US Civil War

The Spanish may well have been worse than the Brits. In the case of the conquest of Meso and South America, far worse.
In some countries in S America, there was slavery on rubber planations well into the last century. These were native people who were pressed into slavery by the descendants, or inheritors, of the Conquistadors.

What is so nasty about British slavery is the taking of Africans, packing them onto ships in absolutely hellish conditions where many died, and shipping them across the Atlantic to the West Indies and the US.

It wasnt that the Brits sought to enslave the Native Americans, so far as I am aware.
In fact as you very likely know, we recruited some of them to fight with us against the French in Canada. I believe the French did likewise.

Queen Victoria. who must have met literally thousands of people from all over the world during her long reign, is said to have remarked after meeting some Lakota in the later part of the 19th c. that they were "the most beautiful people" she had ever seen. Thus spoke the great white queen.

Anyway, the culture of the old South owed more to British than Spanish influence.

 

Most everyone who knows a thing or 2 about the civil war,s prison situation always mentions Andersonville as the benchmark for pure hell, pure evil on earth - and maybe rightly so- -but what seldom gets mentioned is that the North,s camps were just as horrific -

Northerners are quick to point the moral finger of slavery and Andersonville which often silences any reasonable dialogue. Yankees compare Andersonville with the National Socialist camps. Any media presentation of POW camps during this fateful war focuses on Andersonville at the exclusion of the North’s hellish Camp Morton. The Union tried, convicted, and executed Henry Wirz, the commander of Andersonville, for alleged crimes that occurred before he took charge of the camp or while he was away from the camp due to illness. The Union called 160 witnesses to testify against him. Of those witnesses, 145 testified that they had no knowledge of Wirz killing or mistreating anyone. Only one witness could provide the name of a victim Wirz supposedly killed. The Union did not allow key defense witnesses to testify while the prosecution handpicked witnesses to solidify their case against Wirz. The Union gave its most convincing witness a written commendation and a first-rate government job. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton reported that a higher percentage of Southern POWs died while incarcerated than Northern POWs. The Union hung Wirz on November 10, 1865 but later exonerated him.



The Union appointed Colonel Ambrose A. Stevens as the new commandant of Camp Morton on October 22, 1863. John A. Wyeth, a Confederate prisoner of the Union, arrived at Camp Morton, near Indianapolis, Indiana in late October 1863. He survived the camp and went on to become a physician. Years later, he exposed the horrific conditions at the camp in the April 1891 issue of Century Monthly Magazine. Other victims of the camp then came forward and corroborated Wyeth’s disclosures. According to Wyeth, the Union had erected the camp on about twenty acres of ground that they formerly used as a fairground. They enclosed the camp by a twenty-foot high plank wall. There was a rivulet running through the middle of the camp with sheds on both sides. They initially assembled the sheds to house cattle.


They built the walls of wooden planks which had shrunk and separated. There were four tiers of bunks on each side of the “barracks” which extended seven feet out towards the center. They housed 320 men in each shed. The lowest tier was one foot off the ground; the second was three feet above the first and so on. The Union allowed prisoners about two feet each with their heads next to the wide cracks of the wall with their feet towards the building’s center. The snowy winter weather in 1863-64 decreased to twenty below zero. Each man had one blanket. During a storm, snow would usually cover this meager blanket by morning. The men suffered tremendously as they were unaccustomed to cold weather which lasted until April.


Prisoners, walking skeletons, regularly died of starvation on a daily ration that was not enough for a single meal. The prisoners augmented the meat rations by harvesting the camp’s rat population. Gangrene resulting in death from untreated frostbite was an issue. In the crowded squalid sheds, vermin and parasites were an aggravating challenge. Close personal contact, inadequate scanty clothes, and no bathing or sanitary facilities contributed to the failing health and starving conditions of the prisoners, many of which were under eighteen years of age. The guards physically abused the prisoners who also suffered constant mental abuse. The sadistic guards immediately shot many of them or bludgeoned them to death for minor infractions. The guards, possibly for sport or retribution, repeatedly shot through the flimsy-walled sheds during the night. Wyeth left this hellhole in February 1865. Two thousand young Confederate soldiers died at Camp Morton.



