Don't Know Much About the Civil War

Kenneth C. Davis

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061806735
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la guerre de Sécession

"Highly informative and entertaining…propels the reader light years beyond dull textbooks and Gone with the Wind."
— San Francisco Chronicle It has been 150 years since the opening salvo of America's War Between the States. New York Times bestselling author Ken Davis tells us everything we never knew about our nation's bloodiest conflict in Don't Know Much About ® the Civil War —another fascinating and fun installment in his acclaimed series.

chapter one

“The Wolf by the Ears”

As God Himself hath set them over you here in the nature of his stewards or overseers, He expects you will do everything for them, as you do for Himself: That you must be obedient and subject to them in all things, and do whatever they order you to do.

—THOMAS BACON
“SERMON TO NEGRO SLAVES” (1743)

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

—THOMAS JEFFERSON
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE (1776)

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty

from the drivers of Negroes?

—SAMUEL JOHNSON (1775)

* Who Brought Slavery to America?

* What's the Difference Between a Servant and a Slave?

* What Was the Triangle Trade?

* What Was the Middle Passage?

* What Was the Stono Rebellion?

* If Jefferson Believed What He Wrote, Why Did He Keep Slaves?

* What Did the Constitution Say About Slavery?

Early in April 1865 Charles Coffin, a correspondent for the Boston Journal, witnessed an extraordinary occurrence. Having reported on the Civil War from the earliest days, he had observed many significant events, from the First Battle of Bull Run four years earlier through Grant's final campaign in Virginia in 1865. Now he was present at the capture of Richmond and the arrival of President Abraham Lincoln in the fallen Confederate capital. Coffin recounted:

No carriage was to be had, so the President, leading his son, walked to General Weitzels' headquarters—Jeff Davis's mansion…. The walk was long and the President halted a moment to rest.

“May de good Lord bless you, President Linkum!” said an old Negro, removing his hat and bowing, with tears of joy rolling down his cheeks.

The President removed his own hat and bowed in silence. It was a bow which upset the forms, laws, customs, and ceremonies of centuries of slavery.

So ended the Civil War. Of course, it would be a few more days before Robert E. Lee's final surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. And months more of dislocation, followed by years of bitter Reconstruction and decades of hatefulness between victor and vanquished. But in this brief moment, in the crumbling, burning remnants of the Confederate capital, the heart and symbol of the ruined Confederate Cause, the war came to a close. Hundreds of thousands were dead. A large part of the country was in ruins, smoldering. A deep sense of regional mistrust and racial hatred would sunder America for decades. But here, as the tall, somber president bowed to a former slave, the war was crystalized in an eternal moment of reconciliation: the doomed Lincoln, symbol of the Union, worn down by the years and the losses, slow to name slavery as the enemy but indomitable in his will to ultimately destroy it, and an aged slave, bent by years of relentless labor, glorying in the first flush of freedom.

“We have the wolf by the ears,” an aging Thomas Jefferson had written to a friend forty-five years earlier. “And we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and selfpreservation in the other.” Jefferson's “wolf” was, of course, slavery. And this big, bad wolf had been banging at America's door almost since the arrival of the English in America. It huffed and puffed and nearly blew the house down.

The United States was born out of a revolutionary idea that Jefferson (1743-1826) expressed eloquently in his Declaration of Independence: All men are created equal and are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These notions, along with the very radical statement that governments could rule only by the consent of the governed, formed the basis of the Great American Contradiction: How could a nation so constituted, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and supposedly founded on the cornerstone of “liberty for all,” maintain a system that enslaved other human beings? It was this contradiction—this Great Divide—that eventually split the country in two.

Only about one quarter of the people in the slave states kept slaves. And of the five and a half million whites living in the slave states in 1860, only forty-six thousand held more than twenty slaves. But to understand fully the Civil War, this Great Divide—this American Contradiction—must be understood. Its roots were deep, planted about the same time that the first English colonists were learning how to plant tobacco in Virginia.

Who Brought Slavery to America?

George Washington did it. Patrick “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” Henry did it. Thomas “All Men Are Created Equal” Jefferson did it. George Mason, who wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights, on which the American Bill of Rights was based, was against it but did it anyway. Even good old Benjamin Franklin did it. In fact, many of America's Founding Fathers did it. They bought, kept, bred, and sold human beings.

