A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (73 page)

Marxist Revisionists, Lost Cause Neo-Confederates

In the decades following the Civil War, a truly remarkable thing happened. The rebellious South, which had been utterly invaded, destroyed, and humiliated, concocted a dubious explanation of its past. This reconstruction of history reshaped every aspect of the Civil War debate, from causes (slavery was not a sectional issue) to battlefield defeats (the South only lost because of the ineptness of some of its generals, most notably James Longstreet at Gettysburg) to the legality and constitutionality of secession to the absurd notion that the South, if left to its own devices, would have eventually given up slavery.
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The Lost Cause myth accelerated in the twentieth century when pop historians and even a few trained scholars bought into the false premises.

It is useful to recount, as historian James McPherson does, the total defeat inflicted on the South:

 

By 1865, the Union forces had…destroyed two-thirds of the assessed value of Southern wealth, two-fifths of the South’s livestock, and one quarter of her white men between the ages of 20 and 40. More than half the farm machinery was ruined, and the damages to railroads and industries were incalculable…Southern wealth decreased by 60 percent.
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To that could be added the thorough destruction of the Southern banking system and the regionwide dissolution of the social structure based on slavery.
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Lost Cause theorists emphasized the irrelevancy of slavery as a cause of war, and sought to make the conflict about economic issues such as the tariff and cultural differences between the “honorable South” and the immoral North. They emphasized constitutional values and states’ rights, not the issue of human chattel. But the record was quite different. Jefferson Davis “had frequently spoken to the United States Senate about the significance of slavery to the South and had threatened secession if what he perceived as Northern threats to the institution continued.”
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In 1861 Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens called the “great truth” of slavery the “foundation” and “cornerstone” of the Confederacy.
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The Confederate constitution specifically provided for protection of the “right of property in slaves.” Far from moving toward emancipation
anywhere,
the South, as Allan Nevins pointed out, was making slavery harsher and more permanent. New laws reinforced slavery, throttled abolitionist materials, and spread the net of compliance to more and more nonslaveholding whites.
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Indeed, the best argument against the notion that the South would have voluntarily given up slavery is that there was not the slightest indication of movement toward emancipation in any Southern state prior to 1861.

Contrary to the perpetrators of the Lost Cause story, once the Southerners saw the war on their doorstep, their defense of states’ rights and principles all but vanished as the Confederacy increasingly toyed with the notion of emancipating its own slaves if they would fight for the CSA. The first such recommendations came in February 1861, but most officials dismissed them. By mid-1863, however, after Vicksburg fell, the Confederacy suddenly entertained arguments about emancipation. “Cannot we who have been raised with our Negroes and know how to command them, make them more efficient than the Yankees can?” asked one proponent of arming the slaves.
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The Lost Cause myth took root during Reconstruction, with pro-Southern writers emphasizing the corruption of federal occupation and the helplessness of white citizens against the power of the federal government and the proportionately large numbers of blacks who went to the polls. Neo-Confederate writers’ imaginative attempts to portray the antebellum South as a utopia were outrageously distorted and ultimately destructive. They planted in a large number of Southerners (though not the majority) the notion that the Confederacy had fought for important moral principles, and they labored to move the argument away from slavery.

The modern-day voices of the Lost Cause who received new support (after the fall of the Dixiecrats in the 1960s) came from modern libertarians who, for the most part, viewed the Union government as more oppressive than the Confederacy. Emphasizing the infractions against civil and economic liberties by the Union government during and after the war, this view has maintained a dedicated but small group of adherents.
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To these Lost Cause proponents, Lincoln remains the ultimate monster, a tyrant whose thirst for power enabled him to provoke the South into firing on Fort Sumter. Had he only let the lower Confederacy secede, their argument goes, the remaining United States would have embarked on a golden age of liberty, and the South, eventually, because of market forces (claim the libertarians) or its own noble character (as the neo-Confederates assert), would have emancipated the slaves. These views are as deceptive as they are erroneous. Virtually no evidence exists to suggest that the South would have peacefully emancipated its slaves. Indeed, since slavery was supported with the power of a Confederate government fully behind it, the institution could have survived for decades, if not perpetually. Slavery existed in some empires in the world for centuries—and still exists in parts of the Arab world today. It was seldom voluntarily eradicated from within. Equally as destructive is the notion that states—or principalities—could choose their own terms when it suited them to be in the Union.

