Due tomorrow !! July 27th
Veronica27
readings.docxYour week's reading assignments:
Reading: Escott, Chapters 1-7; Masur, Chapter 1. Page total: ~90
Overview notes and images to accompany Lecture 1
Some key elements from the lecture:
Lincoln’s Illinois vs. Davis’s Mississippi: Davis and Lincoln both migrate from Kentucky and are born not super far from each other in 1808-09. Border states often had a lot in common with one another, but the difference that slavery makes is crucial to understanding their differences because it permeated basically all of the economic, political, and significant amounts of decisionmaking occurring in those communities. Davis was born into the planter class and and enjoyed political connections as part of an elite slaveholding family. Lincoln was born into extremely modest means and while his birth may have been in a slave state, his view casts across the river to Ohio. Lincoln ultimately uses access to the West and a degree of audacity and ambition to make his way in the law in Illinois. Both fight in the Blackhawk War of 1832-33 though Lincoln never sees combat. As men entering their late 20s, Davis finds his future as a planter and slaveholder in Davis Bend, Mississippi, Lincoln as a lawyer and politician in Springfield, Illinois. Both were parts of the nation’s growing West - a region that, as it Native Americans with European and African descended people, evolved into two very different societies.
The paradigmatic role of white supremacy in 19th century America: We need to quickly dispose of the idea of a morally superior anti-slavery North. While the sections held very different views about the desirability of slavery, they held very similar paradigmatic views on race - a theme that we’re tackling head-on this semester, particularly through the reading of Escott's Lincoln's Dilemma.
The growth of the Nation in the 1850s - where it is growing and where it is not:
|
State |
1850 population |
1860 population (% enslaved) |
Net Growth+ |
|
Mississippi |
606,526 |
791,305 (55%) |
184,779 |
|
Georgia* |
906,185 |
1,057,286 (43%) |
151,101 |
|
Virginia* |
1,119,348 |
1,219,630 (30%) |
100,282 |
|
Arkansas |
209,897 |
435,450 (26%) |
225,553 |
|
South Carolina* |
668,507 |
703,708 (57%) |
35,201 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
New York |
3,097,394 |
3,880,735 |
783,341 |
|
Illinois |
851,470 |
1,711,951 |
860,481 |
|
Minnesota |
6,077 |
172,023 |
165,946 |
|
Iowa |
192,914 |
674,913 |
481,999 |
|
New Hampshire* |
317,976 |
326,073 |
8,097 |
|
|
|
|
|
* Reflect almost no immigration, reliant almost entirely on natural population growth
As you can see from the chart, the nation in general grew, but particular areas of the North in the 1850s grew very rapidly in population. In many ways the migration from Europe to the Americas was unprecedented in the history of human migration (and would be only surpassed by migration from Europe to America after the Civil War up until the 1920s.)
The only real immigrant port and large city in the Deep South was New Orleans. Antebellum New Orleans was the nation’s greatest slave market (in 1860 there were as many as 25,000 enslaved people available for sale in the city’s notorious “slave jails.”) New Orleans itself was over half foreign born in 1850 and ¾ white. In this regard (and others), the city was nothing like the rest of the region. But New Orleans was also tied to the economy and culture of the region through slavery and agriculture.
Otherwise the South attracted few immigrants. Also worth considering in the South’s population totals are the number of unfree people in the count. Productive and financially beneficial in one sense, but enslaved people bought few goods and thus created little to no internal market for manufactured goods. Nor were they allowed to be entrepreneurial in the strictest sense (though often sold food and other items on the side for spending money.)
As a consequence, it was the antebellum North that was different and changing: The North, much like the industrial cities of England, is in the second quarter of the nineteenth century at the leading edge of a modernizing industrialized revolution that will eventually overtake the globe but begins in England and the American North after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815.
The North is cultivating a culture of industrialization, and by extension, technological innovation. The South has thinkers and inventors, but no market for their work. Places like the Connecticut River Valley (home to Colt Arms, for instance) and the great manufacturing and commercial centers of New York and Philadelphia grow quickly and attract the urban poor of Europe to their factories. Prosperity in the North is increasingly tied to commerce and manufacturing as the region becomes the supplier to the rest of the nation (tariffs boost America’s internal market) and even start exporting abroad.
