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

A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR

ALSO BY DAVID WILLIAMS

Plain Folk in a Rich Man’s War: Class and Dissent in Confederate Georgia (with Teresa Crisp Williams and David Carlson)

Johnny Reb’s War: Battlefield and Homefront

Rich Man’s War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley

The Georgia Gold Rush: Twenty-niners, Cherokees, and Gold Fever

Gold Fever: America’s First Gold Rush

(with Ray C. Rensi)

A PEOPLE’S HISTORY

OF THE CIVIL WAR

STRUGGLES FOR THE MEANING

OF FREEDOM

DAVID WILLIAMS

NEW YORK

LONDON

© 2005 by David Williams

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to:

Permissions Department, The New Press, 38 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013

First paperback edition published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2006

Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATA LOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Williams, David, 1959–

A people’s history of the Civil War : struggles for the meaning of freedom / David Williams.

     p. cm. — (A New Press people’s history)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

ISBN: 978-1-59558-747-3

1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Social aspects. 2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865. I. Title. II. Series.

E468.9.W56 2005

The New Press was established in 1990 as a not-for-profit alternative to the large, commercial publishing houses currently dominating the book publishing industry. The New Press operates in the public interest rather than for private gain, and is committed to publishing, in innovative ways, works of educational, cultural, and community value that are often deemed insufficiently profitable.

www.thenewpress.com

Composition by Westchester Book Composition

2  4  6  8  10  9  7  5  3  1

For Trish

Contents

SERIES PREFACE by Howard Zinn

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction: The People at War

1 All for the Benefit of the Wealthy

2 The Brunt Is Thrown upon the Working Classes

3 The Women Rising

4 We Poor Soldiers

5 Come In Out of the Draft

6 My God! Are We Free?

7 Indians Here Have No Fight with the Whites

8 Was the War in Vain?

Afterword

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Series Preface

Turning history on its head opens up whole new worlds of possibility. Once, historians looked only at society’s upper crust: the leaders and others who made the headlines and whose words and deeds survived as historical truth. In our lifetimes, this has begun to change. Shifting history’s lens from the upper rungs to the lower, we are learning more than ever about the masses of people who did the work that made society tick.

Not surprisingly, as the lens shifts the basic narratives change as well. The history of men and women of all classes, colors, and cultures reveals an astonishing degree of struggle and independent political action. Everyday people played complicated historical roles, and they developed highly sophisticated and often very different political ideas from the people who ruled them. Sometimes their accomplishments left tangible traces; other times, the traces are invisible but no less real. They left their mark on our institutions, our folkways and language, on our political habits and vocabulary. We are only now beginning to excavate this multifaceted history.

The New Press People’s History Series roams far and wide through human history, revisiting old stories in new ways, and introducing altogether new accounts of the struggles of common people to make their own history. Taking the lives and viewpoints of common people as its point of departure, the series reexamines subjects as different as the American Revolution, the history of sports, the history of American art, the Mexican Revolution, and the rise of the Third World.

A people’s history does more than add to the catalogue of what we already know. These books will shake up readers’ understanding of the past—just as common people throughout history have shaken up their always changeable worlds.

Howard Zinn

Boston, 2000

Acknowledgments

Foremost among the many debts I owe in the making of this book is to Howard Zinn for encouraging me throughout the project and for his long years of dedication to the practice of people’s history. I first read his People’s History of the United States many years ago as a graduate student, and his point of view has inspired my work ever since. I hardly owe less of a debt to the many fine scholars upon whose work this book is based. The inquisitive perseverance and diligent research reflected in their works have made mine possible. For help with tracking down those works and making good use of them, I am indebted to Alan Bernstein, Denise Montgomery, and Rex DeVane of Valdosta State University’s Odum Library.

Marc Favreau, senior editor at The New Press, deserves much appreciation for his suggestions on improving the manuscript and for shepherding it through the publishing works. Sarah Fan, my production editor, and David Allen, my copy editor, deserve much appreciation as well for their hard work in carrying the manuscript through its final paces toward print.

Though a small contribution to the literature of my field, this work is quite likely to be my magnum opus. So, on this occasion, I feel compelled, as I often do but fail in the follow-through, to say how grateful I am to those who contributed so much to the making of me and my career. First to my parents, Harold O. Williams and Anita D. Williams, children of poverty and depression who made sure that their children knew the value of education. And to my younger brother, Scott, who often served more as an example to me than I did to him.

To my wife, Teresa Crisp Williams, I shall always be grateful for her many years of steadfast patience and loving encouragement. Her faith in me has been the foundation on which my efforts have been largely built. I am eternally grateful to her family as well for their patience, tolerance, and help with more moves than I care to remember.

