In the Cause of Liberty

How the Civil War Redefined American Ideals

William J. Cooper, John M. McCardell, William J. Cooper, Jr., John M. McCardell, Jr.

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780807143407
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

In this remarkable collection, ten premier scholars of nineteenth-century America address the epochal impact of the Civil War by examining the conflict in terms of three Americas -- antebellum, wartime, and postbellum nations. Moreover, they recognize the critical role in this transformative era of three groups of Americans -- white northerners, white southerners, and African Americans in the North and South. Through these differing and sometimes competing perspectives, the contributors address crucial ongoing controversies at the epicenter of the cultural, political, and intellectual history of this decisive period in American history.
Coeditors William J. Cooper, Jr., and John M. McCardell, Jr., introduce the collection, which contains essays by the foremost Civil War scholars of our time: James M. McPherson considers the general import of the war; Peter S. Onuf and Christa Dierksheide examine how patriotic southerners reconciled slavery with the American Revolutionaries' faith in the new nation's progressive role in world history; Sean Wilentz attempts to settle the long-standing debate over the reasons for southern secession; and Richard Carwardine identifies the key wartime contributors to the nation's sociopolitical transformation and the redefinition of its ideals.
George C. Rable explores the complicated ways in which southerners adopted and interpreted the terms "rebel" and "patriot, " and Chandra Manning finds three distinct understandings of the relationship between race and nationalism among Confederate soldiers, black Union soldiers, and white Union soldiers. The final three pieces address how the country dealt with the meaning of the war and its memory: Nina Silber discusses the variety of ways we continue to remember the war and the Union victory; W. Fitzhugh Brundage tackles the complexity of Confederate commemoration; and David W. Blight examines the complicated African American legacy of the war. In conclusion, McCardell suggests the challenges and rewards of using three perspectives for studying this critical period in American history.
Presented originally at the "In the Cause of Liberty" symposium hosted by The American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar in Richmond, Virginia, these incisive essays by the most respected and admired scholars in the field are certain to shape historical debate for years to come.

1

The Civil War and the
Transformation of America

JAMES M. McPHERSON

The tragic irony of the American Civil War is that both sides professed to fight for the heritage of liberty bequeathed to them by the Founding Fathers, who were, in the eyes of the Civil War generation, the “Greatest Generation” of Americans, having founded the nation they inherited with a sacred duty to uphold the principles of 1776. North and South alike wrapped themselves in that mantle of 1776, but the two sides interpreted this heritage in opposite ways, and at first neither side included the slaves in the vision of liberty for which they fought. But the slaves did; and by the time of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in 1863 the northerners were fighting not merely for the liberty bequeathed to them by the Founders but also for “a new birth of freedom.” These multiple and varying meanings of freedom and the ways in which they dissolved and reformed in kaleidoscopic patterns during the war provide the central meaning of the war for the American experience. Therefore we need to examine the three meanings of liberty during the war.

First, the Confederate perspective. When the “Black Republican” Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860 on a platform excluding slavery from the territories, southern whites compared him to George III and declared their independence from “oppressive Yankee rule.” “The same spirit of freedom and independence that impelled our Fathers to the separation from the British Government,” proclaimed secessionists, would impel the “liberty loving people of the South” to separation from the government of the United States. A Georgia secessionist declared that southerners would be either “slaves in the Union or freemen out of it.” From “the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights which our fathers bequeathed to us,” declared Jefferson Davis, let us “renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to holy cause of constitutional liberty.”¹

Many Confederate soldiers echoed this rhetoric in their letters and diaries. A Texas soldier wrote in 1861 that his forefathers in 1776 had established “Liberty and freedom in this western world” and that he was “now enlisted in ‘The Holy Cause of Liberty and Independence’ again.” An Alabama corporal celebrated the Fourth of July in 1863 by writing that he was fighting for “the same principles which fired the hearts of our ancestors in the revolutionary struggle.”²

In the minds of most southern soldiers, this struggle for liberty and self-government merged with the most powerful motive of all for fighting: to defend hearth and home from an invading enemy. In 1862 a captain in a Tennessee regiment proclaimed that he was fighting to defend “the invaded soil of our bleeding Country.” The South must not “pass under Lincoln rule without the fall of a far greater number of his hireling horde than have yet been slain at the hands of those who are striking for their liberties, homes, firesides, wives and children.”³