Railroads: I do not talk about railroads in the lecture, but one aspect of technology that tended to weld the North together increasingly in the 1850s was the emergence of railroads. Because of geography, it was easier to build lines along an east/west alignment rather than the longer distances to southern destinations. Few railroads crossed the Ohio River and fewer yet the Appalachian Mountains save through Pennsylvania. The South also had fewer cities and natural terminuses. Lastly, the South relied on its river system to get agricultural products to market in coastal towns, pushing inland more for access to new arable land rather than to reach populated areas.
This map of the Sunbury and Erie Railroad from 1850 shows how rail connected smaller communities to the larger cities of the region and knitted together the commerce of the Upper Midwest, connecting it also with the principal cities of the Eastern Seaboard. And this was just one rail line.
It is key for you to understand Free Soil Ideology: Free Soil seems like an agricultural term, but think of it more in the sense of terra firma, or the ground you occupy. A free land if you will. Its emergence is related to the modernization of the North and industrialization as much as it is to an agricultural expansion into the Midwest. Free laborers believe that America should be "Free Soil" - a place where slavery cannot undermine the republican virtue of free labor.
The northern labor market that attracts immigration in large numbers - particularly refugees from the political chaos following the failed 1848 rebellions in Continental Europe. The type of people coming will be committed to the ideas of free labor and republican representation. (Germans and other Germanic people like Austrians, Alsatian French, etc.) Free Soil Ideology as a product of northern laboring classes: It stems from the idea of the republic being grounded less in agrarian landownership (as Jefferson would have had it) and more in free male labor (paralleling movements in England at the time, where land ownership requirements get loosened.) This is a new iteration of the national idea of republicanism. Because most of the South is non-urban, this ideology develops much less there.
Two images that evoke the northern conception of laboring republican virtue: On the left we see a watchmaker, which would have been among the nation's most elite craftsmen, posing with his work - sometime around 1850. On the right we see an early daguerrotype of Philadelphia merchants posing proudly in front of their businesses from the 1840s. (Both Library of Congress images.)
The national nature of the slave financial system: James Henry Hammond’s quote of “Cotton is King” is important to understand how the production of cotton, and by extension the massive slave labor force required to profitably plant (and more critically) harvest it is key to its profitability. (As an aside, mechanized cotton harvesting did not successfully occur until after World War II.) It is also worth noting that American cotton will never be more profitable than it is in the 1850s. (The Wikipedia page for Hammond HYPERLINK "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Henry_Hammond" (Links to an external site.) actually provides a pretty good synopsis of Hammond’s life in all its lurid detail.)
Slavery was important on the macro and micro financial levels, and to say that slavery is strictly a southern financial factor would be wrong. Northern investment in slavery was extensive as were northern business interests from life insurance to food and manufactured clothing. Slavery may have been a pernicious labor system, but it was also an investment class - a large one.
But slavery is ultimately more important to the South because it is key to its social structure: Most of the South is a “slave society,” whereas border states like Kentucky and Delaware are “societies with slaves,” and one needs to consider the differences which I outline in the lecture.
You can see from this remarkable map produced from 1860 census data during the Civil War the pattern of slaveholding in the South and how state outlines don't entirely tell the story of slavery's influence upon the region. Some areas of states were simply more intensely slaveholding than others. Eastern Tennessee, for instance, which had a strong pro-Union element to it and isolated by mountain geography, was a society with few slaves and thus, not wedded to the system. For these same reasons West Virginia becomes a separate state in 1863.
If we think of this in terms of enduring social impact, consider the county-by-county election map of the 2016 presidential election and you can see the demographic, political, and cultural legacies of slavery are literally visible on the South's landscape today.
Slavery was critical to the South's economic outlook and sense of self-worth: A key set of points I make in the lecture are about the importance of slavery's financial impact. White southerners correctly believed that slavery was the route to individual prosperity, that those who could not afford slaves even rented them in that era of agricultural labor. Slaves were the #1 capital asset of the South as a whole and for slaveholding individuals specifically. If you sought credit, often you would secure that credit with slave property because it was, often by a wide margin, your top asset. As an asset, slaves were ideal: They could be moved around, sold in units (the horror of families being split up at slave auctions is real). Slaves were frequently auctioned off to satisfy debts, they were inherited along with other property, and bought and sold in the same way people today play the stock market. Slaves were an asset one mortgaged, and mortgaged slaves could get you in trouble. (I talk about Benedict Cumberbatch’s character in Twelve Years a Slave and how his indebtedness forces him into selling Solomon Northrup once he realizes he’s basically “stolen property” and how it animates him to defend Northrup’s life as well.) The economics of slavery made people willingly blind to its inhumanity, making it all the more perverse.