I owe many thanks to a few professors from my undergraduate days at North Georgia College for their inspiration, insights, and personal efforts for me: John Csomor, who taught me that true patriotism is never blind; Frank Smith, who showed me that there are at least half-a-dozen reasons for everything; Brian Murphy, who gave me a broader view of what democracy should mean; and Ray Rensi, who showed me what I could be as a teacher.

I am especially grateful to my professors during my doctoral days at Auburn University for their exemplary lessons in what it is to be a scholar. Especially influential were Guy Beckwith, Donna Bohanan, Thomas Belser, John Cottier, Allen Cronenberg, Wayne Flynt, Larry Gerber, James Hansen, Joseph Harrison, Joe Kicklighter, David Lewis, Michael Melancon, Steve McFarland, and Bill Trimble. A special thanks goes to my dissertation adviser, Frank Lawrence Owsley Jr., who never kept the reins too tight.

I am grateful also to friends and fellow students along the way. Among those whose concern, companionship, and memories remain most treasured are Bob Patterson, Lisa Stepancic, Kay Ray, Tom Amsler, Joy Hartsfield, B.J. House, Beth McNeil, Kathy Yarbrough, Connie Dunbar, Renee Bruce, Debbie Brannon, Mark McDonough, Brian Phelps, Gene Smith, Jim Segrest, Bill Bryant, Johnny Dollar, Susan Dollar, Martha Viator, Karen Beckwith, Jack Bergstresser, Sandra Bergstresser, Mickey Crews, Hal Parker, Church Murdock, Kim Cantrell, Mary Lee Carter, Alice Pate, Lynne Rieff, Burt Rieff, Dottye Ricks, and Richard Porter.

Any number of fellow scholars have been supportive of my work over the years, read and commented on earlier manuscripts, or otherwise helped my career along the way. Among those who deserve special mention for their support are David Carlson, Lee Formwalt, John Inscoe, William Freehling, Wayne Durrill, Anne Bailey, Anastatia Sims, Mike Fitzgerald, Junius Rodriguez, Billy Winn, Victoria Bynum, Jeff Jakeman, David Heidler, Jeanne Heidler, Emory Thomas, Nash Boney, Edmund Drago, Stanley Harrold, and Randall Miller.

Among friends and colleagues at Valdosta State University who have supported and encouraged me, my first nod of gratitude goes to Joe Tomberlin, professor emeritus and former history department chair, who placed his faith in me as a young scholar looking for an institutional home. For their help during my own time as department chair, I am grateful to Jay Rickman, director of the department’s undergraduate studies program; Charles Johnson, who served as director of graduate studies; and Melanie Byrd, director of planning and program review. They carried much of the department’s administrative burden while I was working on the early stages of this book.

Other friends and colleagues in Valdosta who deserve my sincere thanks are Tracy Meyers, Jacob Meyers, Mary Block, John Crowley, John Dunn, Cathy Badura, Paul Badura, Dixie Ray Haggard, Regina Haggard, Shirley Hardin, Pam Rickman, Okete Shiroya, Brian Adler, James LaPlant, Ernestine Clark, Catherine Schaeffer, Susan Eischeid, Patsy Howard, Patrick McElwain, Tommye Miller, Liz Rose, Martha Laughlin, Kate Warner, Allen DeVane, Deborah Davis, Sandra Walker, Susan Wehling, Willie Mincy, and Stan White. Most read parts of this or earlier incarnations of my work, and all have contributed mightily to making my environs a pleasant place to be. Particularly enjoyable has been my friendly banter with Chris Meyers, a fellow historian who remains grounded in the political-military history tradition despite my jestingly provocative efforts.

For their support in the form of encouragement and reassigned time to work on this project, I wish to thank Linda Calendrillo, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; Sharon Gravett, assistant vice president for academic affairs; Louis Levy, vice president for academic affairs; and Ronald Zaccari, president of Valdosta State. I would especially like to thank my department chair and fellow guitar enthusiast, Paul Riggs, for the support and encouragement he has shown in more ways than I can say.

Finally, I wish to extend a very special thanks to Patricia Coleman Mincy, who has served for nearly twenty-five years as senior secretary of Valdosta State’s Department of History. With infinite patience, inspirational pleasantness, and amazing grace, she has tolerated the quirky impositions of academia and the mindless minutiae of administration. Through it all she has remained the consummate professional and the department’s central mainstay. And she has always made sure that the candy jar is full. It is to her that this book is dedicated with much appreciation and affection.

