Six on History: Civil Wa
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- 1) John Brown's Raid | Photo Essay | Civil War Monitor"In October 1859, abolitionist John Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in hopes of obtaining the necessary weapons to arm a successful slave insurrection throughout the region. The raid failed, and by year's end Brown was dead, hanged after being convicted of treason and inciting slave insurrection. The impact of his actions would live on, however; Brown remained a symbol of the danger posed by abolitionists in the South, while he was considered a martyr throughout much of the North. Shown below are images associated with Brown and his fateful raid."
"Brown was hanged at 11:15 a.m. and pronounced dead roughly 30 minutes later. His body, the noose still around his neck, was placed into the coffin and sent via train for burial in New York. Brown was hailed in the North as a martyr and villified in the South. Little over a year later, the bloody civil war Brown predicted would befall the nation became a reality. (Library of Congress)"2) BOOKS The Civil War’s Most Chicken General, SLATEA new history tells the story of George McClellan, the Union Army leader who almost undid Lincoln.So what did McClellan do when presented with the copy of Lee’s invasion plan rolled up with those cigars? He first sent a few telegraphs to his superiors crowing about how he was about to deliver a decisive victory. (To Lincoln: “I have all the plans of the Rebels and will catch them in their own trap.”) But he soon fell victim to the second thoughts that plagued him throughout his career as a commander. Though he issued orders to act on the intelligence, they exhibited, in Slotkin’s words, a “balance between boldness and anxiety,” and failed to take full advantage of his remarkable good fortune in stumbling upon his enemy’s plan. (As Slotkin notes, the discovery of Lee’s orders was pure serendipity—intelligence-gathering was among McClellan’s weaknesses.) Union forces won a minor victory on the strength of the lost plans, at the Battle of South Mountain, but failed to destroy Lee’s force, allowing him to retreat and fight another day (at Antietam, it would turn out). Despite the modesty of the South Mountain victory, McClellan reported it to his wife with typical immodesty: “If I can believe one tenth of what is reported, God has seldom given an army a greater victory than this.”"Imagine, for a moment, that it is 1862 and you are Gen. George B. McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac, the Union’s premier fighting force. The Confederate Army, led by Robert E. Lee, has just invaded Maryland. As you’re preparing your strategy for checking Lee’s advance, a message arrives at headquarters: A corporal from Indiana has found an envelope lying in a field near enemy lines. Inside are three cigars. Oh, and a copy of Lee’s Special Order No. 191, detailing his invasion plan and revealing that the Confederate general has split his force in two, a daring move that has left his army dangerously exposed to attack. You’re George McClellan—beloved by your soldiers, tasked by your commander-in-chief with destroying Lee’s army. What do you do?
Smoke the cigars, obviously . But after that? If you answered, Attack with all possible speed, by god!, you have a lot to learn from Richard Slotkin’s The Long Road to Antietam: How the Civil War Became a Revolution. As its title suggests, the book sets out to show how the nature of the war changed during Lee’s Maryland campaign, which culminated in the famously bloody Battle of Antietam. Up until that point in the war, powerful men on both sides of the conflict believed that a negotiated peace might be hammered out. But after 3,600 Americans died fighting outside a farming village on the banks of Antietam Creek, Lincoln would issue the Emancipation Proclamation, a radical document that ended any hope of reconciliation. In the wake of Antietam, the Union would fight an all-out war of subjugation, with the goal of crushing the rebellion beneath its Yankee boot and ending the institution of slavery by force.
Slotkin, a historian and a writer of historical fiction, offers an absorbing account of this evolution. But the central figure of The Long Road to Antietam isn’t the author of the Emancipation Proclamation; it’s a man who openly opposed it—George McClellan. Vainglorious but insecure, power-hungry but risk-averse, a Democrat fighting a Republican’s war, McClellan is arguably the Civil War’s most fascinating figure and certainly its most frustrating. In McClellan, Slotkin finds an embodiment of the thinking that Lincoln repudiated with the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, namely the idea that the South should be compelled to rejoin the Union, but allowed to preserve its peculiar institution. Unfortunately for Lincoln, McClellan was also the Union’s best hope for delivering a battlefield victory big enough to give the president the political capital required to issue such a controversial proclamation. Reading deeply and thoughtfully through McClellan’s correspondence—the general didn’t so much as trim his moustache without first dropping a line to his wife Mary Ellen—Slotkin paints a detailed portrait of the talented but flawed general who helped Lincoln bring about his revolution, if ever so unwillingly.
