The American Civil War did not begin as a Revolution. While Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party promised in 1860 that their election would dislodge the Slave Power and place slavery on the path of ultimate extinction, they never advocated for revolutionary means to do so. Theirs was a gradual emancipation, one that would allow slavery to live for decades more, dying slowly but painlessly. This, the Slavocracy rejected. They wished for their peculiar institution to be perpetual, and to maintain their world, the one in which they lived as the unquestioned political, social, and economic leaders. Lincoln may not destroy slavery at once, but he dared to interfere with their prerogatives and speak of slavery as an evil that ought to be exterminated. Knowing that slavery would be for the first time on the defensive with the anti-slavery Republicans at the helm of the nation, Southerners tried to destroy that nation, unable to countenance even the slightest infringement on their power and honor.
The North accepted the war the South had started to maintain the integrity of the nation. For the Northern people, secession was chiefly a threat because a successful separation would eviscerate the unity and stability of the United States. What they believed to be the best government on earth, the source and guardian of their happiness and prosperity, would then collapse into several petty republics, and the American experiment would end. It was to prevent this that the soldiers of the Union Army fought. But everyone recognized the centrality of slavery to the conflict – both Union and Confederate soldiers knew that the South fought for slavery, and that the “way of life” Southerners claimed to defend would be one anchored in slavery and White supremacy. The average Northern soldier was not greatly concerned at first with overthrowing either, but they and their leaders soon realized that the Rebellion drew strength from the millions of people they forced to work for them. They, likewise, realized that the enslaved could be counted on as allies for the Union cause.
Yet, at this early stage, Northerners hesitated to turn the Civil War into a Revolution. Conservative men, opposed to secession but supporters of White supremacy, all dreamed of restoring the “Union as it was,” and insisting on prosecuting a war that disrupted slavery as little as possible. Lincoln was not one of these men. He and the Republican Party, from the first moment, predicted that Union victory meant the doom of slavery, for the Slave Power that had artificially protected it and guarded it from the natural march of progress, had been overthrown. As soon as the Southern States returned, the Republican policies of “Freedom National” would be implemented, and slavery put on the path of ultimate extinction. Free soil for the territories, abolition in the District of Columbia, the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, and Federal pressure on the Border States, all of these were adopted. But what would have been great anti-slavery achievements in the antebellum now proved insufficient, and the Union’s leaders had to recognize that the “inexorable logic of events” was now leading them towards Emancipation.
This momentous step couldn’t have been taken without the actions of the enslaved people themselves. Southern masters who had convinced themselves that the people whose liberty they robbed were happy and loyal, suffered a rude awakening as the war started. Far from what the enslavers had believed, Black people struggled mightily to obtain their freedom, offered their help to Federals that in many cases remained reluctant, and defied the power of the slaveholders. This did not, at first, happen through slave insurrection, for the enslaved recognized that the increasingly repressive Southern State had the necessary force to repress any violent uprising, making any such attempt nothing short of suicidal. Nonetheless, Black people opened a “second front” at the very heart of the Confederacy as they fled to the Union’s lines; offered their services as laborers, spies, and soldiers; and resisted the power of the slaveholders by refusing to work or demanding payment. As a State founded on slavery, the Confederacy had to resist this challenge, but it still sapped resources and manpower it could not afford.
The Victory of the Union
Thus, the Union accepted Emancipation chiefly as a military policy that would weaken the Confederacy while allowing it to gain greater strength by recruiting the formerly enslaved as allies in the struggle. But this should not be understood as merely a desperate policy Lincoln had no other option but to adopt. The administration had stricken back against slavery since the start, and at every crucible, at every choice between policies that weakened slavery and those that upheld it, Lincoln chose the option that furthered human freedom. Certainly, many Northern politicians and generals disagreed with the government’s interpretation of the war and believed that a conciliatory policy would be better. If it were up to men like Douglas and McClellan, the Union Army would have enforced the Fugitive Slave Act, would have never enlisted Black soldiers, would have never adopted the kind of policies that augured a Revolution in Southern life. Consequently, the gradual, painless, compensated emancipation all but the most Radical abolitionists had envisioned in 1860, had already given way to a complete, violent, and immediate destruction of slavery by military power in 1862.