Some of the sheds did not have bunks, so the prisoners had to sleep on the damp, cold ground in the sheds. Prisoners, dirty, cold, lousy and emaciated, slept in their clothes to “keep from freezing.” A Sergeant Pfeifer would walk through the sheds with a heavy stick thrashing left and right into the heads of the starving prisoners yelling – “this is the way you whip your Negroes.” Pfeifer was just one of many brutes who delighted in abusing the POWs. There is sufficient data to document the cruelties of camp life at the hands of the Union, during the War for Southern Independence combined with the ethnic cleansing of America’s indigenous population. Those simultaneous wars served as a perverse prototype for future camps and untold millions of victims, all concealed by government policy and obedient officials.



The Department Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic refuted Wyeth’s claims. The department said it could not imagine why Wyeth and others would fabricate such stories. Century Monthly Magazine then allowed Wyeth another opportunity to expose Camp Morton’s horrors. His first exposure brought a flood of articles and letters published in newspapers nationwide. There were claims that the government paid contractors to supply adequate food but the prisoners never received it due to internal theft.

Like the Indians, the Confederates were also at the mercy of corrupt politicians and their crooked cronies.
Fast forward to today> we are all still at the mercy of corrupt politicians and their crooked cronies.

The prison system of today is a palace compared to the horrors of those war torn years- Yet sadly enuff, the truth is, for the most part, in this country,(never mind the 3rd world horrors) penal reform , is far "behind the times." The condition of the county jails(and state) throughout this Country is a disgrace to our civilization and humanity. The county workhouses are even worse. The Fed joints are just a bit better, as they usually house the "white"- white collar con-

-More than 400,000 soldiers were captured over the course of the Civil War. In the first years of the conflict, equal numbers of captured troops were regularly exchanged for one another, helping to keep the total number of prisoners manageable for both sides. Over the course of the war, however, that practice faded from use. By the end of the war, the plight of prisoners of war on both sides had become bleak indeed. Thousands of Southerners died in the freezing camp at Elmira, New York, and the camp at Andersonville, Georgia, which held Union prisoners, has become one of the most infamous in the history of war. Nearly as many men died in captivity during the Civil War as died fighting in Vietnam.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Much text borrowed from The NY Times article- 1865 "Prison Reform"
http://www.nytimes.com/1865/12/10/news/prison-reform.html

 

Because the Acadia Indians sided with the French in that war, the British rounded them all up afterwards and shipped them to southern Louisiana, the next closest French territory. The locals started calling them Cajuns. Their ethnic foods and cooking methods became popular nationally.

Is there anything left of that place?

Belle Isle (Richmond) has been turned into a city park, and nothing is left of the Salisbury (NC) prison except its cemetery. Escape from Belle Isle was nearly impossible because the James River on both sides of it is nothing but whitewater rapids.

 

Ill still try and get the pic's this weekend. The Iowa side is just a cornfield and shelter house/park. But that area around the cannon and park was the camp.

Across the river, The Athens Missouri side has the original house kept up, Along with a 'battlefield' and is the same image you would have seen then. Couple old 'era' type houses to.
They have re-enactments every other year IIRC and in Keokuk, Ia they have 'Battle of pea ridge' every april. Didn't happen there, But that's where the hold the 're-enactments'.

 

Interesting. I had no idea that had occured.
However, as the piece says, it was on a smaller scale than the enslavement of Africans.
The Brits were pretty bad at that time.​

 

Just finished reading it - Michael Shaara "The Killer Angels".

"The best and most realistic novel about the war I have ever read" - General H. Norman Schwarzkopff.

"You will learn more from this utterly absorbing book about Gettysburg than from any non-fictional account" - Forbes.

Kept me up into the wee small hours. I would highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the CW. It fills in some gaps in the movie, and gives a lot of insight into the main characters, especially Longstreet, whose personal tragedy is not brought out so much on the screen. Chamberlain too. Shaara seems to have somehow got into the heads of these people. The picture of Lee he paints is totally convincing. Or at least, I was convinced. And maybe struck with at least a little bit of wonder at all these great personalities concentrated within in this 72 odd hours of history.

However you view it, destiny was at work in this war, horrendous and grisly at it was. Men were possessed, I think, by a nobility of spirit from which we have a lot to learn in our time, even if the issues and struggles we face are very different. Or are they? You decide on that.