The profitability of slaveholding also reduced incentives to modernize the South in an industrial sense: The South did have individuals who saw industry as the future, but the profitability of slavery (and competition for investment dollars) blunts the efforts of young modernizers in the South - particularly in Virginia which was starting to industrialize (iron, bridges, transit). But many slaveholders also saw industrialization as a threat to agrarian power, because they believed that industrial labor in America meant a culture of free labor. The idea that slaves weren’t suited to industrial work (although they increasingly worked in such a capacity, increasingly in Virginia in the antebellum era) and would extensively during the war itself in works operated by the Confederate government. Liberalized credit that came along with an industrialized power would also weaken the financial and political clout of the planter class, and they did not want that to happen.
The culture of the South, particularly among elites, has consistently been anti-labor: These anti-labor ideas are rooted not just in the economics of slavery but in a constructed self-conception of southern culture. Property and “breeding” key to the good life. A fabrication of the 19th century is the conscious effort to mimic the aristocracy of England in being landed gentry who are above labor - a gentleman not involved in commerce. (The English aristocracy would have laughed at the social notion of such comparatively nouveau riche making such claims, but the aristocracy will also consistently support the South and its undemocratic ideals during the Civil War.)
This lay at the heart of the cult of the “southern way of life:” I.e., a fabricated white aristocracy built on the backs of slave labor with a distant yet supportive southern yeomanry who are aspirational themselves to become slaveholding planters and a discontented poor white minority who are disenchanted with southern life and marginalized and vilified in its culture: We see this expressed in Francis Blackwell Mayer’s painting, HYPERLINK "https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.166461.html"Leisure and Labor HYPERLINK "https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.166461.html" (1858) HYPERLINK "https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.166461.html" (Links to an external site.) . At first we see a rural idyllic scene resonant of mid 19th century romanticism, but look more closely and one begins to see it as a sharp criticism of white elite southern culture.
Labor and Leisure (1858)
The faux chivalry of the South drew upon the wildly popular romantic literature of Sir Walter Scott, particularly his work Ivanhoe HYPERLINK "http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/works/novels/ivanhoe.html" (Links to an external site.) . Mark Twain would later call the cult of Sir Walter Scott and chivalry the “Sir Walter Disease,” a social phenomenon that persists long after the Civil War is over and lay at the root of the idyllic plantation mythology that you can even see on display today. Scott is also important to understanding the southern obsession with casting themselves as fundamentally different than “cold, money-grubbing” northerners, his literature emphasizing an argument for deep genetic differences in national character (in Scott’s case Saxons and Normans).
The planter class saw modernization as a threat to this idealized system.
Reading previews.
Masur wrestles with the idea of the point to which we might identify the Civil War’s origins. He details “long term” and “short term” origins - Longer term seeds buried in the nation’s founding and broader social and economic changes and nearer term the chaotic politics of the 1850s up to the election of 1860.
Escott handles a lot of the political evolution and Masur offers a basic timeline of the period. But Escott also unpacks the racial ideology of the era and the complexity of slavery in American politcs, the juxtaposition of being “antislavery” yet being decidedly anti-black. And how this thread provided a key subtext to our nation, one that hasn’t entirely gone away.
There are some points covered in Masur very briefly I want to highlight a bit:
The Mexican-American War and the Compromise of 1850: An example of being careful what you ask for lest you get it. Made it untenable to ignore the power the South had over the nation - the push to war - driven by Southern Democrats. And this had to do with the way American politics worked. The Whigs were weak nationally - maybe not at the presidential level but definitely down-ticket. The Democrats controlled the nation for the most part. And the South was most uniformly Democratic. This allowed them to control the party that controlled the nation, that controlled the courts, and controlled the nomination of the presidential candidates to that point. When this system falls apart in 1860 it paved the way for Lincoln.
The Election of 1860 and the 4-Way math of Lincoln, Bell, Douglas, and Breckenridge: A huge outlier that could have only happened then. Going into it the Democratic Party was much stronger on paper. And even after the election it held the Senate and controlled the courts. In reality, Lincoln’s victory did not particularly threaten slavery where it was. Or necessarily even stop its spread. But viewed as a matter of time. Also belief that the South would be able to leave without a real fight. Both miscalculations as we will see - both in terms of race and slavery as well as war.