When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787 to debate the great issues facing a struggling, infant nation, seventeen of these Founding Fathers collectively held about fourteen hundred slaves. George Mason, John Rutledge, and George Washington were three of the largest slaveholders in America. Most of Washington's slaves actually belonged to his wife, Martha Custis Washington; they had belonged to her first husband. This is the part of Washington's story that gets left out when children learn the tale of the cherry tree. The moral subtext: Telling lies is wrong; keeping people in chains isn't so bad.

Slavery was as American as apple pie. It was a well-established American institution in the thirteen original colonies long before Washington, Patrick Henry, Franklin, and Jefferson were born, but it threatened to tip the great American ship of state from the republic's very beginnings. Both Washington and Jefferson expressed deep reservations about the practice of slavery and its future in America. Nevertheless, neither of them fretted sufficiently about human bondage on their plantations to do much about it. Granted, Washington freed his slaves in his will. Jefferson, who seems to have been brilliant about everything but his finances, couldn't afford that luxury for most of his slaves. He had to rely on the kindness of creditors to let five of his favored slaves have their freedom.

Of course, America had no monopoly on slavery. The institution was as old as civilization itself. Throughout human history, slavery has taken on many guises, and few civilizations have been built without some form of servitude. In his prize-winning book, Freedom, Orlando Patterson wrote, “Slaveholding and trading existed among the earliest and most primitive of peoples. The archaeological evidence reveals that slaves were among the first items of trade within, and between, the primitive Germans and Celts, and the institution was an established part of life, though never of major significance, in primitive China, Japan and the prehistoric Near East.”

It is impossible to think of such major ancient civilizations as Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, or the Aztecs without acknowledging the role of slavery. Occasionally, slavery took on a variety of slightly more humane forms. In some societies, for instance, slaves could serve in armies, buy their freedom, or even rise to positions of rank and power. Remember the biblical story of Joseph and the pharaoh? Sold as a slave into Egypt, Joseph demonstrated his wisdom to save the country from famine and rose to become an adviser to the Egyptian court. But for the most part, slavery always meant a short life of brute labor or an existence of household servitude passed on to succeeding generations. The monuments of the great civilizations—from the Egyptian Pyramids to the Roman roads and Jefferson's prized Virginia estate, Monticello—were all constructed with slave labor.

But what made Anglo-American slavery so uniquely perverse was the institutionalization, or grotesque efficiency, of the African slave trade. Involving vast numbers of people and contradicting America's founding ideals so obviously, African slavery became America's “peculiar institution.”

The history of Africans in America doesn't begin, however, with slave auctions in the British colonies. The first black men came to the Americas along with the earliest wave of Spaniard conquistadors who followed Columbus in the 1500s. These early European explorers included black natives of Spain and Portugal such as Pedro Alonso Niño, a navigator on Columbus's first voyage. Black men served with Cortés in Mexico and with Balboa at the discovery of the Pacific. And several Iberian blacks were prominent in the exploration of what is now the southwestern United States, including most notably Estebanico, who spent eight years wandering in what is now Mexico and New Mexico before being killed in a battle with Zuñi Indians. This history, long overlooked, is somewhat sketchy.

Better documented but still overlooked is the fact that the first “cargo” of twenty Africans to land in the future United States of America arrived at Jamestown, Virginia—known to generations of American schoolchildren as the first permanent English settlement in America—aboard a Dutch man-of-war in August 1619. These African captives had been taken off a Spanish slave ship en route to Spain's colonies by a polyglot group of pirates who preyed on Spanish slave and treasure ships. This moment escaped generations of history books. Of course, those same books hailed the glorious consequences of the opening of the House of Burgesses in Jamestown. Sure. It was the first legislative assembly in America. But a nasty little secret was that in the very same month those gentlemen planters met to begin inventing American democracy, they were laying the foundation for American slavery.

By the time the English arrived in America, African slavery was well established in Europe. As a sideline to the more famous voyages of discovery he sponsored, Prince Henry, lionized as “the Navigator,” led Portugal in opening the African slave trade in 1444 with the blessing of Pope Nicholas V. Quick to recognize a profitable venture and desperate for labor in its mines and plantations in the New World, Spain joined in and dominated the African slave trade for almost a hundred years. Gradually, other European trading nations saw the profits to be made from this “black ivory.” For about fifty years, the Dutch dominated the trade until they were supplanted by the English, who got an exclusive right to supply slaves—the Asiento—to Spain's colonies in 1713.

