Boss Crackers Outnumbered, Part Two

 “The South vs.The South - How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War” by William W. Freehling, 2001 (Part 2)

The Middle and Deep South

Winning the border states and finally Vicksburg with the help of many Upper South whites where slavery was still legal, the next phase of the land-based Union 'Anaconda' was set in place – black freedmen supplying soldiers, workers and spies from all over the South. For 2 years Lincoln had rejected emancipatory decrees by several of his generals and had ordered Halleck to expel runaways and escaped slaves from the environs of the western armies. That all changed.

Armies like this are never just made up of people with guns. There are teamsters, lumberjacks, cooks, laundresses, ambulance drivers, nurses, iron mongers, mechanics, guides and diggers needed. The Confederate Army itself was using their slaves as helpers, as they were short of personnel. Some body servants, i.e. 'house Negroes' as Malcolm X called them, even went further, protecting their massa in the field and his wealth at the plantation. Yet the South never armed African-Americans en mass, but the Union finally did. Abolitionist General Benjamin Butler first welcomed 'contraband' blacks who offered to dig trenches and build fortifications in Virginia in 1861. This pro-fugitive policy would later reap massive rewards for the whole Union Army and the fight against slavery's disunion. At first Lincoln substantially blocked it with a 1862 'First Confiscation Act' which put up barriers to escapees who wanted to help. But the ranks knew the benefits … as did the more perceptive generals. Even a Copperhead Democrat like General McClellan finally came around in the end.

Freehling is antagonistic to a slave insurrections, as were Union generals. He is also hostile to the abolitionist left, writing it out of this history in place of Lincoln. He prefers the gradualist and escapist varieties of resistance and so details each twist and turn of Lincoln's policy. Because of this he doesn't look at the impact of left abolitionism on Lincoln and the Republican Party. Throughout 1862 Lincoln, the 'soft war' advocate, made a 're-enslavement' proposal to the South, a slave 'buyout' plan lasting 38 years, a proposal to protect slavery in certain states, along with a plea for African-Americans to self-deport to Latin America! No matter, as the Confederacy ignored everything. Lincoln finally came around on January 1, 1863 to relatively full emancipation. The 13^th Amendment in 1865 sealed the issue of chattel slavery.

The advances and victories of the Union Army made this particular change inevitable. The ranks started to refuse to obey Halleck's orders to turn away runaways. The official tide changed in July 1862 with the First Confiscation Act and especially after Lincoln's “Emancipation Proclamation” in January 1863. 196,000 freedmen were eventually recruited to the Union Army and Navy. They were paid for going into combat, on garrison duty, on patrol, at labor, as foragers, as spies. Lincoln, ever the politician, at first only mentioned the role of 'garrisoning' when the issue came to guns to avoid irritating racist Northerners or border Southerners. Half a million slaves ran to Federal armies if they were near, as slave patrols could not function in those areas. After it all played out, with the prior addition of non-Confederate whites, this policy undermined the slaver war machine, its economy and doomed the Confederacy.

Freedmen were armed and trained after the Proclamation. Freehling makes sad fun of Col. Shaw and the 54^th Massachusetts suicidal attack on Fort Wagner outside Charleston. To this day that spit of land has no memorial except on Boston Common, but then it's South Carolina so it figures. Freehling praises the black soldiers at the battle of Milliken's Bend, Mississippi, who held off rebels with their bayonets and also the heroic attack on Port Hudson, Louisiana. At Nashville and Petersburg both Thomas and Grant were impressed by the aggressive role of black soldiers.

But most black troops did not participate in quite this way. Garrisoning the Mississippi Valley and the upper and middle South were essential to the forward movement of the Union armies towards Chattanooga, Atlanta and Savannah. Protecting and rebuilding railroads and bridges, guarding prisoners, driving wagons, guarding boats, fighting raiders like Forrest and Morgan – all the essentials of Northern logistics. 100,000 freedmen and women also worked for the Union Army behind the lines without being enlisted, doing things like growing food, repairing uniforms and weapons, feeding garrisons, handling the dead and even nursing.