Equally perverse is the neo-Marxist/New Left interpretation of the Civil War as merely a war “to retain the enormous national territory and market and resources” of the United States.
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Reviving the old Charles Beard interpretations of the triumph of capitalism over an agrarian society, leftist critics find themselves in agreement with the more radical libertarian writers. Whereas the neo-Confederates harken back to an imaginary world of benign masters and happy slaves, the leftist critics complain that Lincoln was too conservative, and blocked genuinely radical (and, to them, positive) redistribution of not only plantation owners’ wealth, but all wealth.

It is preposterous for Marxists to assert that capitalism enslaved free employees. Quite the contrary, the
only
hope many Southern blacks had once the Yankee armies had left for good in 1877 was the free market, where the color of money could overcome and subdue black/white racism. The government, and not the market, perpetuated Jim Crow; the government, not the market, enforced union minimum wage laws that excluded blacks from entry-level positions; and the government, not the market, passed and enforced separate-but-equal segregation laws. The market, freed from interference by racist Southern state regulations, would have desegregated the South decades before Martin Luther King Jr., the freedom riders, Harry Truman, Earl Warren, and the Civil Rights acts.

America’s Civil War was ultimately and overwhelmingly about the idea of freedom: whether one group of people could restrict the God-given liberty of others. That the Republicans, in their zeal to free slaves, enacted numerous ill-advised taxes, railroad, and banking laws, is regrettable but, nevertheless, of minor consequence in the big picture. In that regard, the South perverted classic libertarianism—libertarianism did not pervert the South.

A remarkable fact of the war is that the United States divided almost evenly, fought for four bloody years, and never abandoned the
concept
of constitutional government. Quite the contrary, if one takes Southern rhetoric at face value, the war was over the definitions of that constitutionalism. But even if one rejects Southern arguments as rationalizations for slavery, the astounding fact is that the Confederacy no sooner left the Union than it set up its own constitution, modeled in most ways on that of the United States from which it had seceded. In neither section, North or South, were elections suspended or most normal workings of civilian government abandoned. In neither section was there a coup d’état. Indeed, both sides agreed that the founding ideas were worth preserving—they just disagreed over the exact composition and priority of those ideas.

And, finally, rather than a contest about capitalism, the Civil War was a struggle over the definition of union. No concept of union can survive any secession, any more than a body can survive the “secession” of its heart or lungs. The forging of the nation, undertaken in blood and faith in 1776 and culminating in the Constitution in 1787, brought the American people together as a single nation, not a country club of members who could choose to leave at the slightest sign of discomfort. The Civil War finalized that contract and gave to “all men” the promises of the Declaration and the purposes of the Constitution. And although thousands paid the ultimate price for completing that process, what emerged—truly “one nation, under God”—could never again be shattered from within.

Hope and Despair

L
ess than two weeks after Lincoln’s assassination more than 2,100 Union soldiers boarded the steamboat
Sultana
at Vicksburg to return to their homes via the Mississippi River. The vessel had a capacity of 376, but on that day it carried soldiers literally packed like sardines from stem to stern when, eight miles north of Memphis, a boiler exploded, collapsing the superstructure and engulfing the rest of the
Sultana
in flames. As if the ravages of war and the death of a president had not dealt the nation enough of a blow, when the dead were accounted for, more than 1,547 people had perished, making the
Sultana
explosion the worst American water-related disaster in history, exceeding the number of Americans who died on the
Lusitania
in 1915 by some 1,400. Their loss came as a cruel exclamation point to the end of a devastating war that had already claimed 618,000 men.

Earlier that month, just before Lee surrendered, the Army of Northern Virginia had marched out of Richmond to the sound of Rebels blowing up their own gunboats on the James River. One Confederate, S. R. Mallory, recalled that the men were “light-hearted and cheerful…though an empire was passing away around them.” When they reached the Richmond suburbs, however, they saw “dirty-looking women, who had evidently not been improved by four year’ military association, [and] dirtier-looking (if possible) children.” Mallory noticed the crowds had not gathered to watch the retreat, but to pillage the burning city, looting and burning “while the standards of an empire were being taken from its capitol, and the tramp of a victorious enemy could be heard at its gates.”
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Armies of deserters and refugees thronged to Southern cities—what was left of them—only to find that even before Union troops arrived, Confederates had set fire to many of the buildings. Union cavalry entered Richmond first, surrounded by mobs of “Confederate stragglers, negroes, and released convicts,” suffocating by the air thick with smoke from the fires that swept the streets.
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Yankee troops, cheered on by former slaves, struggled to finally bring the fires under control and to stop the looting.” Northern reporters accompanying federal forces observed crowds of African Americans heading for the State House grounds, merely to walk on ground where, just days earlier, they had been prohibited from entering.
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Washington, meanwhile, witnessed one of the grandest illuminations ever recorded, as the entire population lit candles, flew flags, and burned lamps. The secretary of war ordered a staggering eight-hundred-gun salute—five hundred in honor of the surrender of Richmond and three hundred for Petersburg—which shook the earth as men embraced, women cheered, and, for a magical moment, old animosities evaporated in goodwill toward men. That did not last long. When word came that Richmond was aflame, cries of “Burn it! Burn it!” reverberated. Reporter Noah Brooks concluded that “a more liquorish crowd was never seen in Washington than on that night.”
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Lincoln traveled to Petersburg to meet with the commander of the Army of the Potomac, General Grant. Perhaps appropriately, the band followed “Hail Columbia,” with “We’ll All Drink Stone Blind.” The president congratulated the general, claiming to have had a “sneaking idea for some days” that Grant neared victory, and proceeded to confer for an hour with Grant over postwar occupation policies. It concerned many that Lincoln had walked exposed and unescorted through the streets of Petersburg, having arrived at an abandoned dock with no greeting party, and then, on April fourth, had ridden through Richmond itself, overcome by joy at seeing freed slaves shouting, “Glory to God! Glory! Glory!” Later, on the night of April fifth, aboard the
Malvern,
Lincoln jotted down his goals for reuniting the nation. He intended that all confiscated property, except slaves, would be immediately returned to its owners after a state had ceased its support of the rebellion.