Introduction

The People at War

The Civil War years are among the most captivating of American history. Names of great leaders and great battles trip off the tongue like icons of ancient myth. Ghosts of the nineteenth century are daily resurrected to sanctify our past and justify our present. Yet for all the attention it receives, the Civil War as part of a larger and ongoing social conflict is still not generally acknowledged. But the people who lived through that time fought through everyday struggles whose collective meaning and results were ultimately much bigger than battles, much greater than leaders, and much broader than the Civil War itself. Laboring people, urban and rural, fought for economic justice. Women struggled for rights and opportunities and for their families’ survival. Volunteers and conscripts demanded respect for themselves and their families, hundreds of thousands answering the call of a higher duty when their demands were not met. Dissenters constantly expanded the bounds of liberty and the rights of conscience. Native Americans struggled to hold their land and maintain their very existence. And African Americans fought in various ways for freedom and made the Civil War their own long before Lincoln drafted emancipation to the service of an embattled Union cause.¹

Such struggles of people against power had been going on for decades. Fanny Wright—a Scottish-born crusader who spoke for human rights in Britain, organized for labor rights in New York, and campaigned for emancipation in Tennessee—wrote of those conflicts in her 1830 article, The People at War.

What distinguishes the present from every other struggle in which the human race has been engaged, is, that the present is, evidently, openly and acknowledgedly, a war of class, and that this war is universal. . . . It is the ridden people of the earth who are struggling to throw from their backs the booted and spurred riders whose legitimate title to starve as well as to work them to death will no longer pass current; it is labor rising up against idleness, industry against money, justice against law and against privilege.²

For over two centuries, the privileged men of colonial and early national America had worked to limit dissent, channel discontent, and secure wealth and power to themselves. They used the Bible and civil law to sanction Indian extermination or removal. They used God and natural law to argue for oppression of women and blacks. They used patriotism and bigotry to turn the native-born against immigrants and immigrants against each other. They used racism to unite whites across class lines and turn poor whites against blacks. They used nearly every conceivable strategy, appealing to the basest human vices at one turn and speaking for God himself at another, to keep the social underclasses divided and more easily controlled.

It was a precarious balancing act for power elites who had found it necessary to justify rebellion against Britain by proposing the radical idea that all men were created equal. Though the Founding Fathers rarely put that notion into practice, the Declaration of Independence served its immediate purpose of drawing at least some support for their rebellion.³ Then, after the war, they tried largely to forget all their bluster about equality. But it was far from forgotten by less fortunate men who had fought for equality’s promise and been betrayed by those who had promised it. Over the following decades—through action like Shays’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, Nat Turner’s revolt, the abolitionist movement, the movement for women’s rights—Americans fought a continuing revolution to make the Declaration of Independence a reality for themselves. Elite control was never easy or complete. Limited concessions, such as restricted voting rights, were often necessary. But control became even more difficult as deprived peoples continued resisting oppression—actively and passively, violently and nonviolently, individually and collectively—throughout the early nineteenth century into the Civil War era.

Rich Man’s War!

In the South, many common whites like Hinton Rowan Helper began to see themselves as impoverished by the dominant slave system. Slaves themselves like Frederick Douglass were becoming increasingly resistant and more difficult to control. By 1860 most slaveholders worried that although Abraham Lincoln publicly opposed only slavery’s expansion, not its continued existence, his election might give encouragement to dissenters and resisters, making control all the more difficult. Slaveholders were sure that with Lincoln in the White House, slaves would be even more prone to insubordination, to poisoning, arson, pillage and murder. As for nonslaveholders, one planter asked nervously: If the poor whites realized that slavery kept them poor, would they not vote it down? Some feared that there might soon be an Abolition party in the South, of Southern men. Another frankly admitted, I mistrust our own people more than I fear all of the efforts of the Abolitionists.⁴ Such fears led slaveholders to conclude that slavery’s future would be more secure outside the Union than in it.

Up North, efforts of elites to channel economic and social discontent into the electoral process were beginning to fail as well. The anti-renter movement, an armed rebellion of tenant farmers in the Hudson River Valley, exemplified rural discontent. In urban areas, strikes by laboring men and women were increasingly common. Organizations like the Workingmen’s Party in Lynn, Massachusetts, even threatened to wrest political control from the hands of elites.⁵ During the early months of the secession crisis, working folk continued to show more interest in struggling against northern industrialists than against southern disunionists. In January 1861, as cotton states were seceding one by one, New York’s Rochester Union wrote: We hear a great deal of talk among the ardent platform Republicans about coercing the secessionists of the south by means of Northern soldiers, but the indications are that the fighting is to be done mostly with the tongue.⁶

Despite reluctance among the common folk, industrialists pressured Lincoln to hold the cotton states in the Union—by compromise if possible, by force if necessary. How else could they be guaranteed ongoing access to southern markets and cheap cotton? Some, like a writer in the Boston Herald, feared that an independent Confederacy would impose a heavy tax upon the cotton used by northern manufacturers. In this way she would seek to cripple the North.⁷ Such concerns carried little weight among the mass of working-class northerners. Only the Confederacy’s firing on the Stars and Stripes at Fort Sumter sparked enough nationalism in the North to bring Lincoln the volunteers he needed for an army. That nationalism, along with brute force, would be used by northern elites over the next few years to divert worker hostility, suppress the labor movement, and, for a time at least, restore some measure of control.