Terms and themes you should understand based on Escott:
· The significance of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
· Why the Fugitive Slave Act was so desired by southerners and yet so despised by northerners that it fueled sectional animosity.
· The founding of the Republican Party and its growth out of the Kansas-Nebraska Act & ensuing violence.
· How important the Wilmot Proviso was to the fostering of a Free Soil ideology.
· How the question of race shaped the politics of Lincoln and Douglas and played a role in their political rivalry and what this meant generally for politics in the late antebellum period.
· What were colonization schemes for African Americans and what kind of people supported them?
· How did Lincoln characterize the Slave Power Conspiracy against free labor?
· John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry and the actor John Wilkes Booth.
· Sumner, Brooks, and the "Crime against Kansas" speech and its aftermath.
· What did Escott mean about Republicans puzzling how to be "safely anti-slavery."
Week 2 readings:
Escott, Chapters 8-12; Masur, Chapter 2; McPherson, Chapters 1-3. Page total: ~140
Movie:
The Red Badge of Courage (1951)
Lecture 2: 1861, the War in Earnest,
Notes to supplement the audio lecture:
Inevitable or Avoidable?
You can look at the spring of 1861 in two ways: Either civil war was inevitable and it was a matter of time before North and South came to that realization and just got it out of their system (the underlying theme of a famous book on the topic titled, fittingly, The Impending Crisis HYPERLINK "https://www.amazon.com/Impending-Crisis-1848-1861-David-Potter/dp/0061319295" (Links to an external site.) .) Conversely, you can see it as a situation that could have played out differently, along with moments that (at least up until the firing on Fort Sumter) could have caused the move toward the Southern Confederacy to crumble and with it an aversion of civil war.
But to think that war could have not come is to engage in what historians call counterfactuals. Counterfactuals are often historians and others going “what if…” and proposing that history could have been different. They aren’t useful as much for their plausibility as for the fact that the reasons why they are not plausible often tell us a lot about why history unfolded the way it does.
Yet it is worth reminding yourself that history is also filled with contingency - moments where human history could have forked in a very different direction. Not all counterfactuals are hot air but by their nature they cannot be proven. There are many moments in the Civil War where events small and perhaps large could have turned out quite differently. It all depends upon your view of the inexorability of human history. (A reveal: your instructor tends toward a belief in the inexorable: that history unfolds not in the particular but in the general because of forces so great that individuals may slightly change their path but in the end do not change their outcome. But he also believes that there are moments where this is possibly not true.)
Formation of the Confederate government in Montgomery and the final secession of the Upper South, but especially Virginia:
There is a central irony to the formation of the Confederacy, which you will read about in Masur. This is the devotion to states rights that ultimately makes the central government in Richmond much weaker and in the end make it unable to govern a nation in the midst of a large scale war. The Confederacy put decentralization at the center of its scheme, in particular its command structure but even worse, at its financial center. We will spend more time talking about this as the war unfolds. The Confederate Constitution is a trap of its own making.
The election of Lincoln in 1860 HYPERLINK "https://millercenter.org/president/lincoln/campaigns-and-elections" (Links to an external site.) was enough for much of the Deep South (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, etc.) to consider seceding from the Union. Even in states that the candidate John Bell (a Constitutional Unionist) won a substantial number of votes (but didn't win) the ultimate election of Lincoln changed the mood and brought delegates to Montgomery. But the Upper South states of Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky did not vote for John C. Breckenridge, who we identify with states' rights, but instead for the Unionist John Bell. Escott spends a great deal of time on the feelings of the Border South and especially Virginia in the spring of 1861, so I will not spend a great deal of time on it in the lecture. But it is key in understanding the counterfactual in “what if Virginia does not secede.” Without Virginia, the entire Confederate experiment would have collapsed. Consider that the men pushing for war in Charleston’s harbor understood this and wanted “push to come to shove.” I would argue that the firing on Fort Sumter was deliberate and could not have been more calculated than to drive a further wedge between North and South. You should think about this in the context of the power that extremists have over pushing outcomes onto the passive majority.