Radicals in Congress who heard Lincoln’s April eleventh Reconstruction speech were unimpressed. Some considered the president shallow for failing to demand “an entire moral and social transformation of the South,” as if such were in the hands of any president.
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Virtually all of Lincoln’s cabinet, however, came away from his final meeting convinced he was more cheerful and happy than they had ever seen him. Lincoln had again insisted that while federal authority must be imposed and violence suppressed, private citizens in the South should be treated with courtesy and respect. Beyond that, we know little of Lincoln’s specific plans, for he met his fate at Ford’s Theater on April fourteenth.

The process of readmitting former members of the Confederacy to the Union, rebuilding the South, and establishing a framework for the newly freed slaves to live and work in as free men and women in a hostile environment has been termed Reconstruction. The actual political evolution of Reconstruction, however, involved three distinct phases. Under the first phase, presidential Reconstruction, Lincoln (briefly) and Andrew Johnson attempted to control the process under two broad precepts: the South should be readmitted to the Union as quickly as possible, with as little punishment as necessary for former Confederates, and the freedmen should obtain full emancipation, free from legal barriers to employment or property ownership. Beyond that, presidential Reconstruction did not attempt to make freedmen citizens, nor did it seek to compensate them for their years in bondage.

A second phase followed: in congressional Reconstruction the dominant Republican faction, the Radicals, sought full political equality for freedmen, pushed for economic compensation through the forty-acres-and-a-mule concept, and demanded more serious punishment for former Rebels. Naturally, the Radicals’ distinct positions put them in conflict with President Andrew Johnson, who held to more Lincolnesque views. Congressional Reconstruction further involved a program to punish Southerners for their rebellion by denying them representation in Washington or by establishing tough requirements to regain the franchise.

In the struggle that followed, on one side stood Johnson, virtually alone, although in a pinch some Democrats and a core of so-called moderate Republicans backed him. Moderates of 1865 had strong principles—just not those of the Radicals, who favored more or less full equality of blacks. Confronting and bedeviling Johnson were Radical leaders in Congress, most notably Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner (who had finally returned to his seat after his caning at the hands of Preston Brooks). They held together a shaky coalition of diverse-minded men, some of whom favored suffrage for all freedmen; others who supported a limited franchise; and still others who advocated voting rights for blacks in the South, but not the North.
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The third and final phase of Reconstruction occurred when Radical Reconstruction lost its steam and public support faded. At that point, Southern Democrats known as Redeemers restored white supremacy to the state governments, intimidated blacks with segregation (“Jim Crow” laws), and squeezed African Americans out of positions of power in the state governments. Reconstruction ended officially with a Redeemer victory in the Compromise of 1877, in which the final Union troops were withdrawn from the South, leaving blacks unprotected and at the mercy of Southern Democratic governments.

It is worth noting that both Lincoln and Johnson sparred with Congress over control of Reconstruction on several occasions, and thus some overlap between presidential and congressional Reconstruction occurred. Although Lincoln had enacted a few precedent-setting policies, the brunt of the initial Reconstruction efforts fell on his successor, Andrew Johnson.