PRELUDE TO THE CIVIL WAR: 1619-1787

1619

August Twenty Africans, carried on a Dutch ship, are brought to Jamestown, Virginia, to be sold as indentured servants, not slaves, a fine distinction that probably escaped their notice.

1652

May Rhode Island outlaws slavery. The first colony to do so, it was founded by religious leader Roger Williams (1603-1683) on the grounds of religious freedom, the separation of church and state, and the compensation of the Indians for their lands. But slavery, because it was so profitable, was later permitted, and Newport became a major slave trading port.

The Netherlands permits African slaves to be brought into New Netherlands, its American colony, which later became New York. The Dutch colony enacts laws governing the treatment of slaves, who may only be whipped with the permission of the colonial authorities.

1664

Maryland is the first colony to mandate the lifelong servitude of black slaves. Previously, under English law, slaves who became Christians and met other requirements were granted their freedom.

1667

The House of Burgesses in Virginia passes a law stating that Christian conversion does not bring about freedom from slavery. This law encourages slave owners to convert their slaves to Christianity without fear of losing them. In 1670 a countermeasure is passed which allows freedom for those blacks who were Christians before arriving in the colony. This law is a reaction to the moral issue raised by slavery. In 1671 Maryland reacts by declaring the conversion of slaves at any time as irrelevant to their servitude. And in 1682 Virginia repeals its 1670 conversion law, which had limited the importation of slaves.

1672

The English Royal Africa Company is granted a monopoly on the English slave trade which lasts until 1696. After that date, extensive slave trading is initiated by merchants in the New England colonies.

1688

The Germantown Protest, the first organized demonstration in opposition to slavery and the slave trade, is made by a group of Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania.

1700

In Boston, Samuel Sewall (1652-1730) publishes The Selling of Joseph, one of America's first antislavery tracts. One of the judges at the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692, Sewall was the only one to later publicly admit his mistake in condemning nineteen people to death.

Virginia rules that slaves are “real estate,” restricts the travel of slaves, and calls for strict penalties for miscegenation (marriage or sexual relations between races).

New York enacts a death penalty for runaway slaves caught forty miles north of Albany.

Massachusetts declares marriage between blacks and whites illegal.

1713

A British firm, the South Sea Company, is granted the Asiento, the exclusive right to import black slaves into Spain's American colonies.

1725

The black slave population in the colonies is estimated at seventy-five thousand.

In Williamsburg, Virginia, black slaves are granted the right to organize a separate Baptist church.

1733

Georgia is chartered, the last of the thirteen original colonies. Under the terms of the charter, the importation of slaves is forbidden, but this prohibition is repealed in 1749.

1739

September A violent slave insurrection takes place in Stono, South Carolina. The slaves kill thirty whites; forty-four blacks die in the aftermath.

1741

March Following a series of crimes and fires in New York, rumors of a black plot to seize power spread through the city. In the hysteria, more than a hundred blacks and poor whites are convicted of conspiracy. Four whites and eighteen blacks are hanged, thirteen blacks are burned alive, and another seventy blacks are banished from the colony.

1754

Quaker clergyman John Woolman (1720-1772), preaching against the evils of slavery, publishes his sermons under the title Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes. He publishes a second volume in 1762. Woolman is instrumental in persuading American Quakers to oppose slaveholding.

1775

Black patriots fight in all the early battles of the Revolution including Lexington, Concord, Fort Ticonderoga, and Bunker (Breed's) Hill. However, the Continental Congress, with George Washington's consent, bars slaves and free blacks from the Continental Army. Only when the deposed royal governor of Virginia promises freedom to male slaves who join the British army does Washington reverse his orders and authorize the enlistment of free blacks. Eventually, an estimated five thousand blacks are involved in many of the Revolution's major engagements.

1776

July Thomas Jefferson drafts the Declaration of Independence. Included is a charge that King George III is responsible for the slave trade and has prevented the colonists from outlawing it. This passage is deleted by Congress at the request of Southerners who keep slaves and with the support of Northerners involved in the slave trade.

1777

July Although not yet a state, Vermont abolishes slavery. It will be the first free state when it enters the Union.

1780

The Pennsylvania legislature mandates gradual abolition within the state.

1781

March 1 First proposed in 1776, the Articles of Confederation is ratified ...