that the Civil War would have been difficult for the North and South to avoid. Each section had its own economic, political, and social systems, and these systems were based on different labor structures.
The issue of slave expansion in the territories divided the nation along sectional lines. Republicans wanted land to remain open to free settlers—not necessarily because they were abolitionists (although some were), but because they believed a man had a right to own property and earn the fruits of his labor in order to move up the social ladder and create a moral society.
Slaveholders, on the other hand, wanted to exercise their constitutional right as a way to expand their slave society while keeping political equality with the North. Slavery, from an economic, political, and social perspective, made sectional conflict nearly inevitable. For some good information on this subject, I recommend reading the work of Kenneth Stampp, David Potter, James McPherson, and Eric Foner.
Q: What were the primary weapons used by both sides in the American Civil War?
A: For both sides, the standard weapon during the American Civil War was the United States Rifle Musket Model 1861 and, with some modifications, the 1863 model. The Springfield armory in Massachusetts produced 800,000 during the war, and other arms factories made an additional 900,000. It is estimated that the Confederates captured 150,000 of the 1861 and 1863 models. The Confederates were also fond of the Enfield Rifle Musket, a make similar to the Springfield but made in England.
The United States model weighed 9.75 lb and fired a .58 Minie bullet at an effective range of 500 yards. It was deadly accurate at a range of less than 275 yards. Although some have disputed the impact of the rifled weapon, it is clear that it made the grand frontal charge a thing of the past. The bayonet no longer decided a battle’s outcome. Civil War officers never fully adjusted to the increased range of the rifled weapon. An experienced soldier could fire his weapon three times a minute.
Q: What was the Compromise of 1877?
A: In the 1876 presidential election, the Republicans ran Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes, who opposed Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden of New York. Although Tilden had a clear majority of 250,000 in the popular vote, violence plagued Southern elections, keeping some quarter of a million Republican voters from the polls. The outcome of the electoral college was contested because both parties claimed South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. Without these states, Hayes would be defeated. Fortunately for Hayes, each state was still in Republican control, and the party’s canvassing boards disqualified enough Democratic votes to give each state to Hayes.
Democrats rallied together, angry that the election had been stolen from them. They threatened a filibuster to prevent the counting of the electoral votes. Republicans responded by meeting with Southern Democrats on February 26 at the Wormley Hotel in Washington, D.C. There they hatched the Compromise of 1877, an informal agreement that stipulated the removal of federal troops from the South and the promise not to oppose the new Democratic state government. Democrats agreed to recognize Hayes’s election and to respect African American rights. The latter they quickly forgot.
Q: Many captured Union troops were kept in the tobacco warehouses in Danville, Virginia, during the Civil War. I am a citizen of Danville and have an interest in its local history. Do you know anything about these Danville prisons, such as what the conditions were like (food, comforts, medical care) and how many prisoners were held there? What happened to the prisoners at the end of the war? Were any of them transferred to Andersonville?
A: There was one prison established in Danville, I believe, during the first quarter of 1864. The idea was to reduce the logistical burden on Richmond. The Danville, Salisbury, and Andersonville prisons were all part of that strategy.
Conditions in the prisons were not good, but they varied among the units in the South. Andersonville was far worse than the rest. Because of the poor sanitation and inadequate nutrition, disease and sickness were the primary killers.
You should contact the Virginia Historical Society for more information on the Danville prison. For a general discussion, see William Hesseltine's small pamphlet on military prisons. Another good source is William Marvel’s book Andersonville: The Last Depot.
Q: What were the effects of the Compromise of 1877?
A: The compromise marked the “official” end of Reconstruction, but the North’s commitment to African American rights had been on the decline since Grant’s election in 1868.
Moreover, the withdrawal of federal troops doomed Republican governments in South Carolina and Louisiana. By 1877 the entire South was under the control of the Redeemers (a self-proclaimed title), men who defended white rule, segregation, and an agricultural system that impoverished blacks and many small white farmers. In the end, the Redeemers represented the interests of the South’s wealthiest class, often gaining the consent of lower-class whites through a shameless racial appeal.