An 1863 map of West Virginia from the Library of Congress. Note how physical geography of the mountains divides east and West Virginia. Not just as a barrier of height, but also it's noteworthy how West Virginia's rivers flow toward the Ohio River, (and Southeast Ohio and Southwest Pennsylvania) and not the Chesapeake watershed. This was as much a cultural and economic difference as it was ecological, agricultural, and geographical. One side, a society with slaves, the other a slave society.
But radicals in South Carolina fire on Fort Sumter and Lincoln calls for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the rebellion and Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina all secede from the Union and within a matter of a few short weeks in April, 1861, the Union and Confederacy enter a state of war.
(Left) Alfred Waud's 1860 illustration HYPERLINK "https://www.loc.gov/item/2004660062/" (Links to an external site.) of Fort Sumter in Charleston's harbor. (Right) A photograph of Fort Sumter taken in 1863. Note the significant damage. Masonry and earthen coastal fortifications such as these were obsolete by the start of the Civil War. (Also note the bayonet stuck in the ground in the extreme foreground of the photo.) Both images via Library of Congress.
The Strategic and Material Considerations of Going to War in 1861:
Masur spends a brief amount of time writing about the mobilization for war in both North and South and the relative advantages and disadvantages of each, and his observations are all true, although I think his portrayal of the “southern military tradition” is a little overblown and buys into the very large Lost Cause literature that appears after the war is over and lost.
Civil War armies are unprecedented in their size. At the end of 1860, the United States Army only had about 16,300 members, most of whom were posted to Indian outposts west of the Mississippi River or in coastal fortifications like Fort Sumter. The American Army was a professional, all-volunteer force that had historically only expanded in times of war, only to be reduced dramatically in size afterward. This went back to the Founding and the belief that states with large standing armies were a threat to democratic institutions. Both will be well over 100,000 by the end of 1861. At first men volunteer for 90 days. By the start of 1862, Union men will serve for 3 years. In the South, this becomes “for the duration.” By 1865, the US Army will be over 1 million strong and perhaps as many as half of a million will serve in the Confederate Army.
The scale of war mobilization leads to natural comparisons to World War II because the Civil War and WWII are similar in scope and scale in their relationship with the nation. McPherson does this in his book looking at soldier motivation, but we will visit this idea often enough.
It is clear that in April, 1861, the vast majority of Americans have no idea what the war will be really like. The misconception of quick victories and a fast peace will be destroyed in the minds of all but the most delusional by the end of 1861. Nobody will believe this after the spring of 1862, one year into hostilities. McPherson does a good job of showing this.
Victory meant different things for the North and South. The North had to conquer and subdue - a much larger proposition. The Confederacy hitched its wagon to the idea of spectacular battlefield victories that brought international recognition and the ability to outlast the Union’s will to fight. That is important to remember when we think about how bleak everything looks in 1864 when Sherman marches through Georgia and Grant has laid siege to Richmond - like baseball, the Confederacy believed it wasn’t “over until it was over,” and in many regards they were correct. In this the Confederacy looked toward the American Revolution for inspiration.
Strategy and tactics in the Civil War on the battlefield was certainly influenced by the 1846-48 war with Mexico but in grand strategy, still in many ways by the Napoleonic Era, the last time a war of this scale was fought. This is overstated in some regards, but not in overall strategy. If they had been more careful, war planners would have paid closer attention to the British war in the Crimea of the 1850s (famous for Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” HYPERLINK "https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45319/the-charge-of-the-light-brigade" (Links to an external site.) ) and understood better what modern war would look like and how outmoded the Age of Napoleon had become just 45 years after his final defeat at Waterloo. (More unforgivable yet that the British themselves would not learn these lessons in 1914.)
Modern war, like we will see later in 1914, was just on the cusp - but not quite there in 1861. The Civil War was modern in its logistical scale and ideological underpinnings, but it was much more like earlier wars with regard to technology and more so the implementation of military science, especially when it starts. The relationship between strategy and technology will change the way Americans make war, but the cost in lives from learning on the fly will be significant.
But the North’s ability to innovate and implement technology is one of its great advantages over the South, which has very little engineering and, more importantly industrial managerial structure to make innovation happen.
I didn’t end up talking about railroads in lecture one but they are even more relevant here: The North had a functioning transit system that linked it together well in an east-west orientation. The South had a fragile internal transit system with significant gaps, including little to no landward connection past the Mississippi River (there were no bridges over the river until after the war.) The South relied on littoral ships and ultimately the superior Union Navy and its blockade immediately makes this more difficult and ultimately impossible. Southern railroads will ironically be nationalized by the Confederacy, but will remain an impractical patchwork. Internal lines of communication are often cited as a strength of the Confederacy but I see this at a minimum grossly overstated but in reality just hogwash.