Most northerners ridiculed southerners’ professions that they were fighting for the ideals of 1776. That was “a libel upon the whole character and conduct of the men of ’76,” wrote the antislavery poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant. The Founding Fathers had fought “to establish the rights of man … and principles of universal liberty.” The South, insisted Bryant, had seceded “not in the interest of general humanity, but of a domestic despotism.… Their motto is not liberty, but slavery.” Northerners did not deny the right of revolution in principle; the United States had been founded on that right, and northerners as much as southerners were heirs of that legacy. But “the right of revolution,” wrote Lincoln in 1861, “is never a legal right.… At most, it is but a moral right, when exercised for a morally justifiable cause. When exercised without such a cause revolution is no right, but simply a wicked exercise of physical power.” In Lincoln’s judgment, secession was just such a wicked exercise. The event that precipitated it was Lincoln’s election by a constitutional majority. As northerners saw it, the southern states, having controlled the national government for most of the previous two generations through their domination of the Democratic Party, had decided to leave the Union just because they had lost an election.⁴

For Lincoln and the North it was the Union, not the Confederacy, that represented the ideals of 1776. The republic established by the Founding Fathers as a bulwark of liberty was a fragile experiment in a nineteenth-century world bestrode by kings, queens, emperors, czars, and petty dictators. Throughout history, most republics had eventually been overthrown. Some Americans still alive in 1861 had seen French republics succumb twice to emperors and once to the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. The hopes of 1848 for the triumph of popular governments in Europe had been crushed by the counterrevolutions that brought a conservative reaction in the Old World. Republican governments in Latin America seemed to come and go with bewildering frequency. The United States in 1861 represented, in Lincoln’s words, “the last, best hope” for the survival of republican liberties in the world. Would that hope also collapse? “Our popular government has often been called an experiment,” Lincoln told Congress on the Fourth of July 1861. If the Confederacy succeeded in splitting the country in two, it would set a fatal precedent that would destroy the experiment. By invoking this precedent, a minority in the future might secede from the Union whenever it did not like what the majority stood for, until the United States fragmented into a multiple of petty, squabbling autocracies. “The central idea pervading this struggle,” said Lincoln, “is the necessity … of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose.”⁵

Many Union soldiers echoed Lincoln’s statement that secession was “the essence of anarchy.” An Indiana lawyer explained to his pacifist wife in April 1861 why he felt compelled to enlist. “It is better to have war for one year than anarchy & revolution for fifty years—if the government should suffer rebels to go on with their work with impunity there would be no end to it & in a short time we would be without any law or order.” Union soldiers also invoked the legacy of the Founding Fathers. They believed they had a solemn duty to defend the nation sanctified by the blood and sacrifice of that heroic generation of 1776. “Our fathers made this country,” wrote a soldier in the Twelfth Ohio Infantry, “we their children are to save it.” A farmer’s son who enlisted in the Tenth Wisconsin explained that he had done so because “this second war I consider equally as holy as the first [the Revolution] by which we gained those liberties and privileges” now threatened by “this monstrous rebellion.”⁶

Freedom for the slaves was not part of the liberty the North fought for in 1861. That was not because the Lincoln administration supported slavery; quite the contrary. Slavery was “an unqualified evil to the negro, the white man, and the State,” said Lincoln on many occasions in words that expressed the sentiments of most northern Republicans. “The monstrous injustice of slavery … deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.” Yet in his first inaugural address Lincoln declared that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists.” He reiterated this pledge in his first message to Congress on 4 July 1861, when the Civil War was nearly three months old.⁷

What explains this apparent inconsistency? The answer lies in the Constitution and in the northern polity of 1861. Lincoln was bound by a constitution that protected slavery in any state where citizens wanted it. The republic of liberty for whose preservation the North was fighting had been a republic in which slavery was legal everywhere in 1776. That was the great American paradox—a land of freedom based on slavery. Even in 1861, four states that remained loyal to the Union were slave states, and the Democratic minority in the free states opposed any move to make this war for the Union a war against slavery.

