Confederates in the Attic

There were never many slaves in Kansas or New Mexico (which then included Arizona).  A Republican Senator (it may have been Seward) even challenged the South on this, offering to admit New Mexico as a slave state provided it could change its mind (which would undoubtedly happen).  They rejected the idea.  Note that the pro-slavery Lecompton constitution in Kansas was designed to prevent them from banning slavery for a considerable time.

Me too. The percentages of slave owners as per this census matches other data I have seen. I have also seen numbers showing the percentage of owners with a large number of slaves to be very small. As I recall, the largest percentage of owners had one or two slaves.

Given the fact that a slave counted as 3/5ths of an owner, it would be interesting to know if the actual number of slaves was somewhat smaller than the census shows. It would be in the interest of the various states to claim a higher population than they, in fact, had.

One of the current themes of the book is how many of the old battlefields have been overrun with mini-mall sprawl. Horwitz visits Vicksburg which apparently has lost whatever old-world charm it once had to casinos, tattoo parlors, and fast-food chains. The price of progress.

In the various interviews and quips that Horwitz collects, there does seem (at least amongst reenactors) to be a lament about how trashy and trivial the modern world is. “Back then” at least people knew what life was about and it had meaning.

Nostalgia has its own narcotic effect on the mind, but I do think there’s a lot of truth in that. A stately old Southern house-and-grounds is going to be much more appealing to the heart and soul than yet another Taco Bell.

But the former are being lost to the latter. Remembrances, reeanctments, and such are clouded and mixed in with all kinds of motivations, not all of them good, but apparently most of them harmless.

Horwitz must have an engaging personality because he has no problem getting people to talk to him, often for hours. He meets one fellow in Vicksburg who runs a pharmacy-cum-museum. A man named Garache had wanted to be a doctor but settled for being a collector of Civil War medicines and instruments which he displays in his store:



Interesting things are buried not only in the attic of the South but in the back yards:



I’ve searched quite a bit through Google Maps for that traffic circle and that cannon, but haven’t found it yet.

There is no doubt that Jackson was a genuine military genius. His Valley campaign is still a study of how a mobile small force can confound and defeat larger units. His death at Chancellorsville is perhaps the element that lost the war for the south. Lee, I think, would have listened to Jackson at Gettysburg and turned after the first day to get between Mead and DC. A moderate victory and frustration for Mead could have cost Lincoln the election and a McCellen presidency would have sought peace. 

I don't believe the south would have remained independent for long, perhaps 20 years. But regardless of the victor slavery was dead in North America. Victory, of a sort, for the south would have resulted in the contraction of slavery as technology for plantings, cultivating and picking cotton ended the practice. The war put a stop to the growth of that tech. Peace in 1864 would have freed up the resources north and south and the second industrial revolution would have occurred 20 years earlier. Of course, this is all a counter-factual but perhaps the elements of the old republic would have lingered into the 20th century. That republic is surely gone now.

I’m not sure that in a siege situation, there’s a hell of a lot a garrison commander can do but hope for reinforcements. In Burns’ Civil War series, it’s told that one reason Lee headed north (and was eventually met at Gettysburg) was to lure Grant away from Vicksburg.

The Confederates won a lot of battles. The problem was, they lost a lot of men even in “victories.” The North could afford the losses and were easily replaced. That was not the case in the South.

But the South had some natural advantages. They were defending what they saw as their homeland. It’s been noted often that the Confederate soldier had a swagger — even when dressed in the filthiest of rags — that a Union soldier didn’t have.

But there were plenty of men on both sides who wanted nothing to do with the carnage. Many were drafted and quite a few never showed up. I can’t say that I blamed them. And the Burns’s series notes that when the Confederate government began to requisition slaves, many marched their slaves the hell out of the region, clear over to Texas.

Jefferson Davis is said to have lamented that he didn’t have the kind of authority that Lincoln had. There was the inherent problem of the Confederacy rebelling against central authority but needing that central authority to be able to break away. It was noted that Davis had declared a special day for memorial (or something). But one governor, disdaining any kind of central authority (but his own, of course), did not comply.

Despite the necessity of the South to try to herd cats, they seemed to have done a remarkably good job considering what they had. Both sides were absolutely primitive in regards to war….just the basic functions of it. Early-on (perhaps later on as well), there was no established provision for dealing with men who were wounded on the battlefield.

And we all know that disease took as many or more men as did battle wounds. The Sanitary Commission was an incredibly interesting and useful thing to have popped up “rooted in a meeting at the New York Infirmary for women, with more than 50 women, addressed by Henry Bellows, a Unitarian Minister.”

I’m not sure of the official governmental ties. But this would appear to be an effort almost completely fueled by volunteers, particularly volunteer women. And they had an immediate impact in the camps, cutting deaths from wounds and sickness by half.

When you read and watch a history of the Civil War, you can’t help but be struck by the reckless negligence of it all. Life was cheap. Even if Pickett’s Charge could be considered a big mistake, it was the belief at the time that the way to break the enemy was to overrun him.

Even the North, with its vast material and production abundances, often had trouble actually get the materiel to the front. Battles were seemingly rarely planned or organized. You just marched until you found the enemy and then went at it.

Obviously with this as a backdrop, any kind of savvy generaling is going to be effective. For all Grant’s reputation of being a rather blunt (but effective) instrument, he did do some tricky stuff at Vicksburg, crossing the river some distance downstream and then getting behind the city. With no easy way to supply himself, it was a risky move. But it worked.

It’s interesting that apparently Jackson was a very religious man. One could read some fascinating things into his last words. The sad fact is that all the Christian (or Jewish) belief in the world had little or no impact in regards to loving one’s neighbor as oneself. Or the keeping of slaves, for that matter.

I think it was a huge blow for Lee to lose Jackson. From the Burns Civil War series, it’s said that (Longstreet, I think) wanted to tell Lee that the charge was a bad idea but in the end couldn’t bring himself to do so. Foote noted that men had the courage to participate in the charge, but no one had the courage to tell Lee “no.” But I think it’s reasonable assume that Jackson had that kind of rapport with Lee.

Whatever the case may be, the North didn’t seem to be demoralized by defeat. Many more were apparently shocked by the Emancipation Proclamation. Many thought it the worst insult to base the war on the freeing of n-words. The draft riots in New York showed a bit of discomfort with the war effort as well, although I’m not sure that an Irish mob is anything to base policy on or to gauge public opinion.

The secret of the war, from what I can see, is the ability of the North to take casualties — and to endure terrible generalship. Lee had to do what he had to do. There was little choice other than to assume the possibility that a victory here or a deep thrust there would demoralize the union and also get Britain or France on their side.

But even if Lee won a victory at Gettysburg, I don’t see the North folding their tents. But hindsight is 20-20. This was a large war with hundreds of fronts. But it seems that as soon as the Union got control of the Mississippi, the outcome was certain. The Emancipation Proclamation then sealed shut the possibility of getting any help from England. All that the South could hope for was that the North would tire of the war. Incredibly, despite the massive casualties that the North took, this was not the case.

One minor note:  the Emancipation Proclamation predated the capture of Vicksburg and Port Hudson by half a year.  (It was simultaneous with Stone's River, and also with the Confederate recapture of Galveston.)  Many historians think that it ended any possibility of a Confederate victory because neither Britain nor France would go to war to save slavery.

There were certainly Southerners who didn’t own slaves. There were Southerners who were not fighting for slavery but to repel those damn Yankees. But inherent to the South's cause was slavery. Jackson wouldn’t have gotten to within a country mile of command in the Southern armies if he was against slavery. But it’s nice that he had Sunday school classes for the slaves. That was awful white of him.