New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America

Essays in Honor of Kenneth M. Stampp

Robert H. Abzug, Stephen E. Maizlish, Robert H. Abzug, Stephen E. Maizlish

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813185712
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

For more than three decades race relations have been at the forefront of historical research in America. These new essays on race and slavery—some by highly regarded, award-winning veterans in the field and others by talented newcomers—point in fresh directions. They address specific areas of contention even as together they survey important questions across four centuries of social, cultural, and political history.
Looking at the institution itself, Robert McColley reconsiders the origins of black slavery in America, while William W. Freehling presents a striking interpretation of the Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy of 1822. In the political arena, William E. Gienapp and Stephen E. Maizlish assess the power of race and slave issues in, respectively, the Republican and Democratic parties of the 1850s.

For the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, Reid Mitchell profiles the consciousness of the average Confederate soldier, while Leon F. Litwack explores the tasks facing freed slaves. Arthur Zilversmit switches the perspective to Washington with a reevaluation of Grant's commitments to the freedmen.

Essays on the twentieth century focus on the South. James Oakes traces the rising fortunes of the supposedly vanquished planter class as it entered this century. Moving to more recent times, John G. Sproat looks at the role of South Carolina's white moderates during the struggle over segregation in the late 1950s and early 1960s and their failure at Orangeburg in 1968. Finally, Joel Williamson assesses what the loss of slavery has meant to southern culture in the 120 years since the end of the Civil War.

A wide-ranging yet cohesive exploration, New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America takes on added significance as a volume that honors Kenneth M. Stampp, the mentor of all the authors and long considered one of the great modern pioneers in the history of slavery and the Civil War.

PART III

Civil War and Reconstruction

5

The Creation of Confederate Loyalties

REID MITCHELL

In April 1863, Lt. Leonidas Lafayette Polk of the 43rd North Carolina Regiment (C.S.A.) took part in an expedition into the eastern part of his home state, an area that had been held intermittently by Union forces. Elected to the state legislature as a Unionist, Polk had nonetheless volunteered very early in the war and regarded himself as a man of southern sentiments; he was a slaveholder loyal to the state of North Carolina. By spring of 1863, however, Lieutenant Polk had considerable misgivings about the Confederate war effort. Speculation and corruption were creating a “rotten aristocracy” in the South; wealth kept the rich man from the army while the poor boy was forced into service. And while Polk recognized the need for military discipline, he resented the restrictions placed upon his freedom: “A man ceases to be himself when he enlists in the ranks.”

The expedition of April 1863 came close to demoralizing Lieutenant Polk entirely. He wrote his wife that he could see no point in the campaign except conscripting men of eastern North Carolina. What particularly saddened him was that he himself was obliged to round up men and force them into the army.

While performing my duty as enrolling officer I witnessed scenes & compelled compliance with orders which God grant I may never do again. To ride up to a man’s door, whose hospitable kindness makes you feel welcome & tell him, in the presence of his faithful & loving wife & sunny-faced children, that he must be ready in 10 minutes to go with you, and see the very looks of sadness and dispair seize the wife & a cloud of apprehension cover the smiling faces of his children—their imploring looks and glances—the tears of sorrow—the Solemn silence—the affectionate clasping of hands—the fervent kisses—the sad & bitter Goodbye—the longing glance at the place most dear to him on earth, as he slowly moves out of sight—this is indeed a sad & unplesant task. When we left doors on the road crowded with the faces of frightened & crying & helpless women with the question, “For God’s sake are you going to leave us at the mercy of the Yankees” made me ask often what have we gained by this trip?

Three months later Lieutenant Polk was wounded at the battle of Gettysburg. Recuperating in a Petersburg hospital, he continued his frequent letters to his wife. He expressed his doubts about a growing peace movement in North Carolina; he feared that the North would offer no terms except a return to the Union and the abolition of slavery. Still, he admired “the good old Republican spirit evinced by the plain spoken Sons” of North Carolina, and he longed for peace. In the fall of 1864 he left the service and returned to the state legislature to which he had been elected as a soldiers’ candidate. In the interval between his election to office and his resignation from the service, he was courtmartialed for cowardice, an accusation he believed to be politically motivated. He was found innocent.¹

Polk was not the paradigmatic Confederate soldier, that statistical average and sum of impressions known as “Johnny Reb.” Nonetheless, his wartime career displays elements common to the experience of most confederate soldiers. Thousands of southern white men in the Confederate army shared his dislike of discipline, his love of the South, and his hatred of speculation and class favoritism—as well as the physical facts of soldiering. This shared experience, too complex to be expressed by the rhetoric of Lost Cause orators, the fancies of filiopietistic neo-Confederates, or the condescension of historians who write of “deference” and “planter hegemony,” created loyalties to that sectional fiction—the Confederate nation—at the same time that it revealed the class bias and racism at the heart of southern society. To understand the Confederate soldier, one must move beyond sentimentality or simplistic class analysis to a realization of the complexities of the wartime experience.²

Both secession and Confederate volunteerism require careful handling. Secession probably generated far less enthusiasm among the mass of southern whites than the war itself did. The prospect of Yankee invasion united the white South. The northern army was real and concrete, compared to the phantoms that the fire-eaters had raised. Furthermore, while a southern white man might deplore secession as a policy, he resented any attempt on the part of the North to tell the South—to tell him—what to do. The invasion was a threat to his community and he quickly rose to meet it.