But as the war went on, the slaves themselves took the first step toward making it a war against slavery. They saw the Union army as an army of liberation before that army itself did. Entering into Union lines by the thousands, they voted with their feet for freedom. As enemy property, they could be confiscated by Union forces as “contraband of war.” This stratagem was the thin edge of the wedge that finally shattered that American paradox. By 1863 a series of congressional acts, plus Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation radically enlarged Union war aims. The North henceforth fought not merely to restore the old Union, not merely to ensure that the nation born in 1776 “shall not perish from the earth,” but also to give that nation “a new birth of freedom.” The fighting of two hundred thousand black soldiers helped ensure that it would not be a stillbirth.

Northern victory in the Civil War settled two fundamental, festering issues that had been left unresolved by the Revolution of 1776: first, whether this fragile republican experiment called the United States would survive as one nation; and second, whether the house divided would continue to endure half slave and half free. Both of these issues had remained open questions until 1865. Many Americans had doubted the republic’s survival; many European conservatives had gleefully predicted its demise. Some Americans had advocated the right of secession and periodically threatened to invoke it, and eleven states did invoke it in 1861. But since 1865 no state or region has seriously threatened secession, not even during the decade of “massive resistance” to desegregation from 1954 to 1964. Before 1865 the United States, boasted “land of liberty,” had been the largest slaveholding country in the world. Since 1865 that particular “monstrous injustice” and “hypocrisy” has existed no more.

In the process of preserving the Union of 1776 while purging it of slavery, the Civil War also transformed it. Before 1861 United States was a plural noun, as in “The United States have a republican form of government.” Since 1865 United States has been a singular noun. The North went to war to preserve the Union; it ended by creating a nation. This transformation can be traced in Lincoln’s most important wartime addresses. In his first inaugural address the word Union occurred twenty times and the word nation not once. In Lincoln’s first message to Congress, on 3 July 1861, he used Union thirty-two times and nation only three times. In his famous public letter of 22 August 1862 to Horace Greeley concerning slavery and the war, Lincoln spoke of the Union eight times and the nation not at all. But fifteen months later, in the Gettysburg Address, he did not refer to the Union at all but used the word nation five times. And in his second inaugural address, looking back over the trauma of the past four years, Lincoln spoke of one side seeking to dissolve the Union in 1861 and the other side accepting the challenge of war to preserve the nation.

The decentralized antebellum republic, in which the post office was the only agency of national government that touched the average citizen, was transformed by the crucible of war into a centralized polity that taxed people directly and created an internal revenue bureau to collect the taxes, expanded the jurisdiction of federal courts, created a national currency and a federally chartered banking system, drafted men into the army, and created the Freedmen’s Bureau, the first national agency for social welfare. Eleven of the first twelve amendments to the Constitution had limited the powers of the national government; six of the next seven, starting with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, radically expanded those powers at the expense of the states. The first three of these postwar amendments transformed 4 million slaves into citizens and voters within five years, the most rapid and fundamental social transformation in American history—even if the nation did backslide on part of this commitment for three generation after 1877.

From 1789 to 1861 a southern slaveholder had been president of the United States two-thirds of the time, and two-thirds of the Speakers of the House and presidents pro tem of the Senate had also been southerners. Twenty of the thirty-five Supreme Court justices during that period had been from the South, which always had a majority on the Court before 1861. After the Civil War, a century passed before another resident of a southern state was elected president. For half a century after the war only one southerner served as Speaker of the House and none as president pro tem of the Senate. Only five of the twenty-six Supreme Court justices appointed during that half-century were southerners. The institutions and ideology of a plantation society and a slave system that had dominated half of the country before 1861 and sought to dominate more went down with a great crash in 1865 and were replaced by the institutions and ideology of free-labor entrepreneurial capitalism. For better or worse, the flames of the Civil War forged the framework of modern America.

