There is an awful lot of mythology about the South and Southerners shortly before and during the American Civil War. It is a conflict often framed as the Northern states against the Southern states. This is bad history. Actually, the secessionists were fighting two wars, one against the Union army and another against fellow Southerners who were loyal to the United States. Those Southern patriots are long overdue their place in history.
Unfortunately, Confederate apologists who successfully put a revisionist spin on what truly occurred wrote much of the history of that conflict. It is time to set the record straight.
In this first of two essays, a more accurate retelling of what happened in the Civil War in the Southern states will be explained. In a second essay to follow, I will put forth a modest proposal for a procedure in renaming all U.S. military facilities in the South named after Confederates. And in doing so, it would be done in a way to more accurately preserve Southern heritage.
When it comes to the Civil War, I never describe the sides anymore as North and South. Instead, when it comes to describing the forces that engaged in an illegal insurrection against our government, I describe them either as Confederates or secessionists. As I will explain, those that engaged in insurrection did not represent the true feelings of most Americans living in the South in the early 1860s.
It is far too easy to buy into the perpetrated myth that this was a purely sectional conflict of patriotic Northerners against a monolithic secessionist South. Indeed, in 1861 most Southerners did not even want to secede from the Union. Unfortunately, the perpetrators of Mudsillism held the upper hand of political power and used intimidation to get their way.
A closer reading of history establishes that of the nine million Americans then living in the South in 1861 the clear majority were for remaining in the Union. During many of the various state secessionist conventions, the desire to tear apart the United States was driven by a powerful plantation class and the well to do institutions (local banks, attorneys, merchant class) that benefited from slavery. There were numerous instances where pro-secessionist delegates used threats of violence and voter fraud in order to guarantee outcomes favoring disunion.
On the other side of the ledger, there were many poor white farmers, a few white patriots of all economic classes, and of course four million African-American in bondage. Too many of us forget that over 500,000 Southerners wore the blue Union uniform and many died in order to preserve the Republic (of which approximately 40% were African-American).
And it was not just the Border States that provided troops to the Union cause; there were high-ranking officers and volunteers from deep Southern states such as Alabama, Georgia, and Arkansas. Additionally, there was open rebellion against the Confederacy by the likes of North Carolinian B.F. Moore as well as Newton Knight and his fellow residents of Jones County of Mississippi as well as by loyal citizens living in eastern Tennessee. In the vanguard of Sherman’s army marching through Georgia was Alabama Union cavalry.
Let us remember an often forgotten truth about slavery: It was not only intended to deny African-Americans their right to self-fulfillment but as a close secondary goal it was seen by the plantation class as a means of denying economic fulfillment to many poor whites. The plantation class used their powerful holdings as an offensive use of private property. Abraham Lincoln’s family left Kentucky for the free soil of Indiana because the slave owning class was just too powerful for small holders such as Lincoln’s father. These marginalized whites were natural enemies of the economics of slavery. Their descendants make up many of the very folks victimized by the evolved version of Mudsill now being peddled by today’s economic libertarian conservatives.
The Union could never have won the war without the help of those 500,000 Union soldiers from Dixie, not to mention the assistance of many patriotic Southern resisters. A good number of these Southern patriots were from Appalachia and other hardscrabble communities. These were the white small plot farmers and sharecroppers for whom slavery was also designed by the likes of John C. Calhoun’s plantation class to economically oppress. They were the secondary victims of the peculiar institution. It is why I no longer talk of the Civil War as one of North against South but of the United States quelling insurrection by slaveholding Confederate agitators.