Non-Plantation Geography Economy

Freehling describes how this split in the Southern population continued in various deep southern 'white' regions too that were inhospitable to large, flat plantation slavery.  This became a 3^rd leg of the southern anti-Confederacy stool. These areas did not have a large periphery of jobs associated with plantations – overseers, carpenters, wheelwrights, farriers, lawyers, doctors, thugs, etc., so locals were not materially indebted to rich slave masters. Freehling only mentions the rebellions of white Jones County Unionists in woodsy southeast Mississippi, Jackson County Unionists in mountainous northern Alabama and anti-Confederate Okefenokee swamp rebels in southeast Georgia. This absence is odd, given his topic and the increased resistance across parts of the deep South - like east Tennessee Unionists who carried out sabotage against Secesh targets. Pro-Union guerillas, desertions, no-go areas, push backs against confiscations and protests happened in nearly every state, especially after 1863.

The bloody battle of Chicamaugua, below Chattanooga, was a Confederate victory partly because of the presence of 15,000 Eastern Confederate troops under James Longstreet, bringing a rare numerical parity to the fight. Longstreet then left to reinforce Knoxville and the Federal army regained a 2-1 advantage, which helped them storm Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, sending the Confederates reeling back towards Atlanta. Freehling makes the point that numbers matter and the collapse in Reb morale on Missionary Ridge in November 1863 mattered even more.

Sherman, sitting in Savannah, looked down on ex-slaves, seeing them as only good for building 'corduroy' roads through marshes. He wanted to free his army of the long lines of freemen tailing his troops. He gave 20,000 of them 35 miles of shore-line land from Jacksonville, Florida to Charleston, South Carolina, averaging 50 acres each. This was as close to what black farmers and fishermen needed to restart their lives as something other than being sharecroppers for rich white farmers. It was the actual '40 acres and a mule.' The program ended a year after it started, killed by conservative Tennessee President Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln.

The rest of the story is well-known. The northern Democrats and the English lords never came to the rescue of slavery. Southern General Cleburne's plea to arm slaves and make them free was suppressed, then bastardized. Lee was caught between the mountains, Grant and Sherman's armies and the deep blue sea. He surrendered at Appomattox, Virginia after a wave of desertions. The Northern and Southern Anaconda was ultimately successful, ending with a 5-1 numerical advantage. The slavers and their supporters were outnumbered almost everywhere. This book is useful for both Civil War newbies and Civil War aficionados, revealing the lie that the Civil War was a 'war between the states' or a war for 'states rights' or a “war of Yankee Aggression.” It was about slavery from beginning to end and no one but Neo-Confederates, ignoramuses and fools believes otherwise.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “The South vs. South” (Part 1); “The Civil War in the United States” (Marx-Engels); "Why the South Lost the Civil War," "Lincoln" (Spielberg); "Struggle & Progress" (Jacobin); "The Neo-Confederate States," "Blockaders, Refugees and Contrabands," "The Bloody Shirt," "Guerrillas, Unionists and Violence on the Confederate Home Front," "The Free State of Jones," "Andersonville Prison," "James-Younger Gang," "Southern Cultural Nationalism," "The Civil War in Florida," "A Blaze of Glory," "The State of Jones," “Monument,” "Drivin' Dixie Down," “A Confederacy of Dunces,” “U.S. Army Bases Named After Confederates” or the words “Civil War,” "John Brown" or “slavery."

P.S. - Greg Abbott, Texas Gov., just cited Civil War 'states rights' theories (called 'nullification') in his battle with the Federal Govt. over border control.  This puts his local 'national' Guard in conflict with the federal DHS.

And I got it at the Athens, GA Library!

The Cranky Yankee, February 26, 2024