Q: Is there a correlation between the Kansas-Nebraska Act and a documented strategy by slaveholders to exploit slave labor in the construction of westward railroads and perhaps in the mining of silver and gold mines of the West? Agrarian slavery was already in decline in the South prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, and Mississippi had already outlawed importation of new slaves into the state by the late 1850s. Additionally, slaves may have had more value than in the agricultural sector, which may have been a great incentive for secession.
A: To my knowledge, there was no organized strategy on the part of slaveholders, either before or after the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to promote the economic benefits of slavery in the territories.
The stance of the Republican Party (which was formed in 1854 by the badly divided Whig party and antislavery Democrats) against the expansion of slavery in the territories angered Southerners on a number of levels. First, Southerners considered the western territory as economically viable for slavery as the South and a place to expand it through farming, industry, mines, or railroads. Republican attacks against the expansion of slavery also violated the South’s sense of honor. White Southerners considered any criticism of the institution as a direct assault against everything they stood for, past and present.
This helps explain the visceral response that the South had toward any expression of antislavery. The constitutional issue over whether slavery could be expanded into the territories fed the white Southerners’ sense of personal injustice, even for those who had no intention of taking their slaves west. As citizens of the country, they could not understand why they were being denied their right to take their property into the territories. Most white Southerners condemned those who accepted Republican demands and called them submissionists. In his classic book, Southern Honor, Bertram Wyatt-Brown explores how Southerners felt compelled to defend slavery as part of their ethical code of honor.
Q: What were Union general Ulysses S. Grant's greatest strengths as a commander?
A: Unfortunately, too many people view Grant as an alcoholic who stumbled to victory by using his superior numbers in a war of attrition. This view is a terrible distortion of the historical record. Grant, like Robert E. Lee, was primarily a general of maneuver. And like Lee, he was not afraid to bloody up his army with the hope of achieving a spectacular victory. The results were mixed. Grant made a mistake when he charged the enemy’s lines at the Battle of Cold Harbor on June 3, 1864. However, this situation was the exception. For the most part, Grant avoided costly frontal assaults and relied on flanking maneuvers. During his 1863 Campaign of Vicksburg, Grant dazzled his adversary, slashing across enemy territory before encircling the town
If he had not been so determined, Grant’s careful planning and innovative tactics would have been wasted during a number of campaigns. His 1864 Virginia campaign illustrates his dogged determination—his refusal to give up—even when the reverses mounted and it appeared that he would never destroy Lee’s army. After the disaster at Cold Harbor, Grant did not retire to Washington, nor did he make excuses to Lincoln as some of his predecessors had done. Instead, he embarked on a turning movement that took his army below the James River. Lee was completely stumped by Grant’s surprise march, and Petersburg nearly fell into Union hands.
Q: Why was the Battle of Gettysburg important?
A: No other Civil War battle has greater name recognition than the Battle of Gettysburg. To many, it stands as the last chance for the South to achieve independence. While the loss at Gettysburg was certainly a severe blow to the Confederacy, few at the time considered the South defeated. No one claimed then that Gettysburg was the great turning point of the war. This interpretation gained popularity after the end of the war.
Although their pride was wounded and many were discouraged, Robert E. Lee’s soldiers returned to Virginia believing they could defeat the Federals on their home soil. Their faith was not misplaced. They battled Grant’s army to a stalemate during 1864. Gettysburg should be remembered as Lee’s last chance to win a meaningful victory on enemy soil, a victory that could have earned the Confederacy European recognition and fueled antiwar sentiment in the North. It is impossible to say whether it would have automatically translated into Confederate independence.
Nonetheless, Civil War buffs love to speculate about the “what ifs” of Gettysburg. Lost in this counterfactual discussion is the significant fact that Lee’s army suffered more than 25,000 casualties. Without those men, Lee never again had the offensive capacity to embark on daring turning maneuvers, to slash at his adversary’s flanks, and to dictate the terms of battle, the very basis of Lee’s brilliant victories that had propelled his army to Gettysburg.
Q: In Confederate Tide Rising, Joe Harsh talks about how Robert E. Lee took command after Johnston was wounded at Seven Pines. Johnston had begged to consolidate all Confederate forces in the east but was turned down by Davis and Lee. Yet when Lee took over, one of the first things he did was try to get as many troops as he could under his command. Why the change in his thinking? Do you feel Lee and Davis gave Johnston the shaft by not listening to him when, as commander in the field, he was expressing his thoughts?