Here, as throughout the book, Slotkin is careful not to use the benefit of hindsight to judge McClellan too harshly. He isn’t convinced, as some of the general’s tougher critics have been, that had McClellan acted without anxiety his army could have decimated Lee’s at South Mountain. “It could be argued,” he writes, “that McClellan’s caution was reasonable given his estimate of enemy strength, even if it is hard for historians who know how wrong McClellan was to accept that judgment.” Partially as a result of his poor intelligence-gathering apparatus, McClellan had a tendency to wildly overestimate the size of his opponent’s army and thus miss opportunities to exploit his superior forces. At Antietam, McClellan would convince himself that he was facing down a Confederate force of 65,000 men. Slotkin figures the number was more like 36,000.
Though McClellan often seemed to be afraid of his own shadow , he could also be wildly self-assured, and The Road to Antietam captures him in all of his megalomaniacal glory. (McClellan’s nickname was “Young Napoleon,” but reading Slotkin’s book I imagined him as an unholy combination of Alvy Singer and Douglas MacArthur.) “He would come to see his elevation as providential,” writes Slotkin, “and would interpret his successes and failures as signals of God’s intentions toward the American republic. … He confided to Mary Ellen his sense that ‘by some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land.’ ” It’s self-regard so grandiose it verges on treason.Why on earth would Lincoln suffer such insubordination? For one, there was a paucity of Union generals with command experience at the outset of the conflict. To paraphrase a confounding military mind from our own era, you go to war with the generals you have. The Union war effort also relied on a fragile coalition of Republicans and so-called War Democrats, who would have blanched at McClellan’s ouster. (McClellan was well-connected in the party, and would unsuccessfully challenge Lincoln as the Democratic nominee in the 1864 presidential election.) And finally, despite his failings, McClellan’s men loved him — as any soldier might love a general disinclined to risk his men’s lives.McClellan believed that he, and he alone, could save the nation from ruin—both the ruin threatened by Bobby Lee’s army and the ruin threatened by those in the Republican Party who would abolish slavery. “McClellan was living in a military and political fantasy world,” Slotkin writes, “in which he was the central figure in a two-front war to save the Union from the Rebels in front and the Radicals in the rear.” But rather than spur him to action, the fantasy only reinforced his trepidation. McClellan was loath to commit his troops to battle, Slotkin argues, for fear that a loss would give his political enemies the ammunition they needed to relieve him of his command.
He certainly wasn’t going to risk his neck to help a rival. To show us McClellan at his self-serving worst, Slotkin takes us back to the Second Battle of Bull Run, in August 1862, in which Robert E. Lee badly outmaneuvered a Union force commanded by John Pope. The North had forces that could have come to Pope’s rescue, but unfortunately for the soldiers being cut down by the Confederates, those forces were commanded by McClellan, who saw Pope as a threat to his ambitions. Despite repeated orders to reinforce Pope, McClellan dragged his feet, asking for clarification on who would be in command when he arrived on the scene. By the time he got his troops to the field, it was too late. Slotkin quotes Attorney General Edward Bates’ assessment of McClellan’s performance: “a criminal tardiness, a fatuous apathy, a captious, bickering rivalry, among our commanders who seem so taken up with their quick-made dignity that they overlook the lives of their people & the necessities of their country.”
The Long Road to Antietam culminates in a detailed account of the titular battle, in which McClellan finally committed his troops to an all-out engagement. The blow-by-blow description of the fighting may tax the patience of the lay reader; what goes by in a matter of pages in a popular survey like James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom here occupies several chapters overflowing with carnage. (Twenty-five thousand soldiers were killed or wounded on Sept. 17, 1862, making it arguably the bloodiest day in American history.) But Slotkin’s description of the battle is essential to completing his meticulous, maddening portrait of McClellan. Though he commanded a superior force—and though he drew up a sensible strategy for vanquishing Lee’s overtaxed army—a tentative McClellan nearly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, ultimately allowing Lee to retreat back to Virginia with his army badly bruised but intact.
