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Overview
Bitterly Divided reveals that the South was in fact fighting two civil wars—the external one that we know so much about, and an internal one about which there is scant literature and virtually no public awareness. In this fascinating look at a hidden side of the South’s history, David Williams shows the powerful and little-understood impact of the thousands of draft resisters, Southern Unionists, fugitive slaves, and other Southerners who opposed the Confederate cause.
“This fast-paced book will be a revelation even to professional historians. . . . His astonishing story details the deep, often murderous divisions in Southern society. Southerners took up arms against each other, engaged in massacres, guerrilla warfare, vigilante justice and lynchings, and deserted in droves from the Confederate army . . . Some counties and regions even seceded from the secessionists . . . With this book, the history of the Civil War will never be the same again.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Most Southerners looked on the conflict with the North as ‘a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,’ especially because owners of 20 or more slaves and all planters and public officials were exempt from military service . . . The Confederacy lost, it seems, because it was precisely the kind of house divided against itself that Lincoln famously said could not stand.” —Booklist, starred review
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781595585950 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New Press, The |
| Publication date: | 08/13/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 258,286 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"Nothing but Divisions Among Our People"
A few weeks after Abraham Lincoln's election, in the Confederacy's future capital city, Virginia Unionists organized a mass meeting of the "working men of Richmond" to oppose secession. At a second such meeting, they upheld the federal government's right to suppress secession by force if necessary. Anti-secession mechanics in Frederick County, Virginia, met to denounce the "folly and sinister selfishness of the demagogues of the South." Workers in Portsmouth were equally stirred: "We look upon any attempt to break up this Government or dissolve this Union as an attack upon the rights of the people of the whole country."
From western Virginia came word of Union meetings in Harrison, Monongalia, Wood, Tyler, Marion, and Mason counties. Preston County residents drew up a resolution declaring that "any attempt upon the part of the state to secede will meet with the unqualified disapprobation of the people of this county." A resolution from Wheeling insisted that "it is the sacred duty of all men in public offices and all citizens in private life to support and defend the Constitution ... the election of Abraham Lincoln ... does not, in our judgment, justify secession, or a dissolution of our blessed and glorious Union."
There were similar sentiments in the Deep South. In the heart of Georgia's cotton belt, a large crowd of local citizens gathered at Crawfordville to declare: "We do not consider the election of Lincoln and Hamlin as sufficient cause for Disunion or Secession." A mass meeting in Walker County expressed the same sentiment: "We are not of the opinion that the election of any man in accordance with the prescribed forms of the Constitution is sufficient cause to disrupt the ties which bind us to the Union." In Harris County, the newspaper editor stated firmly that "we are a Union loving people here, and will never forsake the old 'Star Spangled Banner.'" To stress the point, he printed the names of 175 local men, all pledged to "preserve the honor and rights of the South in the Union."
At Lake Jackson Church near Tallahassee, Florida, there assembled a crowd of 400 "whose heart beat time to the music of the Union." A convention of laborers in Nashville, Tennessee, declared their "undying love for the Union" and called secessionist efforts "treason ... by designing and mad politicians." All across the South, thousands of worried southerners did their best to head off secession. While most had opposed Lincoln's candidacy, a similar majority saw no reason to destroy the country over his election. Three-fourths of southern whites held no slaves and tended to believe that, as one Georgia man wrote, "this fuss was all for the benefit of the wealthy."
Still, slaveholders pressed their advantage in the face of popular opposition. Alfred P. Aldrich, a South Carolina legislator and staunch secessionist, acknowledged that most southerners opposed disunion. "But," he asked, "whoever waited for the common people when a great move was to be made — We must make the move and force them to follow." Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia likewise expressed his determination to see the South out of the Union whether most southerners supported it or not. "Give me the sword!" he blustered. "But if you do not place it in my hands, before God I will take it!" When he learned of Toombs's threat, one Georgia newspaper editor wrote: "Let him take it, and, by way of doing his country a great service, let him run about six inches of it into his left breast."
Secessionists employed more than words in pursuing disunion. One southerner recalled that secessionists "used the most shameless and unconcealed intimidation" to suppress their opponents. A secession meeting in Richmond turned violent when twenty or so "muscular young men" attacked several Unionists who tried to disrupt a secessionist speech by whistling "Yankee Doodle." That was hardly the worst of it. In Mississippi's Panola County, a group of vigilantes announced their intention to "take notice of, and punish all and every persons who may ... prove themselves untrue to the South, or Southern Rights, in any way whatever." There was no mistaking their meaning. In Tallahatchie County, a secessionist gang of Mississippi "Minute Men" lynched seven local Unionists. In Florida, secessionists formed armed bands of "Regulators" who ambushed Union men by night.
So the Civil War did not begin at Fort Sumter. It did not even begin as a war between North and South. It began, and continued throughout, as a war between southerners themselves.