The conservative dream of completely separating the war from slavery was over, and from then on, the United States Army fought not merely for Union, but also for Liberty. Again, this was not something incidental, for the war started a process of radicalization against slavery and then against White supremacy within the Northern people. Seeing the horrors of slavery up close, and identifying the Southern Slavocracy as the responsible for the conflict, Northerners started to feel a deeper moral revulsion against slavery than ever before. This wouldn’t have been possible without the efforts of Black people and their Radical allies, who continuously pushed forward for imbuing the war with a greater moral significance. These campaigns of anti-slavery slavery agitation, plus seeing the value of Black people and their commitment to the Union cause in such great events as the Battle of Union Mills, all helped to transform the nation’s conception of Black people. By the end of the war, Northerners had become fully convinced that the perpetuity of the Union, but also the aims of justice and the survival of the national ethos of Liberty, required the eternal overthrow of slavery and a true effort at Equality for all. The Civil War, then, had become the Second American Revolution.
This Revolution frightened Southerners. The Confederacy was a fundamentally
counterrevolutionary effort, which sought to preserve the structure of antebellum Southern society, one dominated by the slaveholder elite, against the terrifying challenge Northern abolitionists presented. However, the South was not united in this effort. The question of the Confederacy’s legitimacy and its claim of democratic government is one that has been debated countless times. One must not forget that there were at least four million abolitionists that the Southern elite did not take into account when the secession movement started. Yet even beyond them, secession was not unanimously accepted by Southern Whites. Hundreds of thousands would resist the Confederacy, fighting in blue uniforms or as Unionist guerrillas, and defying the slaveholders’ pretensions to make them give up their properties and lives for a cause which seemed only to benefit the elite. Especially because that elite seemed unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices, resisting bitterly and shortsightedly every attempt to make them give up any of their “rights.” Deep cracks in Southern society were exposed and grew more pronounced as the war continued and the sacrifices asked of the poor increased.
The Southern masters responded to this challenge in the same way they responded to Black attempts to reclaim their freedom: with brutal repression. Throughout the war, the Confederacy and its Armed forces acted swiftly and ruthlessly against Unionists, persecuting, massacring, and attacking them. The sorry tales of repression in East Tennessee and Western North Carolina are examples. The Confederacy employed similar methods to stamp out defiance amongst the enslaved, who were used to being driven from their homes and murdered by White power structures. In this way, the continuous, aggressive State violence needed to maintain slavery and the power of the planter aristocracy was exerted, and the South answered to the North’s radicalization by radicalizing itself, taking increasingly appalling measures to maintain its power. And those great libertarians like Robert Toombs and Alexander Stephens, who spoke so often and so bitterly against tyranny and for constitutional government, never challenged this repression. Because, to the leaders of the South, violence to enforce their “rights” was always good, whereas any challenge to their power, no matter where it came from, was completely unacceptable.
This meant that ultimately the government of John C. Breckinridge also became unacceptable to those who held power within the Confederacy. Committed to a successful prosecution of the war above all else, the Breckinridge regime employed all the methods thus described to enforce the power of the Confederate State, but also sought to lessen the burden upon the poor and push the wealthy to make the necessary sacrifices. The Administration thus faced planters that fought against impressment of goods and enslaved laborers, resisted his intromission in local government and obstructed the prosecution of the war, and above all believed that Breckinridge was not adequately protecting slavery. All because these measures attempted against the power they held to be sacred and untouchable. And thus, Breckinridge to them became the worst tyrant in history not because of what he did to Unionists or Black people, but because he dared to tell them what to do.
The Defeat of the Confederacy
This culminated in the so-called “Five Monstrous Decrees” and the attempt to recruit Black soldiers, both hard blows against slavery that nonetheless failed to save the Confederacy, which tottered in the brink of destruction after the Union victories in Atlanta and Mobile. Knowing that further resistance was hopeless, Breckinridge then tried to surrender, hoping that a negotiated peace may yet save White supremacy or even slavery. But even this the planter aristocracy could not countenance. Deciding that it was better to be utterly destroyed than to voluntarily give up their “rights,” they overthrew Breckinridge and then executed him, cleaving Southern society in two and alienating the poor Whites who had seen him as their protector. In this Southerners were merely repeating history, for it was this same pride and arrogance that had resulted in secession. And just like how secession had only brought about the very revolution they had wanted to avoid, more radical and immediate than it could have been otherwise, the coup against Breckinridge only assure that the war would go until it destroyed the Confederacy. The same suicidal instinct that had made them reject Lincoln, made them unable to accept Breckinridge, and thus assured their complete perdition.