Unluckily for McClellan, his victory at Antietam was just decisive enough to give Lincoln the political cover he needed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and set the war on the president’s new, revolutionary course. The victory was also just limited enough to give Lincoln the political cover he needed to issue Young Napoleon a pink slip and put the Army of the Potomac in the hands of men committed to stamping out the rebellion and the insidious institution it sought to safeguard. McClellan had finally gone to battle, and won, but the victory proved to be his undoing, not the coronation he’d imagined in his letters to his wife. Close, but no cigar."3) Honor Slaves For Surviving the Confederacy, Civil War Memory"I am not surprised that public officials in Union County, North Carolina have finally authorized the inclusion of a marker/monument on courthouse grounds to honor its local slave population. [I’ve followed this story for quite some time.] Given everything I know about the folks involved in this project I am not optimistic that the final wording of the marker will do justice to what we know about the history of free and enslaved blacks and the Confederacy. The history will be distorted.
This is unfortunate since slaves like Aaron Perry and Weary Clyburn deserve to be remembered. The final wording of the marker will likely reference their service in the Confederate army and their having been awarded pensions late in life. This interpretation will satisfy the self-serving agenda of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who are committed to remembering the Confederacy as some kind of experiment in civil rights. It will also satisfy the descendants of these men, who wish to see their ancestors remembered.
These men deserve to be remembered, but not for living a life that falls outside of the historical record. They deserve to be remembered because they survived slavery. We can only imagine what hardships and humiliations these men suffered as chattel. How many experienced the lash or the pain of separation from loved ones? How many suffered from the intense desire to be free?
On top of all of this these men were forced to endure the hardships of a war that, if concluded in favor of their owners, would have ensured their continued enslavement. Tens of thousands of slaves were impressed by the Confederate government as laborers, while thousands more accompanied their owners to serve their individual needs. The presence of slaves in the army did not mark a change in their legal status. They were not brought to war to place them any closer to freedom. Quite the opposite. Now, in addition to the hardships experienced at home these men were forced to negotiate a new set of challenges and dangers. Violence was anything but foreign to the nation’s slave population by 1861. Separation from families was anything but new for these men.
And yet these men survived. They even went on and managed to eke out an existence during very difficult times that perhaps filled them with pride in knowing that their lives were finally their own.
Yes, we should honor these men. Honor them not for serving the Confederacy, but surviving it."
4) The 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner Photo Essay, Civil War Monitor"On July 18, 1863, Union troops commanded by Brigadier General Quincy Gillmore launched an attack on Fort Wagner, the Confederate bastion that protected Morris Island, located south of Charleston Harbor—part of the larger Federal attempt to capture the city of Charleston. While the assault failed, the men of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the African-American regiment commanded by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw that led the Union advance, were subsequently praised for their valor—a significant step on the path toward the acceptance of black troops among northern soldiers and civilians. Below are images and illustrations that help tell the story of the noteworthy engagement."5) Untwisting Sherman’s Neckties, Civil War Memory"As a quick follow-up to yesterday’s post on Sherman and Civil War memory I thought it might be helpful to cite a passage from William G. Thomas’s new book, The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern AmericaNo image of Georgia in 1864 is more iconic than that of Sherman’s men destroying southern rails and turning them into what became known as Sherman neckties. The destruction caused by Sherman’s army almost always eclipses the rebuilding that took place immediately following the war.
Reconstruction of the South in this respect was literally re-construction, a fact long obscured in the era’s twisted history, which the white South remembered long as punishment and subordination, conveniently forgetting the generous terms of their restoration….
No railroad suffered more than the Western and Atlantic (what Wright called the Chattanooga and Atlanta) because of both Union army maneuvers across it and Confederate cavalry raids against it during the Atlanta Campaign in the summer of 1864. The Confederates tore up twenty-five miles of the railroad in a massive raid aimed at disabling the Union’s key supply route. And in an effort to cut off Atlanta from external communication, Sherman just before his November March to the Sea, “very effectually destroyed the road” and gave orders for Wright’s Corps to remove sixteen miles of track between Resaca and Dalton. Yet, after Sherman’s March was completed, Wright’s Corps went back to Atlanta and rebuilt nearly all of the Western and Atlantic, laying down 140 miles of new track and cross-ties, raising 16 bridges, and erecting 20 new water tanks. Close to $1 million in construction labor and $1,377,145 in new material were expended on the Western and Atlantic before turning it over to the state of Georgia and its original corporate officers in September 1865. (pp. 183-84)
According to Thomas, in less than one year rail service in the South had been largely restored. The book details the rebuilding that took place throughout the South toward the end of the war. I highly recommend it."