This is highly readable and gripping reading. I would say this about only a few books, especially historical novels. 'Killer Angels', along with Gore Vidal's 'Lincoln', are two novels from which I definitely have learned a lot more about that time than from viewing numerous historical videos, or reading actual histories.

This thread too has been very good.

Probably when I see the film again, which I inevitably will, I'll get even more out of it.

Also, Colonel Fremantle's book is available for free on the kindle.

I need a break from CW reading for a while, but look forward to reading it.

Cheers Karen. And all who've viewed this thread.

 

I knew you would enjoy it.

Last week, my spare time was not so well spent. I decided to explore various online forums devoted to American history, and some devoted only to our civil war period. These forums seem to have replaced nearly all the study groups that used to meet in person. I can't recommend any of them to you. The vibe I get from them is the very thing that has turned so many people away from the study of history; a bunch of boring people endlessly arguing about minor details, and brazen attempts at history revision.

I think you and other CW students are better off continuing with independent study, and visits to significant sites when and if opportunities present themselves. It works for me.

 

This has been a wonderful thread. I read through the entire thing. Thanks to you Karen, and all of you for your insightful and provocative posts

Hahaha ... in other words, like a lot of the posts on this site?

 

There is some truth to that, but CW forums seem to be a lot worse than HF about that sort of thing. The Southerners on them act so butt-hurt when anybody mentions that the war might have had a little something to do with slavery or anything racial. In their minds, you're personally attacking their ancestors if you imply that the Confederacy was anything less than a great and noble cause. It's impossible to have a rational discussion with them. At one CW forum, I got a lifetime ban in less than a week!

 

Hard to truly get an accurate feel of the day day beliefs and concerns of any time, as when revising history we focus on events that are of more interest. But there may be a lot of truth tothat sentiment from Southerners, the more you read up on the civil war, the more you realise it was more about economics, power, fear as it always is, less about slavery.

Pressure from Europe and religious factions in Europe to abolish slavery at the time, and yet the English and others were still sending convicts abroad, a lot of whom were convicted for trivial stuff. So it was really just slavery re-branded. We want to claim we are more civilised as we dont allow slavery, but we still need that labour force, so we will pick on the poorest members of society and send them off to the colonies for lesser and lesser infractions.

The last convict ship sent to Australia was three years after the American Civil War, that wasnt a co-incidence, there were the same kind of fears here at the time, oh hang on a minute, there are a lot more of them then us, what does happens if there is an uprising. The US civil war made a big impact around the world. it would have been like, oh shit, we better rethink a lot of this.

And that hatred did seem most extreme between white vs white. Yes there were some absolutely horrific stuff that happended to African slaves at the time, but its not like there wasnt a white underclass at the time and all the other races at the time.

Trying to capture the actual mood of the time, the way people really thought, the way it really was day to day as opposed to attention grabbing out of the ordinary events. Did whites really believe they were superior, or is that mostly about fear of losing their position in the pecking order, believe they were more civilised because of their values and yet end up hating other whites that dont agree with them more. Plantation owners mistreating there workers too much wouldnt make economic sense, they were treated badly, but how compared to everyone else, chinese, mexican immigrants, native americans and the white underclass.

What was the actual pecking order of the time?, life wouldnt have been sweet being a slave on a plantation, but was it actually a better life than many other immigrants, or even , for want of a better term, some of the "poor white trash" at the time.

The south was kind of backed into a corner, there wasnt enough money for the north to compensate them for the end of free labour. if they were left alone, may have taken an extra 50 years, but slavery would have ended anyway as the driving forces for that are both good and bad, money, power, fear....as well as conscience and familiarity.......the driving force was never long winded speeches in congress by fat middle aged men far removed from any of it

Theres that whole duality about it, supposedly about race, but what the whites end up doing to each other, was pretty feroscious, quite staggering really. In terms of percentage of men of a fighting age that were lost between to armed sides over an extended period, there isnt really anything that compares to it in history

 

Indeed. It's part of their "heritage".

It's part of our "heritage" to try and exterminate the Native people from the Great Plains, too. But we don't defiantly celebrate it as if it were something to take pride in, and was kept from succeeding only at the hand of an invading army.