Slavery is both an advantage and disadvantage for the South. Slavery frees up free white men to enlist and fight. But slavery is ultimately rooted in control, and maintaining enough men to ensure stability at home is a liability for the Confederacy. Ultimately the enslaved will free themselves and help win the war just by doing so, let alone fight in blue uniforms.
Military technology changes a good bit and one of the most obvious examples of this is the rifle and rifling generally (like rifled artillery). Rank and file soldiers had been equipped with smoothbore muskets to this point, which had strategies for their use and a limited lethal range and in close quarters could be very effective. The rifle will greatly expand the distance of lethality and rifled artillery will alter the entire conception of defensive positions. Tactics will change, but they will change slowly. But rifles are an implementation that occurs at the war’s start - the 1861 Springfield of the Union and the 1853 pattern Enfield (bought from Britain) in the Confederacy will be the main battle arms (although all sorts will appear) and these are substantially more effective than their predecessors.
You used to be able to visit nearby Fort Pike HYPERLINK "https://www.crt.state.la.us/louisiana-state-parks/historic-sites/fort-pike-state-historic-site/index" (Links to an external site.) at Chef Menteur Pass, until the State of Louisiana decided that it couldn’t pay its bills any more and chained it shut, but it is an excellent surviving (at least until it falls into the Gulf) example of early national masonry coastal fortifications built by the United states between 1820 and the 1850s. There used to be many of these (and Fort Sumter in Charleston’s harbor was one of them) “guarding” our major ports and key waterways. They were only ever moderately effective at doing so, but once rifled cannon came along, they were absolutely obsolete as defensive works because a rifled naval shell with exploding projectile would simply blow a hole clean through its walls. Fort Pike never saw action (although it was a holding pen for Native Americans captured during the Seminole War) and black soldiers occupied it and trained there during the Civil War.
Masur devotes time to Winfield Scott and the Anaconda Plan and how it did and did not work and how expensive it was to implement. It will never be perfect, but the overall strategy put into place by Scott will unfold for the duration of the war. It will just be a lot more difficult to make happen than first imagined.
The People and Social implications of Mobilization:
I feel that McPherson does such a compelling job of putting a human face upon the men who fight in the war that it doesn’t bear repeating here. But I do want to point out that the Civil War was a youth movement. Wars generally are fought by young people, but the Civil War in particular will be crystalline for this generation who will enter major leadership roles in their twenties and early thirties.
One of the great tragedies of the early war was what people called “camp fever” - the diseases that stalked both Northern and Southern camps in the first months of the war. Many volunteers never saw battle because they came from rural communities and had maybe never traveled more than 20 miles from home. In training camps they encountered diseases unknown to them and died in great numbers.
The Mexican War had produced an early professional officer class for both armies who would soon find themselves in leadership roles. These junior officers would become familiar names in the Civil War. Names like Lee, Jackson, Sherman, Grant would all become household names, then and now. But there were few veteran soldiers to go around, and thus both armies were dogged, especially early on, by incompetent political generals and senior officers who knew nothing about strategy. This had to do with the way Civil War regiments formed initially (McPherson will talk about this in the context of unit cohesion and discipline) but it was tragic early on in terms of military strategy. All of this was magnified by not only the inexperience of the officers but also the relatively minimal training that the soldiers under their command received. McPherson also talks about this aspect of the war. It made decisive victories, especially early on, almost impossible because what little discipline the soldiers possessed going into combat came almost completely unglued once the fighting hit an obvious lull.
1861: The year in battles and strategy and key figures:
Early on, we see what I call the emergence of the “cult of Virginia,” or extreme emphasis that both historians now and even observers of the time placed upon Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and equating its fortunes with those of the Confederacy. Union failures in Virginia early establish a mythology about the superior fighting ability and generalship of the Confederacy. And it is largely a mythology. But in the West, the Confederacy suffered devastating losses: The Battles of Forts Henry and Donelson which won by a force of “combined arms” by Grant in the Winter of 1862 led to the surrender of the fairly large force of Confederates who could not be easily replaced. In the West, the Confederacy does stupid things like violating the neutrality of Kentucky - and losing in the bargain.