The result was a bloody, horrifying fiasco, just as Breckinridge had predicted. The South’s collapse resulted in famine extending through the Southern countryside and a breakdown of order, leading to anarchic Jacqueries that claimed thousands of lives more. This assured that the Civil War would be the deadliest conflict in American history, and one of the bloodiest in the history of the world. Over 650,000 Union soldiers died in the struggle to maintain the nation, and a further 500,000 Confederate soldiers, most of disease. Famine, anarchy, and disease, extending beyond the end of the war, all claimed some 100,000 civilians in Union-areas, while over 500,000 thousand Confederate civilians died. The 1.8 million people that died in the war represented 5.8% of the US population, and, staggeringly, over 10% of the Confederate population and over 40% of its White males of military age. The war had further reduced the South to an “economic desert,” making the South go from 30% of the nation’s wealth to less than 10%. It also fundamentally changed the dynamics of power – never again would the South domineer over the Federal government as it once did, but instead the US entered a period of Northern, and more specifically Republican, dominance.
The most inescapable fact of Southern defeat was the destruction of slavery. Unlike what Northerners had believed, slavery proved to be a sturdy institution, requiring powerful military blows and a concerted effort until it was destroyed. The legal end of slavery throughout the nation did not come until June 1865, when the Reconstructed government of Mississippi ratified the 13th amendment, securing emancipation in the South and starting it in Kentucky and Delaware, both of whom clung to the institution. The actual end of slavery came on the ground, as Union soldiers started an occupation of the South and enforced emancipation at gunpoint. But the military and unconditional defeat of the Confederacy had already assured the outcome, granting their freedom to over four million of human beings and revolutionizing Southern life. “Society has been completely changed by the war,” observed a Louisiana planter. “The [French] revolution of '89 did not produce a greater change in the 'Ancien Régime' than this has in our social life.” And he was completely right – the American nation would never again be the same.
The “vaunted world of privilege and power” that the Southern elites had enjoyed and sought to protect now came crashing down as the victorious Union enforced emancipation, land redistribution, and justice against the leading rebels. “The props that held society up are broken,” said the daughter of a former planter, as she observed these changes. The once “rich, hospitable,
powerful, are now poor, and like Samson of old shorn of their pride and strength,” grieved a Mississippian. Katherine Stone gasped in horror at the idea of “submission to the Union (how we hate the word!), confiscation, and Negro equality.” Sarah Morgan believed for her part that it would be best for Southerners to “leave our land and emigrate to any desert spot of the earth.” Some rebels followed her counsel and fled the country, never to return, the most prominent of them being General Beauregard. E. Kirby Smith and some of his lieutenants fled to Mexico; Judah P. Benjamin and others preferred Europe, while other communities tried to relocate to Brazil or Cuba. Some 50,000 rebels left the country, convinced by the fate of those who stayed that this was the right choice.
Several leading rebels ended up being trialed for war crimes and treason. Governor Vance was hanged for war crimes for his actions in Western North Carolina, a fate shared by Wade Hampton and Jeb Stuart, who was hanged in Harpers Ferry, the same place in which he had stood during John Brown’s execution. Howell Cobb and Robert Barnwell Rhett were hanged as traitors for having served in high positions in the US government and then joining the rebellion. Even some who obtained clemency because they had surrendered themselves received step penalties, such as Joseph Brown, condemned to 10 years of imprisonment, or Joseph E. Johnston, who was saved by the hangman only by Sherman’s intervention and then condemned to 20 years of imprisonment, having served only ten years when his health failed, and he died in 1875. Anticipating such a fate and seeing the “government overthrown & the whole property of myself and my family swept away,” Edmund Ruffin preferred to imitate his former chief and shoot himself. Other rebels received greater clemency if they had given up in time, such as General Longstreet, who received a full pardon, or Henry Wise, who merely had to suffer the confiscation of his properties, both because they surrendered themselves after the Coup.
Execution, however, was reserved only for the worst rebels, being used almost entirely against the architects of secession, supporters of the Junta, or war criminals. Most often, the Union enforced exile against the losers of the war. Due to Lincoln’s personal intervention, for example, Alexander Stephens was “allowed” to flee to England, where he would scrape a meager existence by advertising cheap products and being regarded as a curiosity by Europeans. Albert Sydney Johnston had his own sentence commuted to exile for having denounced the Junta, but, he observed later, it would have been preferrable to “die in my own native land than even live as a King in a foreign land.” Beauregard also echoed the American loyalist Thomas Hutchinson, writing in a bout of homesickness that he would rather “die poor and forgotten in my country than amidst honor and glory in another nation.” But this was a possibility forever closed – none of them would see the US again.