It has been argued that the leaders of the secession movement managed to override the popular will by distorting the election returns. If this was the case, the cause of secession paid for it. If a substantial majority of the white South had not been converted to secession by democratic means, the enthusiasm of 1861 would not suffice. Men whose loyalty was drummed up by flagwaving rather than elicited by ideological persuasion might not always stay loyal. If the secessionists were aware that they did not lead a popular movement, then they required a short, successful war.³

If secession could not be characterized as a popular movement, it was nonetheless greeted with considerable display of enthusiasm by many southern whites, both the slaveowners and the slaveless. J. Mills Thornton interprets secession as the last crisis of the Jacksonian era—the heir of the war against the monster bank, a symbolic crusade fueled by a tension-ridden, expanding market economy. While this interpretation ignores the fact that secession was also an attempt on the part of the slaveholders to cement the loyalty of the nonslaveholding class to the South’s “peculiar institution,” it does help explain why many southern whites supported secession.

The existence of a “subsistence culture” with a premarket ethos in antebellum America is debatable. It is certain that during the first half of the nineteenth century the United States underwent an economic transformation that deserves to be called a revolution and that this transformation produced a wide variety of responses among citizens North and South, ranging from wholehearted acceptance to ambiguity to rejection. During the crisis of the 1850s, the slaveholding class tended to support modernization and the spread of the market, while what resistance existed came from the nonslaveholding class. But the Southern Rights movement of the same period succeeded in part with identifying the ills created by economic transformation with northern domination.⁴

Secessionists played on white racial fears as well. The nonslaveholder, who may have resented the planter, very rarely had love for the slave. He too could be stirred by tales of abolitionist incendiarism. And if the worm of upward mobility ate at him, if he had decided to seek the spoils of the market economy, the slave system offered him the way to wealth. The twin motives—fear of a black uprising and the desire for economic advancement—created a loyalty to the southern social order on the part of many white nonslaveholders.

The secessionists, however, did not succeed in creating universal support for their cause among southern whites. Large pockets of Unionism, located in the areas farthest removed from market activity, plagued the Confederacy throughout its brief life. And disaffiliation among individuals who could in various ways resist the war effort was another constant problem. And, indeed, historian Kenneth M. Stampp has gone so far as to suggest that a sort of latent Unionism within the souls of many Confederates prevented them from making the struggle for southern independence the all-out effort they so often proclaimed it to be.⁵

The initial enthusiasm for war, the 1861 counterpart to what Charles Royster calls the “rage militaire” of 1776, proved inadequate to prosecute a long and exhausting conflict. The secessionists did not get their short, successful war. Rather, they were plunged into a war that revealed the strains and cracks within southern society. The demands that the war placed upon the southern people were not shared equally; those whom Bell Wiley called “the plain people of the Confederacy” bore a disproportionate share. The Confederacy, which was born of the crisis of the Old South, died, in part, from its own contradictions.⁶

Secessionists claimed, for instance, that the Confederacy would be a bulwark against modern Yankee incursions of power on the autonomy of individuals and small communities. Yet the new government actually encouraged the operation of the market, the growth of industry, and the encroachment of a national government upon individuals and into communities. It tried to control agricultural production and the labor force. Taxes and impressment of food brought farmers into contact with the agents of the state much more frequently than had been the case in the antebellum South. The Confederate Conscription Act of 1862 was the first in American history. Individual autonomy was more threatened by the Confederacy than it had ever been under the United States. Politicians such as Zeb Vance of North Carolina and Joe Brown of Georgia were able to gain tremendous popularity among southern whites by their attempts to place the doctrine of state’s rights between the Confederate citizen and Jefferson Davis’s government at Richmond; at least one historian of the Civil War has claimed that the Confederacy died of state’s rights.⁷

Nor was the Confederacy a classless, white man’s utopia; it proved class-ridden and dominated by the interests of the well-to-do. Conscription, for example, clearly favored the wealthy over the poor. The original conscription act of 1862 was accompanied by a series of exemptions that placed the burden of service primarily upon poorer men. The “twenty-nigger” law, the most notorious, provided exemptions for planters owning twenty or more slaves and for overseers of large plantations. Such class legislation was justified by its supporters as necessary for the functioning of the southern economy, but it created considerable resentment among small slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike. James Skelton voiced a popular sentiment when he wrote his sister Emily, “I do not think it is right for me to go through the hardships of camp life and the danger of Battle and others living at home enjoying life because they have a few negroes.” And his brother A.H. Skelton, a conscript, wrote his sister from a camp near Vicksburg in January 1863, “so here we all go to Hell together and I dont care damn how soon the Big fis was made to eat the little ones anyhow dont this Lat [exemption] Law [beat] all the laws that you ever did see they intend to kill all the poor men and the fools go in to it just like they ware a bliged to do it now if they are a mind to do t all Right But if they ware Like me I would see them in Hell before I would do it.” There was nothing one man could do by himself against such injustice, he told his sister, and he had only one final resistance to the Confederate state: “I can think.” And independent thought provided the only possible basis for opposition to the planter class during or after the war.⁸

The Confederate conscription act was reformed in 1864 to extend the exemption to smaller planters and to eliminate many other exemptions, but the impression the earlier act made persisted. As Charles A. Wills wrote on June 12, 1863, “it looks like the will never be peace anymore for poor people the rich is getting out of the war on every hand,” and the cliché “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” proved an enduring one.⁹

Widespread corruption marked the Confederate experience. In the chaos of the time, profiteering and speculation were rampant. Men made fortunes—bright, glittering, and insecure—by trading with the enemy, engrossing necessities, speculating in gold, in Confederate currency, and in Yankee greenbacks, and running the blockade. Rhett Butler was not purely a creature of Margaret Mitchell’s imagination. These profiteers were the men Lieutenant Polk referred to as the emerging “rotten aristocracy.”

Finally, the Confederate state was notoriously incompetent. One of the greatest charges that could be made against such procedures as conscription and impressment was that they failed. The armies in the field were almost always undermanned and underfed. Confederate authority failed the mass of southern white people. As the war kept on, and as evidence of Confederate incompetence, corruption,...