I'm not for a second suggesting that we continue to flog the South with that guilt, a century and a half after the fact, only that people honestly face up to their past and not try to divert the issue by saying it was all about "states' rights," or that blacks really were "better off" under slavery.

I still vividly remember my old Sociology professor admonishing us to "avoid mono-causal answers." Of course the Civil War was about more than race. But look at the aftermath in the century after the War. Who had crosses burned on their lawns? Who got lynched for even daring to look at a white woman? Who was intimidated into staying away from the voting booth? Who wasn't even allowed to mingle their feces with whites?

It sure wasn't "states' rights" opponents, or economists.

Karen, I fear that "rational discussion" has become an anachronism.

 

Even studying it from a close distance, it took a long time and a lot of effort for me to get to the point where I felt like I really got it, from all the different angles. As you would expect, different factions within the North and South had very different points of view, which evolved during the war.

So many factions. So many stories. Without mass media, society was more fragmented than today, especially in the North. Many immigrants spoke little or no English, so they had little idea what English-speaking people were saying about current events, only what their neighbors were saying.

Irrelevant distinction. Confederate economics and slavery cannot be separated. Without free labor for picking cotton, there would have been no Southern economy. Cotton was like oil to Saudi Arabia. Also, Confederate politics and slavery cannot be rationally separated. Racism was a convenient tool to be used in preserving the system. So was mainstream religion.

That's something I've heard very little about. It does make sense that a lot of people around the world would have paid close attention to such a large event.

Slave owners were basically the top 1%, which is why it bugs the shit out of me when black racists point to all white Southerners and blame the whole group for slavery. My ancestors didn't likely get a vote on that. If I have any wealthy ancestors, I don't know about it.

They were thoroughly indoctrinated as to the inferiority of the black race, from early childhood. Most of them never heard an alternate point of view. This didn't start changing much until my parents' generation.

I've heard a lot of that old racist rhetoric. I wouldn't want to repeat much of it. It's just too disgusting and intolerable to modern ears. You know, the people who controlled the big money had to do and say whatever it took to keep the common people in line. I'm embarrassed for the people who fell for it.

...except to make an example of someone. If you own hundreds of slaves, you can spare one now and then, to make a point. And, slave torture that doesn't result in death is a much smaller financial loss. And, being human, plantation owners sometimes lost their tempers and did things they regretted later. Extreme torture and murder of slaves wasn't legal, but most such incidents went unreported. Slave witnesses couldn't contact the authorities, who were usually racist and corrupt anyway.

I can't think of anything worse than being a slave. Their marriages weren't respected as legal, their children were sold to other plantations without warning, and they were subjected to medical treatment (or lack thereof) according to the wishes of their owners. Unlike poor whites, they were guaranteed food and shelter every day, but I wouldn't take that deal. A few owners were very nice to their slaves, but you can't judge a major institution by happy exceptions to the pattern.

But to answer your question more directly, race in the South was everything, with black being at the bottom. There were very few minorities here that were neither fully black or white. It didn't take them long to figure out that the North was a better place to be.

A weird exception was New Orleans. It was something like ten times bigger than any other Southern city, but it was always separate from Southern traditional culture, as it is today. Minorities fared much better there, especially mixed race. The city was captured early in the war by the North, with insignificant damage. Then and now, most traditional white racist Southerners have a very low opinion of New Orleans. They consider it the armpit of the South, because it dares to be different.

Of course. It was a terrible situation for everybody, in 1860. I mostly blame the leaders who allowed it to grow for such a long time. Slavery started here under the British, but it grew exponentially after 1776. Limits should have been put in place. Jefferson foresaw big trouble in the future, but few in power agreed with him. Tight limits on slave importation could have made the end of slavery much less traumatic for everyone, whenever it took place.

The only modern event I can think of that comes close is Hitler's invasion of Russia.

There's another part of it that has had a major impact, and I can hardly believe that I'm daring to go there, but I'm in a mood to lay out the hard truth. This is generally an off-limits topic down here.

Late in the war, the Southern army was desperate for leadership, so almost anybody who seemed halfway intelligent got quickly promoted. Northern sharpshooters were getting much more accurate. The death toll among CSA officers was much higher than the average death toll for all soldiers, so the quality of the gene pool was significantly reduced by the end of the war.