Animosities that tore the South apart from within had been building for decades and had much to do with a widening gap between rich and poor. On the Civil War's eve, nearly half the South's personal income went to just over a thousand families. The region's poorest half held only 5 percent of its agricultural wealth. Land and slave ownership dominated the South's economy, but most white southerners held no slaves, and many owned no land. According to one antebellum resident, in southwest Georgia's Early County "there was a body of land east of Blakely ... which made 216 square miles, and not one foot of it was owned by a poor man." John Welch, a poor farmer in western Tennessee, complained that the slaveholders of his district "owned nearly all the land and they wanted to keep it."
Opportunities for upward mobility had not been so limited just a generation earlier. Land had been relatively cheap in the 1820s and 1830s after the Indians were forced into western exile. Wealthy men from crowded coastal regions bought much of the land, but small farmers too could get loans to buy land and slaves. Cotton prices were on the rise, and there was every reason to expect that loans could easily be repaid. Some yeoman farmers who were lucky enough to have good land and good weather became affluent slaveholders and even planters.
But with a single act, Congress put an end to the hopes of millions. So did the resulting economic depression, known as the Panic of 1837. A year before, at the urging of Andrew Jackson — proclaimed friend of the common man — Congress had passed the Specie Circular Act, which made it difficult for small farmers to buy land. No longer would the government accept banknotes in payment for former Indian lands. Only gold or silver would do. Plain folk seldom had the required "hard money" on hand, nor did they have the collateral with which to borrow it. Successful loan applications fell dramatically, and small banks across the country began to fail. The depression that followed helped drive cotton prices down as well, and they continued falling into the 1840s. With their staple crop income cut nearly in half, debt-ridden farmers found it impossible to keep up loan payments. Their land and slaves were repossessed and sold at auction, usually to already well-established slaveholders. The sheriff in Henry County, Alabama, auctioned off so many small farms that enraged locals demanded his resignation.
Some farmers were able to keep a few acres and eke out a living as lesser yeomen. But many lost everything and fell into tenancy and sharecropping. When the cotton market finally recovered, affluent slaveholders held nearly all the South's best land. Most other farmers found themselves trapped in a system of poverty from which few could ever escape. One contemporary described tenants in the South Carolina upcountry as "poor people who can neither buy [land] nor move away." Even for those who managed a move to cheaper western lands, disappointment most often awaited them. Historian Victoria Bynum recently noted that "most poor whites' geographic mobility grew out of class immobility rather than frontier opportunities. ... Many moved time and again in search of elusive prosperity."
"The slaveholders buy up all the fertile lands," recalled a disgruntled Mississippian who witnessed the process firsthand. "Hence the poor are crowded out, and if they remain in the vicinity of the place of their nativity, they must occupy the poor tracts whose sterility does not excite the cupidity of their rich neighbors." That gap between rich and poor continued to widen through the 1850s. Planters bought more and more land, forcing a rise in land prices and making it nearly impossible for smaller farmers to increase their holdings or for tenant farmers to buy any land at all. Wealth in terms of slaveholding was also becoming concentrated in fewer hands. During the last decade of the antebellum period, the proportion of slaveholders in the free population dropped by 20 percent. Economic circumstances beyond their control forced many yeomen into landless tenancy — so many that some commentators predicted the complete disappearance of small independent farmers. By 1860, at least 25 percent of southern farmers were tenants, and more were joining their landless ranks every day.
"The Hell of Slavery"
At the bottom of the social scale, in a caste of their own separate and distinct from the white class structure, were free blacks and slaves. Numbering roughly four and a half million in 1860, they made up nearly a sixth of the nation's population and well over a third of that in the slave states. A total of about four million were held in slavery.
Despite the social chasm between them, living and working conditions for slaves were not altogether different from those of many southern whites. In describing a typical day's labor, one slave remembered getting up every morning before sunrise to work in the fields. After a short dinner break at noon, it was back to the fields until dark. And the women, she said, worked just like the men. The same was true among white tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and lesser yeomen of both genders. Similarly, neither slaves nor poor whites had much hope of ever improving their condition. Poor whites may have been free in the strictest sense, but freedom meant little without opportunities for economic improvement. On the other hand, African Americans held by law as property bore physical and psychological burdens from which poor whites were mercifully free. Threats of violence and forced separation from loved ones were constantly present in the slave's life. Inevitably, to every extent possible, slaves pushed back against those threats.
Slaveholder claims to the contrary, the "wise master," in the words of historian Kenneth Stampp, "did not take seriously the belief that Negroes were natural-born slaves. He knew better. He knew that Negroes freshly imported from Africa had to be broken into bondage; that each succeeding generation had to be carefully trained. This was no easy task, for the bondsman rarely submitted willingly. Moreover, he rarely submitted completely. In most cases there was no end to the need for control — at least not until old age reduced the slave to a condition of helplessness." Control of elderly slaves was hardly a concern in any case. Less than four in a hundred ever lived to see age sixty.
Slave resistance took many forms, the most celebrated of which was the Underground Railroad. Harriet Tubman, perhaps the most successful of the railroad's "conductors," led hundreds of slaves to freedom. Rewards offered for her capture totaled upwards of $40,000, but she was never caught. Neither was Arnold Gragston, an enslaved Kentuckian who ferried hundreds of fellow bondsmen and women across the Ohio River before making his own escape. Harry Smith helped escapees cross the river at Louisville but never escaped himself because he did not want to leave his family. Thanks to Tubman, Gragston, Smith, and so many others like them, well over one hundred thousand enslaved people had escaped by 1860.