A: I think the situation outside Richmond, when Lee finally took over command, had become so desperate that consolidation was necessary to protect the city. Johnston's earlier plea for more troops came at a time when a number of Union offensives were presented in Virginia, not to mention that Johnston was not making the best use of the troops that he already had under his command. Finally, I think that Lee was simply more persuasive than Johnston and was better equipped to get Jefferson Davis to meet his demands.
Q: Where do the largest Civil War reenactments take place?
A: Each year there are at least one or two events that draw the largest number of authentic Civil War reenactors, from 15,000 to 30,000 soldiers. Civil War News and the Camp Chase Gazette carry information on upcoming events. Only the July 4th reenactment at Gettysburg, which occurs every year, consistently draws significant numbers of reenactors.
Q: What were Confederate general Robert E. Lee's greatest strengths as a commander?
A: Robert E. Lee possessed many admirable gifts as a general. Of all his abilities, audacity made him a master of so many battlefields. Unlike many Civil War officers, Lee never considered losing. Such a tentative approach left an army commander on the defensive, waiting for the enemy to dictate the terms of battle. Lee, on the other hand, found a way, often against great odds, to keep the initiative and control the flow of events. His spectacular victories at the Second Battle of Bull Run and at the Battle of Chancellorsville attest to his boldness, his determination to fight the battle of his choosing.
Lee was also careful to channel his aggressiveness into well-formulated and realistic plans. Once his plans were in place, he left his subordinates to execute their orders. He did not micromanage his army. This style of leadership brought him amazing victories, though they generally came at a high human price. Some scholars, most notably Alan Nolan, have criticized Lee for losing men that the Confederacy could not replace. Nolan believes that Lee bled the Confederacy to death, even though his battlefield victories boosted Southern morale and demoralized Northerners. While this interpretation is debatable, it is clear that the Confederacy had its best chance of victory with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. No other Southern officer came close to achieving Lee’s remarkable feats.
Q: In your opinion, how did the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln affect relations between the North and the South? How would Reconstruction have been different if Lincoln had lived?
A: What-if scenarios abound in the study of the Civil War. In most cases, such counterfactual exercises are not fruitful lines of intellectual inquiry. Many believe that if Lincoln had lived, a more benevolent federal policy would have been imposed on the South, leading to a smoother and less violent transition of the former Confederate states to the Union.
There are two serious flaws with such a scenario. First, Lincoln, in the months leading up to his assassination, was assuming a more aggressive policy toward the South’s slaveholding class. He recognized that the federal government could not allow home-rule, because white Southerners would reconstruct a society that replicated their way of life before the war. Although Lincoln had offered a very generous plan of Reconstruction in 1863—called the Ten Percent Plan—he was beginning to understand that freed blacks needed federal protection, that prominent slaveholders and Confederate officials needed to be stripped of their power, and that federal troops needed to occupy the South.
The second flaw with the belief that Lincoln would have ensured a less vengeful Reconstruction draws from the curious assumption that the true victims of Reconstruction were white Southerners who were ruled by carpetbaggers and hapless blacks. Although there was corruption and misrule by Reconstruction governments, white Southerners did not suffer the degree of persecution that movies such as Gone With the Wind have conveyed to the American public.
Q: Why did Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 cause the Southern states to secede?
A: Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party was based in the North and lacked any substantial following in the South. From the inception of the party, Southerners denounced the Republican Party for its antislavery stance. Indeed, by 1860 the Republican Party firmly stood behind the platform of not allowing slavery to expand into the territories.
Lincoln refused to compromise on the issue of expanding slavery into the territories, although he promised not to interfere with the institution in its existing states. However, a study of Lincoln as a public speaker maintains that in the 175 speeches he gave from 1854 to 1860, he consistently argued for slavery’s exclusion from the territories as the first step toward putting the institution on the path to ultimate extinction. White Southerners believed the Constitution gave them the right to take their slaves wherever they wanted. Even nonslaveholders in the South would not tolerate what they considered a violation of their fundamental right to own and transport slaves. Many white Southerners believed that to accept Republican rule was a dishonorable act because Lincoln’s party wanted to deny Southerners the same rights granted to all Americans. In the end, white Southerners saw Lincoln and his Republican Party as the aggressors, whose attacks against the institution of slavery signified a general assault against the South.
