American Civil Wars

There are few topics in American history that produce more strong feeling than the Civil War. The South, some will passionately insist, fought to repel authoritarian aggression and to preserve the right of regional self determination. Others contend that the North waged a war fought by free men to preserve the democratic Union and to liberate the slaves that they could share in that freedom. Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee and other major players are canonized in opposing Churches of Geographic Loyalty. In his excellent A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom, David Williams, professor of history at Valdosta State University in Georgia, tells a different kind of story. As he explains in the introduction, his book remembers the people who "who 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." GR: All the other books about the Civil War I've seen seem obviously romanticized, with this kind of Halmarky, tragic family fight kind of feel to it, like in The Killer Angels. Williams: If you just look at what's going on in the battle field, which is really what most people do who are drawn to the Civil War, you kind of get left with that impression. One reason I think that so much of what I try to include in the book is overlooked so often, is that we just focus on the battlefield and maybe some of the politics, and that's it. Ninety-percent of everything that's ever been written on the Civil War has had to do with military or political aspects, so that kind of becomes the overarching formative parts of our impression about the war, with the North on one side and the South on the other and that's it. They really don't talk much about anti-war movements in the South, anti-war movements in the North. When I'm teaching classes on this, particularly when I'm teaching class on Southern history, and I talk about how much opposition there was to the war in the South, the question becomes: how in the world was the Confederacy able to survive as long as it was with that kind of opposition coming from its own people? And the quickest answer to that is because Lincoln was having his own problems with popular support in the North… By 1863, I think it's accurate to say that there's really two Civil Wars going on: one, between North and South, one that you always hear about, and another between Southerners themselves. In fact, there was one Georgia newspaper editor, and I think I quoted him in the book, who wrote in November of '63, that "We're fighting each other harder than we ever fought the enemy," giving some impression of how violent the inner civil war within the South had become that time. There were huge parts of the Confederacy where tory gangs and layout gangs [draft dodgers and other anti-Confederate guerillas] were really in control and had driven off Confederate authority. GR: My impression has been that most histories of the Civil War are written from the perspective of the "Lost Cause" which you call the "fiction of kind masters, contented farmers, and happy slaves in an idyllic Old South", "romanticizing the South's Confederate past and perpetuating its racist future," or from the self congratulatory liberal Yankee perspective of Lincoln the Great Emancipator dispatching the Abolitionist Union Army to free the slaves. Williams: I get the impression that a lot of people who are drawn to the study of the Civil War kinda do it to reinforce preconceived notions and not really because they want to find out much new. They just kinda want to have what they already assume to be true reinforced. And I think that's probably true North and South, both, especially when it comes to the issue of support for the war, North and South. Especially unity within the South itself. Or disunity, actually. So many Southerners were opposed to the Confederacy, but not a lot of people want to hear about that. And I think that has a lot to do with the fact that so many modern Lost Causers tend not to want to hear about disunity, tend to want to keep the myth going that the South was united. And for Northerners, I think it kinda gratifies their pride to think that they beat a united South, and don't care much to hear much about the half-million Southerners that served in the Union army. GR: The story of the Indians during the Civil War was incredibly depressing, them trying to find a good spot on whichever side, or to keep out of it all together, and then at the end, the heroes of the Union start explicitly calling for the extermination of Indian men, women, and children. Williams: I really wanted to include that chapter on the Indians because very often, when you use the term "Civil War", how many people think of the Indians? Not very many. Might of heard about Ely Parker [Ulysses S. Grant's aide-de-camp and first Native commissioner of Indian Affairs for the US government], but that's about it. You don't hear about how the Civil War divided loyalties among the nations in the Indian Territory, in what's today Oklahoma, and really tore that place apart. And how the Federal Government used the Civil War as an opportunity to expand into the west using militia units from these territorial militias…[many militiamen were] draft dodgers from the east who had gone out west to these territories to get away from the draft because they didn't want to fight in big battles against huge armies, but they were perfectly willing to go after the Indians for any promise of Indian land or any other plunder they could get. GR: Instead of the romanticized notions of what went on, you see class war. That's not a term I remember popping up in Ken Burns's documentary. Williams: Not much. His purpose was to make a popularized version of the war. You don't get very popular by talking about class very much in this country. Sometimes you can use terminology that gets around class, but if you use the term "class" itself, that's almost a red flag. Somebody, somewhere along the line is going to call you a communist. GR: The "people's history" approach that you and authors like Howard Zinn have employed, it sort of turns on its head Henry Kissinger's notion that "History is the memory of states." His vision of history, which I think applies to a lot of mainstream history writing, is really disempowering, it gives one the sense that things happen because of "great men", because of popes and kings and rulers and it makes one feel powerless to do anything. That even bleeds over to the progressive left. You can sit around thinking, "I'm not Martin Luther King. I'm not Emma Goldman. How can I do anything?" But your approach almost redefines what history is itself. Williams: Well, one thing I've tried to point out in the book is that what political and often military leaders were doing, especially political leaders, on the larger stage, they were really reacting to what was going on among the people at large, as much as trying to steer events in a particular direction. For example, Northern political leaders, one thing they didn't foresee early in the war was this mass migration of slaves to Union lines. And they really weren't prepared to deal with that. "What do we do with all these escaping slaves?" Lincoln's policy initially is to return them to slaveholders, because legally they're still slaves. But the problem was they wouldn't stay put. They kept escaping. The Union army couldn't deal with them. They didn't have the facilities to feed tens of thousands of runaway slaves. It's really this mass migration, mass escape of slaves early in the war that begins the process of turning the war into a war against slavery. Not because Lincoln or Northern politicians are eager to do this, certainly not most of them, but because of what the slaves themselves are doing. The real turning point comes in late '61, early '62, when a general by the name of Dixon in the Union army decides, "If we in the army can't take care of these slaves, let's just send them north." He wrote a number of letters to governors in several Northern states, most notably Massachusetts, asking Gov. Andrew, who was a very prominent abolitionist, if he could send these slaves on up to Massachusetts, and establish kinda work colonies for them, and Andrew just went ballistic, said "No way! That's just not happening!" He was scared he'd get voted out of office if that happened. He actually went down to Washington, met with the War Department, said "Do not send those slaves to Massachusetts!" Among Northern politicians and the electorate generally, [they reasoned] "If slaves are so demanding of freedom they'll come north to get it, they'll flee to Union lines, I guess we'd better give it to them in the South, and use them in the army, give them something to fight for." By early '62 anyway, the desertion rate in the Union army was so high that Lincoln was beginning to think about using blacks in the army anyway, which he'd refused to do at first, because he didn't want to make the war a war against slavery. Ultimately, the first and second Confiscation Acts of '61 and '62 and then the Emancipation Proclamation are very much reactions to what the slaves themselves are doing. And that's just one example of how the mass of people are taking things into their own hands and forcing the course of events.