There is also a bias against soldiers who are not from Virginia in the upper command of the Confederacy and favoritism towards those who are close to Davis. Men like the incompetent Earl Van Dorn HYPERLINK "https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/earl-van-dorn" (Links to an external site.) , who graduated at the bottom of his West Point class, but who was close to Jefferson Davis and thus placed in command of men whom, despite some successes, he more or less got killed. Early Confederate blundering in the West will have significant ramifications for the Confederacy’s grand strategy of “outlasting” the Union. The North never fully conquers this vast area but takes away much of its potential from the Confederacy and does this early in the war.
But we spend a lot of time talking about First Manassas or (“Bull Run”) and this is because of the immediacy of the threat to Washington. The Capitols the Union and Confederacy, Richmond and Washginton, D.C., are so close that it fuels a lot of this focus on Northern Virginia. Ultimately, the Lost Cause will later come along as an idea and portray the Virginia campaign as something that could have been won - perhaps even should have been won but for bad luck and a lack of resources. But in the context of grand strategy, one might consider that it was stupid for the Confederacy to put its capitol in Richmond, but it does so for political reasons.
For the key battles of 1861 (and moving forward.) I encourage you to follow along with me on this Google Map HYPERLINK "https://www.google.com/maps/d/drive?state=%7B%22ids%22%3A%5B%2213xGDEF8W77-SwfL11Ws_J5nm5b0%22%5D%2C%22action%22%3A%22open%22%2C%22userId%22%3A%22103882424390809816003%22%7D&usp=sharing" (Links to an external site.) that I have made that helps you understand the relationship between timing and distance in this war that covers such a vast terrain.
Masur reading guide week 2:
Once again Masur serves as a concise guide to the time period. But there are a few things you should be certain that you understand from the reading in addition to the things I mention above:
· What was Alexander Stephens's "Cornerstone Speech" about?
· Masur spends some time briefly talking about the relationship between McClellan and Lincoln. We'll talk more about McClellan next week, but consider what Masur has to say by way of background.
· How did First Manassas unfold?
· How did the Confiscation Act and the "Contraband of War" interpretation of Butler factor into the legal dimensions of war and its relationship to slavery? (There will be more on this next week.)
· What was the South's diplomatic prospect with Europe according to Masur? (Again, we'll engage this further next week.)
McPherson reading guide week 2:
You are starting McPherson, which I think you will find very readable. One note of warning: if you are offended by racial slurs in print you may not like what you read, as McPherson quotes directly from many letters. He has a historical point to make - he is letting historical actors speak for themselves and reveal the thoughts and ideas of the mid 19th Century.
· Why are memoirs written a long time after the war's end not useful for close study of soldier motivation?
· What were the conditions that caused McPherson to have so many war letters to read, and how was this different from previous wars? Why?
· What was rage militaire and what were the reasons that caused soldiers to enlist in the respective armies?
· How did northern and southern volunteers conceptualize notions of personal obligation to fight?
· Why was the notion of reputation so crucial in the 19th century?
· How did soldiers manage fear?
Escott reading guide for week 2:
· How were the late-breaking compromises like the Crittenden Compromise not really compromises at all in the truest sense? That they basically offered enormous concessions to the South and gave away the key promise of the Republican Party: that slavery would be contained.
· What were Lincoln’s early 1861 efforts to conciliate the South and keep Virginia from secession?
· Understand how Lincoln believed in a southern Unionism that ultimately did not show itself, as well as his understanding of slavery’s material importance to the South in the war effort and Lincoln’s hopes for undermining it.
· You should understand the position of Blair, who argued that the need to unite the North in the war for Union should keep any hint of abolition toward the backburner because abolition was unpopular. More important: you should be able to unpack why abolition was such an unpopular idea in the North as well as the border states.
· Who was John C. Frémont and why did his actions cause so many problems for Lincoln?
· What was Lincoln’s plan for gradual emancipation in Delaware and what was the reception this plan received by Delaware’s slaveholders?
· What was the Chiriqui Plan and how did it reflect thinking about emancipation and race inside the administration?
· How did the reaction from Union slaveholders to Lincoln’s plans for gradual emancipation change the way the administration felt about the issue more broadly?
· Who was David Hunter and what did he do that again put Lincoln’s administration into a bind? (Hunter will be depicted in a not very flattering light in the film Glory.)