Q: What is one of today's most common misconceptions about the North prior to the American Civil War?
A: Most Americans see the American Civil War as a contest between the agrarian South and the industrial North. This is a fundamental misreading of the pre-Civil War United States. The North, like the South, was an overwhelming rural land with an economy that was defined by commercial agriculture. It is true that the nation’s industrial base was centered in the Northeast and was growing, connected by an impressive transportation system, but most Northerners still worked on farms in 1861. The rapid industrialization of the Northeast actually complimented the South’s agricultural base. Even though many Southerners sent their raw materials, particularly cotton, to Northern factories and markets, they increasingly became dissatisfied with this relationship. By the 1840s, there was a cry throughout the South to industrialize, to become economically self-sufficient, and to break the dependent relationship with Northern industries. In the end, Northern and Southern economies paralleled each other in their commitment to modernize, but the North certainly enjoyed a head start in the race toward industrialization. The key difference remained that the North was predominantly a free labor society while the South was based on slave labor.
Q: What is one of today's most common misconceptions about the South prior to the American Civil War?
A: Because of movies such as Gone With the Wind, Americans tend to romanticize the Old South as the land of “moonlight and magnolias” where white men acted like chivalrous knights, women behaved like refined belles, and blacks willingly accepted their roles as slaves. As a result, modern observers tend to see the antebellum South as a land free of conflict, where harmony prevailed among all people. This static image overlooks the deep tensions that fragmented society. Great disparities existed in wealth and power among whites, most of whom did not own slaves. Poorer whites were fiercely proud of their independence and resented slaveholders. In addition, blacks did not embrace slavery as a benevolent institution. Slaves resisted the authority of their masters on a daily basis, always trying to gain more autonomy and freedom. Violence or the threat of it, not mutual affection, held the institution together.
In the end, the Old South should not be singled out for internal contradictions and tensions, which can be found in all societies. At the same time, it is irresponsible to deny the inherent conflict that existed among slaveholders, nonslaveholders, free blacks, and slaves. No historian has been able to capture the diversity of experience and the daily struggles of the Old South like the novelist William Faulkner did. In The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Abasalom, Absalom! (1936), Faulkner stripped away the romantic layers of the region to portray the gritty, hardscrabble, and often violent existence of those people who lived in the Old South.
Q: How did the Union Army recruit soldiers to fight in the American Civil War?
A: Federal officials were met with an onslaught of recruits in 1861 when the Civil War began; the number of recruits reflected the tremendous enthusiasm that gripped Northern society. Most of the recruitment was done at the local level. Soldiers would normally sign a volunteer enlistment form that contained the signer’s intention to serve in the army for the time specified. Northern governors offered about 300,000 troops by April 1861, but Congress had not given President Abraham Lincoln the authority to accept that many volunteers for Federal service. On April 15, 1861, Lincoln called for 75,000 men to serve in a three-month militia. In July Congress authorized a volunteer army of 500,000 men. The flow of volunteers dried up quickly, however. By November 1862 state governors reported to Lincoln that they could not raise enough troops for the Union armies. The Federal government passed the Enrollment Act of 1863 (also known as the Draft Act). It forced Union officials to institute a draft. The draft met with uneven success and sparked considerable protest in the North.
Q: How did the general public in the North react to the outbreak of the American Civil War?
A: During the winter of 1860-1861, emotions in the North had already reached a fiery pitch. When the South fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, Northerners became enraged with war fever. The United States flag had been insulted.
But emotions alone did not carry the North to war. Most Northerners, although morally ambivalent about slavery, had long believed that a slave power had taken control of the country. This slave power wanted nothing less than the economic and political control of the Western territories as its final goal.
Northerners were further convinced that slaveholders had little regard for democracy because the South seceded after Abraham Lincoln was elected in a fair presidential election in the fall in 1860. The majority of Northerners, consequently, rushed to arms to preserve the Union in a war against what they perceived to be a tyrannical slave power.