6) Southern schools' history textbooks: A long history of deception, and what the future holds, Montgomery (AL) Advertiser“With all the attention they received in terms of reference to the monuments, I think their most lasting impact was in controlling and censoring textbooks,” said Kevin Levin, a historian who has written on the Civil War in American memory. “That’s often overlooked.”
But Black Southerners refused to accept these distortions. Black historians mounted challenges to Lost Cause mythology as early as 1913. Parents and grandparents pushed back against the school lessons given to their children. They passed family stories onto children and grandchildren. They took ordinary moments, like preparing food or fixing hair, to tell stories of Black achievement.
Confederate reckoning:Southern newspapers were vocal supporters of the Confederacy. It lasted for generations
All too many times, they had to do their own work to learn that history. Frederick Webb, an actor who graduated from a high school in Texarkana, Arkansas, in 2004, had to do his own research to uncover that history, including borrowing a copy of Alex Haley’s “Roots” from an English teacher.
“It was 10th or 11th grade … there was a shelf in the back [of the classroom] and the entire shelf was the book ‘Roots,’” he said. “But we never talked about anything like that.”
Efforts to improve history education moved slowly. Lost Cause mythology came under sustained fire from academic historians starting in the 1950s, but that research took decades to reach classrooms. After a long court fight, Mississippi in 1980 adopted the textbook “Conflict and Change,” which confronted lynching and the dehumanizing aspects of slavery in ways previous textbooks had not. Later textbooks provided more information about slave life and abandoned earlier whitewashings of terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
But change came slowly. Textbooks that said Black Southerners were content to be second-class citizens were in use in Virginia well into the 1980s. Mississippi students were not required to learn about the civil rights movement before 2011.
Most state curricula today encourage or require the teaching of slavery, segregation and the civil rights movement. But arguments continue about how to teach Black history. Natalie Keefer, an assistant professor at the University of Louisiana Lafayette who teaches curricula development, encourages students to take a broad view of the subject.
“If all Black students are hearing about their history is enslavement, enslavement, enslavement, then they’re not hearing about the civil rights movement,” she said. “They’re not hearing about the education that started to blossom and bloom in Louisiana during Reconstruction, and they’re not hearing about other things,” she said.
Darrell Cobbins, the only Black member of the Tennessee State Board of Education, wants history to hit home for students and said part of learning it is putting it in the context of today and using it to inform society."I think, generally speaking, part of learning history is that you have to acknowledge that particular period of time and what is happening and what is going on, but you do it through the lens of today," Cobbins said. "If you juxtapose that respective period, whatever it is in history to today’s time, and ask students to evaluate the values and norms of society and the values and norms of society of today you allow them to come to their own understanding and their own values of right and wrong."Some teaching methods have brought sharp criticism. Two Tennessee teachers resigned in 2019 after asking students to imagine themselves as slaveholders and “create a list of expectations for your family’s slaves.” Another school district in the state faced a lawsuit after a student-teacher used a supposed 1712 speech on “how to make a slave” in class.
Teachers also face time pressures and testing demands that can make it difficult to cover any topic in-depth.
“The No. 1 complaint I hear from students who become teachers is, ‘We don’t have the time to do it,” said Toby Daspit, a University of Louisiana at Lafayette professor. “The question teachers have to ask is, ‘What knowledge is of most worth? You can’t cover everything.”
But an understanding of this history can be critical. Daniel Kiel, an attorney and filmmaker who produced a documentary about the integration of Memphis Public Schools, said learning the history was life-changing for him, and helps connect present struggles with past ones.
"When you unpack these topics (like segregated schools or housing) and recognize that it's not by accident, but that there is a reason that things are the way they are, then there's a need to question," Kiel said. "Even middle-schoolers and high-schoolers respond to things they can connect to. ...They'll start to ask, 'Why does my neighborhood look the way things are versus another neighborhood?'"
Contributing: Bonnie Bolden of the Monroe (La.) News-Star; Leigh Guidry of The Daily Advertiser in Lafayette, La.; Misty Castile of the Hot Springs (Ark.) Village Voice; Meghan Mangrum of The Tennessean in Nashville, Tenn.; and Luke Ramseth of the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss.