Though most blacks remained in bondage, they still resisted. Slaves organized work slowdowns. They feigned illness and ignorance. They sabotaged or destroyed equipment, or used the threat of such action as a bargaining tool for better treatment. If they failed to get it, suicide was not uncommon. Some slaves were treated so badly that death was a welcome relief. One Georgia slave took her own life by swallowing strychnine. In another case, two enslaved parents agreed to "send the souls of their children to Heaven rather than have them descend to the hell of slavery." After releasing their children's souls, they released their own. Another enslaved mother killed all thirteen of her children "rather than have them suffer slavery." Two boatloads of Africans newly arrived in Charleston committed mass suicide by starving themselves to death.
Sometimes slaves killed their oppressors. Most famous for its violence was Nat Turner's 1831 Virginia rebellion in which well over fifty whites died. There were many others who fought back or conspired to do so. In 1800, over a thousand slaves marched on Richmond. The governor called out hundreds of armed militiamen to turn them back. When asked why he had rebelled, one slave calmly replied: "I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British officers and put to trial by them. I have ventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am willing to sacrifice to their cause." There were similar efforts to gain liberty in Petersburg and Norfolk.
In 1811, four hundred Louisiana slaves rose up for freedom. A year later, there was rebellion in New Orleans. In 1837, slaves near that city formed a rebel band and killed several whites before they were captured. Slaves fought back individually, too. In 1849, a slave in Chambers County, Alabama, shot his owner. In Macon County, a slave "violently attacked with a knife and cut to pieces" his overseer. A Florida slave killed his owner with an ax as the white man attempted to administer "punishment." When Edward Covey tried to bind and beat Frederick Douglass, he fought Covey off. From that day forward, Douglass later wrote, "I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me." Covey never touched him again.
Douglass was fortunate to escape slavery before resistance cost him his life. Most others were not so lucky. Slaves were defined as property by slave state courts and, in the Dred Scott case of 1857, by the United States Supreme Court. As personal property, slaves were subject to the absolute authority of slaveholders and to whatever controls they chose to employ. As one member of the Georgia Supreme Court insisted: "Subordination can only be maintained by the right to give moderate correction — a right similar to that which exists in the father over his children."
There were, however, laws limiting abusiveness of parents over their children. Slaves enjoyed few such legal protections. And the definition of "moderate correction" was left entirely to the slaveholder. "Should death ensue by accident, while this slave is thus receiving moderate correction," recalled a British visitor, "the constitution of Georgia kindly denominates the offence justifiable homicide." The Reverend W.B. Allen, a former Alabama slave, personally knew those in bondage who were beaten to death for nothing more than being off the plantation without written permission. Other offenses that might result in extreme punishment were lying, loitering, stealing, and "talking back to — 'sassing' — a white person."
On Christmas Eve, 1855, a slave patrol closed in on escaping fugitives from Loudon County, Virginia. The self-emancipated blacks brandished their weapons and held their ground. Ann Wood, the group's leader, dared her pursuers to fire. The patrollers backed off, and Ann led her friends on to Philadelphia. Rising resistence among slaves during the 1850s aroused worries about loss of control among slaveholders, which contributed to the move toward secession. Illustration from Still, Underground Rail Road.
Aside from the brutality they sanctioned, most state slave codes defined the limits of life for slaves far beyond their status as personal property. No slave could carry a gun, own property, travel without a written pass, testify against whites in a court of law, or learn to read or write. Slave gatherings, even for religious services, were forbidden without a white person present. Free blacks labored under similar legal restrictions. They had to have a white legal guardian and could not own property in their own names. In the words of historian James Oakes, "it was like turning the Bill of Rights upside down."
"The Argument of the Cotton Gin"
By the mid-nineteenth century, the tools of slave control seemed to have firmly secured perhaps the world's most rigid system of racial caste. It had not always been so. Two centuries before, in the early decades of British North America, there had been no distinctions in law or custom between whites and blacks. In fact, the term "slave" was often used in reference to all those laboring as indentured servants. Like white servants, blacks typically gained freedom after serving a given number of years, usually seven. The servants themselves were, as historian Kenneth Stampp put it, "remarkably unconcerned about their visible physical differences." Black and white servants worked together, played together, lived together, and married each other. The harsher forms of racism that would become all too familiar to later generations of Americans were absent through most of the seventeenth century.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Bitterly Divided"
by .
Copyright © 2008 David Williams.
Excerpted by permission of The New Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1 "Nothing but Divisions Among Our People" 9
2 "Rich Man's War" 53
3 "Fighting Each Other Harder Than We Ever Fought the Enemy" 109
4 "Yes, We All Shall Be Free" 171
5 "Now the Wolf Has Come" 209
6 "Defeated... by the People at Home" 235
Notes 251
Bibliography 275
Index 293
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