Q: Why did race relations in the South deteriorate so dramatically after Reconstruction ended?
A: The codification of segregation accelerated near the end of the 19th century. During Reconstruction, however, there was a surprising degree of interaction between whites and blacks. As C. Van Woodward has made clear in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Southern whites and blacks did not immediately turn to a system of segregation laws to govern race relations. With a few exceptions, blacks and whites shared the same railroad cars, ate at the same taverns, and congregated in the same public places.
The South, however, was far from a racial utopia. At the heart of the conflict were conflicting visions of freedom. White Southerners, particularly former Confederates, wanted their former slaves to return as laborers to work in gangs in a system that resembled slavery. They wanted to closely supervise black family life, as well as limit the black political voice. In the end, white Southerners wanted to recreate the way of life that they knew before the war.
Former slaves valiantly resisted, pursuing a competing vision of freedom that centered on establishing political and economic independence for the black community. Many white Republicans sided with blacks and pushed for stronger federal support of African American rights. However, most white Southerners remained adamantly opposed to any expansion of African American rights. Those who used violence against blacks, including the Ku Klux Klan, directed their intimidation toward blacks and whites who openly supported black political action and education.
This is a contest that should not be understood as simply a racial conflict. To do so is to miss the fundamental economic and political differences between blacks and whites that defined the struggle of Reconstruction.
Q: What was Reconstruction?
A: Reconstruction was the reincorporation of the former Confederate States into the Union. It was a long and tortuous road that began during the war and “officially” ended in 1876, although many of the fundamental questions of Reconstruction continued to be debated well into the 1960s.
During the war, President Abraham Lincoln began to develop a program of Reconstruction called the Ten Percent Plan, which allowed for a state to return to the Union once 10 percent of its qualified voters from 1860 took a loyalty oath to the Union. The new state governments had to be republican in form, abolish slavery, and provide for black education, but Lincoln did not prevent prominent Confederate officials from holding public office. This proposal was extremely generous in nature.
After Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson from Tennessee became president. He proved more lenient in his terms to the South—so much so that Congress repudiated Johnson’s plan. Congress also rejected the Southern states that had been readmitted to the Union under the Johnson administration. This ushered in Congressional, or Radical, Reconstruction, marked by the passage of the first Reconstruction Act in March 1867 and the granting of black suffrage.
During the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, beginning in 1868, Northerners increasingly became disillusioned with Reconstruction and affairs in the South. With the 1876 presidential election, national Republican leaders abandoned Reconstruction and turned the South over to home-rule in exchange for Rutherford Hayes’s election as president.
Q: What were the main failures of Reconstruction?
A: The Reconstruction promise of freedom for African Americans, although realized temporarily during Radical Reconstruction, was ultimately lost in a system of segregation, sharecropping, and disfranchisement. This was the primary failure of Reconstruction.
This system, it should be remembered, was not slavery. Blacks were no longer being bought or sold. Black families were not subjected to the same degree of white intrusion that they had experienced under slavery. Their housing was no longer near their master’s house—instead, they erected cabins on distant parts of the plantation. And the power and wealth of the slaveholding class was destroyed by the Civil War and the revolutionary Emancipation Proclamation.
Once the federal government had abandoned its commitment to African Americans, blacks were left to struggle on their own, against state and local governments that did not recognize them as full citizens. Without the protection of federal troops, blacks were terrorized by vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Blacks had little choice but to work for white landlords in a system of sharecropping, and most sank into a cycle of perpetual debt. Even under these conditions, blacks did not give up the struggle. They continued to resist the system, keeping alive the memory of Reconstruction.
Q: What were the main successes of Reconstruction?
A: Instead of looking at Reconstruction in terms of success or failure—since no historical movement resolves the problems that initiated it—it is more useful to understand how Reconstruction unleashed forces that would ultimately lead to full citizenship for African Americans. The passage of the 14th Amendment in 1866 made African Americans citizens of the United States and granted them “equal protection” of the laws. Even though Southern legislators managed to skirt the 14th Amendment by creating a system of segregation, modern civil rights activists have used this amendment to challenge discriminatory practices.