Though there was some enthusiasm for the war early on, that the rich were profiting while others were dying led common people on both sides to question their respective causes. In the South, planters devoted far too much land to cotton and not enough to food. Spring of 1862 found one southwest Georgia man writing to Governor Joe Brown about planters growing too much cotton and begging him to stop those internal enemies of the country, for they will whip us sooner than all Lincolndom combined could do it.⁸ With cotton smuggled out by land and sea, some planters bragged that the longer the war went on the more money they made. The result was a severe food shortage for soldiers and civilians alike. Most of what food planters did produce was sold to speculators, who priced it far beyond the ability of common folk to pay.

Officials sought to compensate for the food shortage by imposing a tax-in-kind called impressment, taking what they needed for little or no pay. Impressment hit small farmers hardest, many of them women with husbands in the army. Planters often had the connections to avoid impressment. Much of the impressed food found its way to speculators through corrupt government officials, driving food prices even higher. Poor farm families struggling to survive increasingly had to sell what land they had, mostly to those who already had large land holdings. Urban workers fared little better. Industrial wages rose in the South, but so rampant were food shortages, speculation, and corruption that wages never kept pace with inflation.

The same was true of wages in the North. Corporate profits soared, and prices with them, but wages lagged far behind. Industrialists cut corners and provided shoddy goods to the military, killing soldiers in the process. They endangered workers back home as well, speeding up production with little thought of worker safety. Strikes for better wages and working conditions often followed. Railroad workers in New York, riggers in Boston, and coal miners in Pennsylvania were among the laboring multitudes who insisted on economic justice and safer working conditions. Capitalists struck back violently, often with the help of state, local, and federal authorities. In the interests of what we would today call national security, ignoring worker security as if the two were separate and distinct, the army beat down strikers in Rutland, Vermont; St. Louis, Missouri; Cold Springs, New York; and Tioga County, Pennsylvania, among other places.

Women were likewise affected by difficulties on the home front. And they took action as well. Many participated in the struggle for economic justice and were beaten down just as their men were. There was the additional struggle to be accepted into professions typically occupied by men. In factories, in hospitals, in government offices, women insisted on their right to take on nontraditional roles. Though their services were needed, and in many cases appreciated, they still faced resentment from men and sometimes other women, constrained as they were by a cult of domesticity that placed strict boundaries on what women should and should not do. In army hospitals, male physicians frequently objected to the petticoat government, as they put it, imposed by female matrons. One doctor was overheard complaining to a colleague in a tone of ill-concealed disgust, as an army nurse recalled, "that ‘one of them had come.’"⁹

Perhaps most difficult for women was the absence of their husbands. A northern preacher wrote: Yesterday I saw the wife of one of our parishioners driving the team in a reaper; her husband is at Vicksburg. With what help she can secure and the assistance of her little children, she is carrying on the farm. In another field was a little boy of ten years, similarly employed; and in another a girl of about twelve, doing the same. Men cannot be found in sufficient numbers to secure the harvest.¹⁰ Having their men in the army was especially hard on women in the South, where food shortages and impressment hit hard. Many urban women—from Richmond, Virginia, to Sherman, Texas—responded with riots and robberies to keep their families fed. So did those in rural areas. A southwest Georgia planter ran a notice in local papers warning poor soldiers’ wives to stop stealing his livestock. Many such men were bonded planters who had signed agreements with the state to provide food for soldiers’ families. But they grew too much cotton for export and sold what food they produced to speculators. In May 1863, a soldier from Harris County, Georgia, wrote home to his wife Sarah: You spoke of a riot in Columbus . . . it is no more than I expected. I understand there was also one in Augusta. . . . What will become of the women and children with the food situation?¹¹ Indeed, thousands of soldiers wondered how their families would get along in their absence. With hunger rampant and the planters unwilling to help, many began to question whether the Confederacy was worth preserving at all, much less fighting for. As the war lumbered on and conditions worsened, more and more soldiers decided it was not.