Others decided to exile themselves after their relatives received the Union’s justice. Thus, Varina Davis settled in England, denouncing how Lincoln had by “a single dash of the pen” wanted to “disrupt the whole social structure of the South, and to pour over the country a flood of evils.” Mary Breckinridge and her sons, after a brief stay in Kentucky, also decided to leave for Canada, writing that “I cannot bear the sight of this land - it isn’t home without my dear martyred husband.” Mary Boykin Chesnut also spent many months grieving how “our world has gone to destruction,” and wondering whether her husband “would be hanged as a Senator or as a General.” James Chesnut would be hanged as a Senator, the properties of his father then being confiscated, and Mary being given a small amount of money which she used to leave the country for France, where she would survive by publishing her memories (the first edition being in French). As she embarked, penniless and bitter, she saw enslaved people celebrating their freedom. “It takes these half-Africans but a moment to go back to their naked savage animal nature,” she observed in hatred. Gertrude Thomas, who had gone from a wealthy mistress to a ruined poor woman, also wished for a “volley of musketry” to be “sent among the Negroes who were holding a jubilee” in Georgia.
For the ruined planter class, Katherine Stone said, the “future stands before us dark, forbidding, & stern,” full of “all the bitterness of death without the lively hope of Resurrection.” Stone’s plight was even more severe, for when she returned to her plantation in Mississippi, she found it already redistributed to the people her family had enslaved. Granted a forty-acre homestead by the Federal commander, the girl who had once enjoyed a life of ease and pleasure for the first time had to work for her own bread. Even Unionist planters like William J. Britton felt themselves ruined by the end of slavery and the policies of the Union in favor of equal rights. He took dark pleasure in seeing “the political mad caps who have destroyed our once prosperous and happy people Swing at the end of hemp,” only regretting how “our great man Toombs was not among the number.” Although the full form of the post-war settlement was to be determined, most planters could already tell that the balance of power had changed and could only brace for worse.
That the Revolution was just starting was also recognized in the North. As the Congress closed its December session, a lame duck Chesnut could only declare apprehensively that “the anti-slavery party is in power. We know it. We
feel it.” The Lincoln administration had won the election and then the war on a platform calling for the destruction of slavery, equal rights for all Americans, and a throughout Reconstruction of the Union. The victory of the Union, Frederick Douglass declared, had been a necessary and glorious one, for the future and soul of the nation and the progress of humanity. “The world has not seen a nobler and grander war” than this Second American Revolution. While costly and full of sacrifice, this struggle had written “the statutes of eternal justice and liberty in the blood of the worst tyrants . . . We should rejoice that there was normal life and health enough in us to stand in our appointed place, and do this great service for mankind.” A former slave named Uncle Stephen made the same point with less eloquence but just as deep a feeling. “It’s mighty distressin’ this war,” he told Yankee soldiers, “but it ’pears to me like the
right thing couldn’t be done without it.”
Nonetheless, the victory of the Union had not settled the issues of the war, but only opened new challenges. The issues of the war were certainly not settled in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, where the famine and the Jacquerie were raging on. They were not settled in the Mississippi Valley and other large swathes of the South, where roving bands of marauders still stole from starving civilians and where order hadn’t been reestablished. They were not settled in many plantations where former masters tried to maintain slavery and were preparing to fight for a system of labor and racial subordination, even if it required violence. They were not settled in the Black belt, where new Black landowners found themselves attacked by terrorists that wanted to reverse the tide of the Revolution. They were not settled in the Upper South, where a deadly riot started when Kentucky troops attacked a group of Tennesseans that had been singing “Stonewall Jackson’s Way.” They were not settled in the North either, where William Lloyd Garrison tried to dissolve the American Anti-Slavery Society by declaring that its work was completed, only for Frederick Douglass and Wendell Philipps to take over it and adopt a new motto: “No Reconstruction Without Negro Suffrage.”
The United States had successfully passed through its greatest trial, maintaining its unity and nationhood in the face of a powerful rebellion. But new and perhaps more difficult trials were now dawning. The American Civil War was over, but it remained to be seen whether the United States could win the peace in the new Reconstruction Era.
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