More than anything else, Reconstruction demonstrated that the former slaves had an understanding of freedom, a vision of independence from white control that centered on attachment to family, a belief in education, a desire for black-controlled churches, and a quest for land. They also recognized the power of the vote and of political actions. After they received the franchise, black men constituted as much as 80 percent of the Republican voters in the South. They fervently opposed the Democratic Party because of its appeal to white supremacy.
Although meaningful land reform never took place and most blacks eventually were disfranchised, the black community enjoyed a degree of autonomy that they had never had under slavery. New systems of repression were imposed on the black Southerners, but blacks never forgot the freedom and power they exercised during Reconstruction. These were not temporary gains—they were lasting achievements that fueled the black historical memory and served as a source of inspiration throughout the civil rights movement.
Q: How was religion used to justify slavery in the United States?
A: White Southerners considered the Bible the cornerstone of their defense of slavery. As with any historical or philosophical document, the Bible offered a number of interpretations that could either support or condemn the South’s “peculiar institution.”
White Southerners cited the Old Testament to show that the Israelites, including Abraham, held slaves without drawing God’s censure. They also cited the New Testament to demonstrate that neither Jesus nor the apostles ever preached against slavery. In fact, slaveholders were among Jesus’ followers.
White Southerners, beginning in the late 1820s, increasingly turned to a biblical interpretation of slavery as a positive good, a divine system that entrusted the master class with the responsibility of governing an “inferior race.” This, of course, was a self-serving justification. But most white Southerners earnestly believed not only that slavery had the scriptural sanction but also that history was on their side. All the great civilizations, the leading pro-slavery theorists pointed out, had employed some form of human bondage. Virtually all Southern religious leaders continued to argue during the Civil War that defense of slavery was a religious mission that placed Southerners against the abolitionists, infidels who had abandoned God’s word.
Q: Why did Northern general William Sherman single out Columbia, South Carolina, for destruction when he was marching across the South?
A: Responsibility for the burning of Columbia, South Carolina, is one of the most controversial issues of the American Civil War. Many have charged that Sherman wanted his men to burn the town because South Carolina was the leader of the secession movement, the home of the fire-eaters who pushed the South into war. Sherman’s forces reached Columbia in February 1865. A fire broke out and destroyed half of the city before Union soldiers were able to bring it under control. After the war, Confederate cavalry man Wade Hampton charged that Sherman’s men had deliberately set the town on fire, but Sherman denied the accusation, claiming that his soldiers actually prevented the city’s complete destruction. He further argued that it was actually Confederate soldiers who started the blaze when they set bales of cotton on fire so that the goods would not fall into Union hands. There remains no consensus among historians as to who was responsible for the destruction of Columbia.
Q: What was Sherman's March to the Sea?
A: After William T. Sherman captured Atlanta, Georgia, in September 1864, he moved across the state destroying the raw materials that fed the Southern war machine. He was fulfilling the North’s strategy of exhaustion, which would ultimately destroy the Confederacy’s capacity to wage war. In a dangerous move, Sherman decided to live off the land, cutting his army off from its own supply base. As his soldiers cut a 60-mile-wide swath of devastation across Georgia, they took freely from Southern civilians. What they could not eat or carry with them, they destroyed. Barns were burned, livestock slaughtered, railroads smashed, all in an effort to break Southern will. While there were random acts of violence committed by Sherman’s men, the execution of his orders were generally handled in a systematic and orderly manner. Sherman’s army did not rape and pillage. By mid-December, Sherman had reached Savannah, which surrendered. Sherman offered it to President Abraham Lincoln as a Christmas gift. Early in 1865, Sherman turned his attention to South Carolina where he continued his destructive work.
Q: Was the American Civil War fought over slavery?
Without slavery, there would not have been a Civil War between the North and South. It should be seen as the root cause of the war.
By 1861 the South and the North had developed two different social systems and political economies, one based on slavery and the other on free labor. In other words, each region had a ruling class whose economic and political power drew from a specific labor system. The future of those who held power in the North and South depended on the expansion of either free labor or slavery into the Western territories. The Republican Party, which drew its support exclusively from the North, wanted to stop the expansion of slavery. When Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, many white Southerners believed that the South was beginning a long and irretrievable loss of power that would eventually result in the destruction of slavery and social chaos throughout the region.