The last point requires some elaboration. Before 1865 two socioeconomic and cultural systems had competed for dominance within the body politic of the United States. Although in retrospect the triumph of free-labor capitalism seems to have been inevitable, that was by no means clear for most of the antebellum generation. Not only did the institutions and ideology of the rural, agricultural, plantation South, based on slave labor, dominate the U.S. government during most of that time, but the territory of the slave states also considerably exceeded that of the free states before 1859, and the southern drive for further territorial expansion seemed more aggressive than that of the North. Most of the slave states seceded from the United States in 1861 not only because they feared the potential threat to the long-term survival of slavery posed by Lincoln’s election but also because they looked forward to the expansion of a dynamic, independent Confederacy into new territory by the acquisition of Cuba and perhaps more of Mexico and Central America. It is quite possible that if the Confederacy had prevailed in the 1860s, the United States might never have emerged as the world’s leading industrial as well as agricultural producer by the end of the nineteenth century. That it did happen is certainly one of the most important legacies of the Civil War, not only for America but for the world.

At the same time, however, the war left the South impoverished, its agricultural economy in shambles, and the freed slaves in a limbo of segregation and second-class citizenship after the failure of Reconstruction in the 1870s to fulfill the promise of civil and political equality embodied in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

Yet all was not lost. Those amendments remained in the Constitution, and the legacy of national unity, a strong national government, and a war for freedom inherited from the triumph of the 1860s was revived again in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which finally began the momentous process of making good on the promises of a century earlier. Even though many white southerners for generations lamented the cause they had lost in 1865—indeed, mourned the world they had lost, a world they romanticized into a vision of moonlight and magnolias—white as well as black southerners today are probably better off because they lost that war than they would have been if they had won it.

The story of the Civil War and of its legacy is therefore three intertwined stories from three perspectives that initially were separate but increasingly have merged over the past 140 years. There are the northern perspective of a war for national unity; the southern white perspective of a war for home and home rule; and an African American perspective of a war for freedom. By 1863 the first and third of these perspectives merged in a war for Union and freedom. The second perspective has been more complex and clouded, but that complexity makes it all the more important to unravel the story and to understand the values of a rural society and cultural nationalism in the South that were uprooted by the war but have survived in altered form and have done much to enrich as well as to trouble the nation’s cultural heritage.

Until the opening of the American Civil War Center at Tredegar in October 2006 no single venue brought these three stories and three legacies together in a meaningful way. This museum has remedied that defect in our understanding of our shared heritage. Richmond, Virginia, is an ideal setting for the Center. The Confederate capital and its largest manufacturing city, Richmond was also the principal target of the Union’s largest army, and its defense was the main task of the Confederacy’s best army. When the city finally fell after four bloody years, the fall of the Confederacy itself soon followed. One day after the capture of Richmond, President Abraham Lincoln visited the city and was enthusiastically welcomed by its black population, now free. There is no better place to tell the three intertwined stories of the war, to understand how the conflict unfolded as it did and how that unfolding laid the basis for the country we live in today.

2

Slaveholding Nation,
Slaveholding Civilization

CHRISTA DIERKSHEIDE AND PETER S. ONUF

On the eve of South Carolina’s secession from the Union, Robert Barnwell Rhett predicted what a historian writing in the year 2000 might say about the antebellum South: “Extending their empire across this continent to the Pacific, and down through Mexico to the other side of the great gulf, and over the isles of the sea,” Rhett’s future historian reported, southerners “established an empire and wrought out a civilization which has never been equaled or surpassed.” They “presented to the world the glorious spectacle of a free, prosperous and illustrious people,” providentially destined to become the most civilized nation on earth.¹ The foundation of southern greatness was the institution of slavery. As James Henry Hammond told the British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson in 1845, “American slaveholders … stand in the broadest light of the knowledge, civilization, and improvement of the age.”²

Proslavery polemicists knew that such claims would provoke a hostile, even incredulous response elsewhere in the “civilized world.” Until very recently, southerners themselves generally acknowledged, or at least did not contest, the conventional understanding that slavery was an archaic, unjust institution. Enlightened southerners of the founding generation argued eloquently for ending the slave trade, and a few bold spirits even looked forward to the emancipation and expatriation of the existing slave population. Yet the antislavery consensus was tenuous at best. The comforting notion that European slave traders were responsible for American slavery, as Jefferson claimed in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, could not be reconciled with the economic realities of plantation societies. Independent Americans did not constitute a single people with a single destiny. The United States was instead a fragile union of semi-sovereign states, some heavily rel...