I hear all kinds of jokes and insulting comments about certain Southern states having IQ issues due to inbreeding. Well, now you know where that problem originated.

The Southern states that have done the best since the CW have been those with the greatest amount of immigration from the Northeast, which has helped return their gene pools closer to average.

Yeah, I said it.
:leaving:

Nobody should feel responsible for the actions of their ancestors. We didn't get a vote.

Just imagine somebody getting out of a time machine and saying to you, "We're from 1850. Do you think we should continue with slavery and the extermination of Indians?"

Your answer would probably be similar to mine: "Are you out of your fucking mind? Hell no, you shouldn't do it!"

 

I'm so glad this thread was brought to front again. I found it a little after I first joined HF. I lost it after being off line for a few days and could not remember the thread title (Karen, I didn't know you at that time of course and didn't search through your threads then because I couldn't remember the author).

Great thread! I now know that I can subscribe.

 

There are some areas where, if you are interested in serious historical enquiry, you are best staying off internet forums that purport to be about it.

The Dark Ages is one of them (taken over by Arthurian mythologists)

By the sound of it, the American Civil Was is another

I fear, as the centenary approaches, the First World War is another (the centenary of the war's start falls later in 2014, by the way, for anyone who wasn't aware).


The problem, as ever, is I am afraid an attempt to harness history to some end other than the simple study of history.

I have at my side the text of a very interesting lecture given in 1962 called "Uses and Abuses of Legal history: A Practitioner's View" - but the points it has to make aren't confined to legal history; they are equally applicable to any branch of history.

And the point is ... there are many people out of there seeking to mis-use history. Here in Britain, as the centenary of the first world war approaches, there is an intensifying debate on the correct means of commemorating it; and the extent to which we should focus on whether or not it was a "just" war.

But even to ask the question "was it a just war?" is to confuse history and moral philosophy.

The historian should have no use for moral philosophy. The historian's concern should be to enquire, through the medium of the records they have left, into the way people in past times acted, thought, and spoke to one another. The historian's role is not to place value judgements on the thoughts, words or actions of the subjects of their study; nor to seek to suppress findings which they personally may happen to find disagreeable.

We cannot help, nor influence, nor alter what people did in the past. All we can do is ascertain it, and faithfully report it.

My own view of the American Civil War (and I have read more than the average English person on the subject) is that it both was and was not a war that was fought about slavery. The "headline" issue over which it was fought to begin with was indeed the issue of "states' rights" or secession or whatever you wish to call it. The North went to war to defend the integrity of the Union. The South went to war to defend their right to secede from the voluntary Union of states any time they wished (although the arguments may have differed from state to state: for instance, Louisiana had been purchased from the French with US gold: did it really have the right to say "thank you very much, but we don't want to be part of the Union any more"? Texas, on the other hand, was an independent republic, which had fought for - and won - it's freedom from Mexico, which had voluntarily petitioned to join the Union).

Underlying this, however, was the REASON that the Southern states chose to secede. And slavery was undoubtedly a part of this. The argument in the 1840s and 1850s had not, however, been about whether slavery should be abolished absolutely - the South was too politically powerful for that to happen. Rather, the argument was about whether or not slavery should be permitted in the new Western territories. The Southerners perceived that if it was not then, in time, as the Territories became states, the balance of power in the Union would tilt against them, until outright abolition became a real possibility. Hence, the arguments were ostensibly about the Westward extension of the Mason-Dixon line; but they were really about creating an environment in which the total abolition of slavery might become an issue.

All that changed with the Emancipation Proclamation. From that point on, the war WAS explicitly about slavery - although for the South, that also meant that it was a war about their whole economic and social structure, which would inevitably be changed for ever in the event of Northern victory.

You can, surely, discuss and examine all of these issues without it having to be presented in any way as a criticism of anybody involved. The fact is that people were as they were; the past was as it was.

However, the moment you begin to ask questions like "was the South justified in going to war to defend slavery?" you are not actually discussing history, but moral philosophy. By all means discuss that question if you wish - but don't pretend it is a historical discussion! And the same goes for questions surrounding the first world war, the Vietnam war, the Raid on Cadiz ... you name it!