Andrew Johnson Takes the Helm

The president’s death plunged the nation into grief and chaos. No other chief executive had died so suddenly, without preparation for a transition; Harrison took a month to expire, and Taylor five days. Lincoln’s assassination left the nation emotionally and constitutionally unprepared, and his successor, Vice President Andrew Johnson, was detested in the North and distrusted in the South. Having stumbled through a decade of mediocre leaders in the Oval Office, the nation had risen on the greatness of Lincoln, only to deflate under the Tennessean who now took his place.

Not that Andrew Johnson was in any way dishonorable or unprincipled. Born in North Carolina in 1808, Johnson grew up in poverty not unlike that which Lincoln experienced, and, like Lincoln, he was largely self-educated. His parents worked for a local inn, although his father had also worked as a janitor at the state capitol. While a boy, Johnson was apprenticed as a tailor, but once he’d learned enough of the trade, he ran away at age thirteen to open his own shop in Greenville, Tennessee, under the sign
a. johnson, tailor.
In 1827 he married Elizabeth McCardle, who helped refine and educate her husband, reading to him while he worked and improving his math and writing skills, which gave him sufficient confidence to join a debating society at a local academy. After winning the mayorship of Greenville as a Democrat, Johnson successfully ran for seats in the Tennessee House, then the Tennessee Senate, then, in 1843, he won a seat in the United States House of Representatives, where he supported fellow Tennessee Democrat James Polk and the Mexican War. After four consecutive terms in the House, Johnson ran for the governorship of Tennessee, winning that position twice before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1857.

A Douglas Democrat, Johnson supported the Fugitive Slave Law, defended slavery, and endorsed the 1852 Homestead bill advanced by the Whigs. During his time as governor, he had not hewed a clear small-government line, increasing state spending on education and libraries. More important in defining Johnson, however, was his strict adherence to the Constitution as the final arbiter among the states and his repudiation of secessionist talk. Andrew Johnson was the only Southerner from a Confederate state to remain in the Senate. This made him Lincoln’s obvious choice for military governor of Tennessee, once the federal troops had recaptured that state, and he remained there until 1864, when Lincoln tapped him to replace Hannibal Hamlin as vice president in order to preserve what Lincoln anticipated would be a thin electoral margin by attracting “war Democrats.”

When Johnson was sworn in early on the morning of April 15, 1865, he assumed an office coveted by virtually every other cabinet member present, none of whom thought him ideologically or politically pure enough to step into Lincoln’s shoes. To most Radicals, Lincoln himself had not been sufficiently vindictive, insisting only that blacks remain free and that the former Rebels’ citizenship be restored as quickly as was feasible. His last words about the Confederates were that no one should hang or kill them. Lincoln lamented the tendency of many unionists to “Frighten them out of the country, open the gates, let down the bars, scare them off…. I do not share feelings of that kind.”
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Lincoln, of course, was now gone, so at ten o’clock in the morning, at the Kirkwood Hotel, then Chief Justice Salmon Chase administered the oath of office to Johnson in the presence of the entire cabinet, save the wounded and bedridden William Seward. Each cabinet member shook Johnson’s hand and promised to serve him faithfully, then Johnson settled into what everyone expected would be a harmonious and efficient continuation of the dead president’s policies. It did not take long, however, for Ben Wade and other congressional Radicals to presume they had the new chief executive’s ear, and to demand he form a new cabinet favorable to them. “Johnson,” Wade exclaimed in one of history’s worst predictions, “we have faith in you. By the gods, there will be no trouble now in running the government.”
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Had the Radicals dominated the government as they’d wished, they would have slapped every Confederate officer in leg irons and probably executed the Rebel political leaders for treason. Instead, Lincoln’s sentiments prevailed with Johnson. Aside from Booth’s conspirators, only one Confederate, Major Henry Wirz, who had presided over the hell of Andersonville Prison, was executed for war crimes. Even Davis’s two-year incarceration was relatively short for a man who had led a violent revolution against the United States government.

It is doubtful many Americans thought they could return to their lives as they had been before Fort Sumter. From an economic perspective alone, the Civil War’s cost had been massive. The North spent $2.2 billion to win, the South just over $1 billion in losing.
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Economists calculated that in addition to the destruction of $1.4 billion in capital, the South also lost $20 million in “undercounted labor costs associated with the draft.” Estimating the lifetime earnings from soldiers had they lived an average life uninterrupted by war or wounds, economic historians affixed a value of $955 million to the Union dead, $365 million to Union wounded, and $947 million for Confederate dead and wounded. Accounting for all property, human life, decreased productivity, and other losses, the Civil War cost the nation $6.6 billion (in 1860 dollars). Translating such figures across 150 years is difficult, but in terms of that era, $6.6 billion was enough to have purchased, at average prices, every slave and provided each with a forty-acre farm—and still have had $3.5 billion left over.