Unfortunately, too many people want to deny the central role that slavery played in the war because they consider this interpretation as an implicit condemnation of white Southerners as sinners and an elevation of Northerners as saintly crusaders. To see slavery as a cause of the war should not be interpreted as a condemnation of the South. Everyone can agree that slavery was a monstrous institution and that Northerners were also deeply racist. If one looks at the words of Northerners and Southerners prior to 1861, it is clear that the battle between free labor and slavery was at the heart of the sectional struggle, which inevitably led to secession.
Q: Why didn't Northerners want slavery to spread into the Western territories?
A: By 1861 Northerners had a vision of a good society that called for white men to own their own farms, where they would be independent landowners who could become prosperous farm owners. They saw slavery as an impediment to social mobility as well as to their own economic well-being and future. In the South, Northerners charged, a few large plantations dominated the land, and the planter class dominated every aspect of society. Not only did the slaveholders control the economic power, but they also ruled the political system.
This perception, which was largely accurate, made many Northerners believe that it would be impossible for average white folks to prosper along with slavery. The Republican Party captured the fears of most Northerners when it warned that the Western territories, if occupied by slaveholders, would turn that open land into a closed slave society. Northerners saw a future in the territories where they could build independent farms. Slavery, they believed, made that dream impossible unless one was a member of the slave-owning elite.
Q: How much were Union soldiers paid monthly during the war? How much were Confederate soldiers paid?
A: Confederate soldiers were paid 11 dollars a month, but inflation in the South was so high that the value shrunk in 1864 and 1865 so that Southern paper money was virtually worthless. There was a boost in pay in June 1864 by the legislators at Richmond who voted an increase of seven dollars a month for all noncommissioned officers and privates. Payments were always slow and irregular.
Union soldiers were paid a meager 13 dollars a month for most of the war. This was increased by three dollars a month after a final raise was granted on May 1, 1864.
Interesting books on soldier life can be found in Bell I. Wiley's two books on Union and Confederate soldiers, respectively titled: The Life of Billy Yank, and The Life of Johnny Reb.
Q: How did the Confederate Army recruit soldiers to fight in the American Civil War?
A: At the outbreak of the Civil War, Confederate armies relied exclusively on volunteers. Southern states handled the enlistment process and then mustered those units into Confederate service. In 1861 Confederate fervor was high, and community pressure was intense for young men to fight for the Southern cause. Although most had experience in militia companies, they still lacked the discipline and training to become good soldiers. Most of the men who enlisted in 1861 did so for a year. As their postings came to an end in the spring of 1862, Confederate officials faced the prospect of a desperate troop shortage. War weariness was setting in, and many veterans were not willing to reenlist. In 1862 the Confederate Congress conscripted all white males from age 18 to 35 for three years’ service. The prospect of being drafted encouraged many Confederates to sign the dotted line again; they received a welcomed furlough home as a reward.
Q: How did the general public in the South react to the outbreak of the American Civil War?
A: People throughout the South reacted differently when the American Civil War began. People in the Deep South (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina) were typically more ardent in their support of the Confederacy while those in the Upper South (Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina) had deep reservations about leaving the Union. However, when Abraham Lincoln called for troops to suppress the rebellious states, the concerns of the Upper South disappeared. Virtually every white Southerner opposed coercion by the federal government. They flocked to the Confederate Army to resist the impending invasion of Northern troops.
In defending their homes, most Confederates believed they were protecting their communities from the “Black Republicans,” a derisive label applied to Lincoln’s Republican Party. Southerners detested the party for its political attacks against expanding slavery into the Western territories. Below the Mason-Dixon Line, Republicans were seen as abolitionists in disguise. No self-respecting white Southerners could ignore these insults. Their honor challenged, white Southerners believed they were defending their homes from the abolitionists, who threatened to destroy the heart of Southern society—the institution of slavery.
Q: When did the South actually surrender at the end of the American Civil War?
A: The Confederacy surrendered to the North in fragments. There was not a single document that Jefferson Davis signed that laid out the terms of defeat. Lee’s army was the first to surrender, on April 9, 1865, and other major Confederate armies soon followed suit. On paper, in fact, the South still had 175,000 men in military service after Appomattox. But when news of Lee’s surrender spread across the South, the people knew the end had come and that further resistance would be pointless.