 

So what you're saying Beachball is that we shouldn't judge or have a 'moral' opinion about historical events.
It has often been said that we fail to learn from history, and it seems to me that if you take that kind of attitude it's unlikely you would learn anything other than a bunch of dry facts. Surely history is all about how we interpret the facts that have come down to us. To interpret involves coming to value judgments.
There's no such thing IMO as pure history - every historian has their own particular bias whether they're liberals. marxists or whatever.

To me it seems very unlikely that the US CW would ever have been fought if it hadn't been for slavery, as the Southern states would probably never have gone down the road of secession. It's quite possible to arrive at the conclusion that the 'rights' the states wanted was the right to continue having slaves.

Myself I don't care much for the purely academic type of historian, and I do see a huge moral issue here, as indeed I do in the case of WWI and the current controversy surrounding how it should be remembered.

It's all very well for people like Gove (UK Education Secretary) to urge us to reject 'left-wing' narratives about the war. But I wonder if our dear education secretary has ever read the war poets like Owen, Brook or Sassoon. Maybe he thinks they had a leftist agenda? And in suggesting that a different, presumably Imperialist, jingoistic interpretation of the war is the correct one, he's adopting a definite 'moral' or at least political opinion.

 

It's a pity that military planners in Europe didn't take the lessons on board from what was the first fully industrial scale war in history.
Maybe that's one reason why at the outbreak of WWI they were still thinking like Napoleon. Frontal attacks on well defended positions with huge cost in life.

In essence, the plan for the Battle of the Somme was the same on a bigger scale as the Confederate attack on Union positions on the last day at Gettysburg (Pickett's charge). Massive artillery bombardment to soften them up, then send in the infantry. Didn't work on either occasion.

 

No, we didn't get a vote, but we don't get a free ride now, either. We can't break the connection to our own past. We don't have that option. You can't say ... "well, I'm not the one who inflicted these horrors on these people, therefore I'm justified in washing my hands of it. I have no further culpability here."

An enlightened civilization does not have that luxury. It cannot turn its back on its own past. I'm not saying we are obliged to flagellate ourselves over the horrible acts of some dude a century-and-a-half ago. No, we're not to blame for it, but blame is not the point. We are stuck with the consequences, whether we like it or not. Our task now is to deal with the aftermath, of which there is still plenty, in a responsible and adult way.

 

Without slavery, the South would have had no money. Cotton couldn't have been exported for a profit without free labor, at that time. It would have been like Saudi Arabia without oil. The whole relationship between North and South would have been entirely different, but I don't know what it would have been.

Time for a new WWI thread?

You're talking about two separate things that are both commonly referred to as history, even though they are quite different. Pure historical research should limit itself to facts. Lessons from history cannot be applied until they are analyzed and debated, and this is subject to endless interpretations and opinions. Without this analysis, the study of pure history is worthless.

It irritates me when the line between the two approaches to history is not distinct.

There are biased historians who cannot bear to say anything good about the Southern army, just because they disapprove of the Southern cause. The two subjects are unrelated. James Longstreet often said after the war (and he may have been quoting someone else) that the Confederate army was the best army that ever fought, fighting for the worst cause that any army ever fought for. I strongly disapprove of the Southern cause, but the accomplishments of its army are what they are, and they are damn impressive.

What a can of worms this opens!

Louisiana had not fought for its independence, so it had no legal right to object to being bought or sold. And...did its people strongly prefer French rule to American? That's a complicated question. Its main city New Orleans might have thought that way, but the Louisiana Territory reached all the way to Canada. It was full of Native Americans who had never heard of France or the United States. They didn't even know they were being sold. One exception was the Acadia Indians, who loved anybody who hated the British (see the early history of Quebec). Also, there was a lot of Creole animosity toward the Spanish, and protection from them was a high priority. So, I think answering your question about Louisiana makes unscrambling an egg look like child's play.

Texas is a different story. As an independent nation that joined the US by choice, I think they had a greater moral right to leave, but their leaders failed to secure that right in writing when they joined the Union. Big mistake on their part.

The logic always comes full circle, doesn't it?

Explicitly, implicitly, intelligent people on both sides always knew what was going on.

Very few societies in world history have ever done the right thing, morally, when it was against their financial interests.