Q: What are American Civil War reenactors?
A: People who reenact the American Civil War come from diverse backgrounds and can be found across the country. They are united by a deep passion for exploring the past, not through books but through personal experience. Many reenactors feel they have a deeper understanding of the Civil War because they wear the uniform, perform the drills, and sleep in the fields just as the soldiers did. At tremendous financial cost, they equip themselves with reproduction uniforms, accouterments, and weapons of the Civil War era.
Some reenactors focus on living history, setting up camps where they drill and talk to the public about the life of the common soldiers. The best demonstrations can be found at National Park Service sites, and they usually take place throughout the summer. Chickamauga, Gettysburg, and Richmond routinely incorporate reenactors into their summer programs.
Other reenactors are more interested in recreating battles, in which they try to convey the nature of Civil War combat. These events are of mixed quality. They tend to romanticize war while bringing in plenty of tourists dollars for local chambers of commerce. If you want to learn about the history of the Civil War, stay away from the battle reenactments and go to the living history demonstrations. They are more rewarding and realistic.
Q: If slavery was only prominent in the South during and before the Civil War, why didn't slaves travel westward toward California to escape? You always hear of slaves escaping to the North.
A: In the North, runaway slaves had a waiting support system composed of free blacks, antislavery whites, and other escapees. They could get the necessary support and protection to make the transition to freedom. With the Fugitive Slave Law, runaways were in dire need of assistance. This was not a journey they could make on their own—if a slave tried to go west, they would have had no resources.
On the plight of runaway slaves, see the award-winning book Runaway Slaves by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweniger.
Q: Since Washington, D.C., was lightly defended at the outbreak of the Civil War, why didn't the South attempt a quick strike to capture the Capital and eliminate the Federal Government?
A: After the battle at Manassas, there was grumbling among a number of Confederate officers as well as members of the press that Washington, D.C., was open to a Southern assault and could have easily been captured. Many warned against this, including Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who understood that the Southern army in 1861 was relatively untrained and untried. The Confederate Army under General Joseph Johnston was in no condition to advance on Washington.
In hindsight and on paper, it would seem the South lost a great opportunity, but in reality it was not possible. To learn more, read William C. Davis's book, Battle at Bull Run.
Q: During the American Civil War, what were some of the jobs that women in the North took over while the men were away fighting the war?
A: During the Civil War, Northern armies had such a deep pool of manpower to draw from that the call to arms barely had an effect across Northern society. Life basically continued as it had before the war, and most women retained the position as the moral caretaker of the household. A few women served in the service as nurses or in the U.S. Sanitary Commission.
Nothing captures the rhythm of life for Northern women during the war better than the novel Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott. As Alcott reveals, the actual battles rarely intruded into the lives of Northern families, never coming close to the overwhelming presence the war had on Southern households. The best books on the Northern home front are Phillip Shaw Paludan’s A People’s Contest: The Union and Civil War 1861-1865 and Reid Mitchell’s The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home.
Q: During the American Civil War, what were some of the jobs that Southern women took over while the men were away fighting the war?
A: During the Civil War, the overwhelming demand for men in Confederate armies placed tremendous pressure on the people left at home. Women suddenly found themselves in positions of responsibility that men had traditionally held. With their husbands and sons gone, women had to oversee the production of the family farm, including the management of slaves. The Confederate government also used women in the treasury department and other government services. Local benevolent associations were almost exclusively composed of women who knitted clothes for the men in the ranks or sent them boxes of rations. Sometimes they would even assist poor families who had lost the head of household to the war.
Very few white women served as nurses in the Confederacy. Southern society did not consider nursing a respectable activity. Over the course of the war, Southern women showed a remarkable ability to adapt to their new responsibilities. While most women kept their farms going under these new conditions, some struggled to meet the new demands, which over the course of the war gradually led to war weariness.
Two books on the experience of Southern women are George Rable’s Civil Wars and Drew Gilpin Faust’s Mothers of Invention. The finest diary from a Southern woman during the Civil War comes from Catherine Edmondston. Her superb account of war has been published under the title Journal of a Secesh Lady.
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Reconstruction (U.S. history); Civil War, American
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