INTERVIEWER Had you been alive during the Civil War, would you have fought for the Confederates?
FOOTE No doubt about it. What's more, I would fight for the Confederacy today if the circumstances were similar. There's a great deal of misunderstanding about the Confederacy, the Confederate flag, slavery, the whole thing. The political correctness of today is no way to look at the middle of the nineteenth century. The Confederates fought for some substantially good things. States rights is not just a theoretical excuse for oppressing people. You have to understand that the raggedy Confederate soldier who owned no slaves and probably couldn't even read the Constitution, let alone understand it, when he was captured by Union soldiers and asked, What are you fighting for? replied, I'm fighting because you're down here. So I certainly would have fought to keep people from invading my native state. There's another good reason for fighting for the Confederacy. Life would have been intolerable if you hadn't. The women of the South just would not allow somebody to stay home and sulk while the war was going on. It didn't take conscription to grab him. The women made him go.
INTERVIEWER What about fighting to end the institution of slavery?
FOOTE The institution of slavery is a stain on this nation's soul that will never be cleansed. It is just as wrong as wrong can be, a huge sin, and it is on our soul. There's a second sin that's almost as great and that's emancipation. They told four million five hundred thousand people, You are free, hit the road. And we're still suffering from that. Three quarters of them couldn't read or write, not one tenth of them had a profession except for farming, and yet they were turned loose and told, Go your way. In 1877 the last Union troops were withdrawn after a dozen years of being in the South to assure compliance with the law. Once they were withdrawn all the Jim Crow laws and everything else came down on the blacks. Their schools were inferior in every sense. They had the Freedmen's Bureau, which did, perhaps, some good work, but it was mostly a joke, corrupt in all kinds of ways. So they had no help. Just turned loose on the world, and they were waifs. It's a very sad thing. There should have been a huge program for schools. There should have been all kinds of employment provided for them. Not modern welfare, you can't expect that in the middle of the nineteenth century, but there should have been some earnest effort to prepare these people for citizenship. They were not prepared, and operated under horrible disadvantages once the army was withdrawn, and some of the consequences are very much with us today.
INTERVIEWER Bedford Forrest's picture hangs on your wall. He was an ex-slave trader, responsible for the Fort Pillow massacre of captured black soldiers, and after the war deeply involved in the Ku Klux Klan.
FOOTE You could add that in hand-to-hand combat he killed thirty-one men, mostly in saber duels or pistol shootings, and he had thirty horses shot from under him. Forrest is one of the most attractive men who ever walked through the pages of history; he surmounted all kinds of things and you better read back again on the Fort Pillow massacre instead of some piece of propaganda about it. Fort Pillow was a beautiful operation, tactically speaking. Forrest did everything he could to stop the killing of those people who were in the act of surrendering and did stop it.
Forrest himself was never a bloodthirsty sort of man who enjoyed slaughter. He also took better care of his soldiers and his black teamsters than any other general I know of. He was a man who at the age of sixteen had to raise six younger brothers and sisters after the death of his blacksmith father. He became a slave trader because that was a way of making enough money to support all those people and to get wealthy. Forrest was worth about a million dollars when the war started, an alderman for the city of Memphis. He was by no means some cracker who came out of nowhere. All writers will have great sympathy with Forrest for something he said. He did not like to write and there are very few Forrest letters. He said, I never see a pen but I think of a snake.
He's an enormously attractive, outgoing man once you get to know him and once you get to know more facts. For instance, he was probably Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, but he dissolved that Klan in 1869; said that it's getting ugly, it's getting rough, and he did away with it. The Klan you're talking about rose again in this century and was particularly powerful during the 1920s. Forrest would have had no sympathy with that later Klan. Last thing in the world was he anti-Catholic or anti-Semitic, which is what that Klan was mainly in the twenties. I have a hard time defending the Klan and I don't really intend to defend it; I would never have joined it myself, even back in its early days.
But I don't know what you expected men, having gone through four years of utterly savage war, to do--if you expected them to come home and put up quietly with the kind of occupation that happened in France after World War II. The French Maquis did far worse things than the Ku Klux Klan ever did--who never blew up trains or burnt bridges or anything else; they didn't even have lynchings. The Klan is as nefarious as you want it to be, but you have to understand better what they did do and they did not do. And the "massacre" at Fort Pillow, so-called, truly had better be investigated more closely.
When word of the massacre at Fort Pillow got up to Washington, Lincoln wrote to Grant and said, This is intolerable, I want whoever was responsible for it punished. Grant passed the word along to Sherman. If you know anything about Sherman, you know he would have jumped on Forrest like a tiger if he'd been guilty. Sherman never recommended anything along those lines. They sent a committee of Congress down to investigate Fort Pillow and they took testimony from people who were obviously lying their heads off, talking about people being buried alive, women and children shot while pleading for their lives. If you read a biography of Bedford Forrest, you'll get some notion of what a fine man he was.
INTERVIEWER Is there too much focus on the military in writing about the Civil War?
FOOTE Well, Forrest said war means fighting, and fighting means killing. The Civil War was simply a four-year military action. The causes were so nebulous and so diverse. Lincoln said plainly: What I do about slavery I do because I want to win this war. If I could win this war by freeing all the slaves tomorrow, I'd do it. If I could win this war by keeping them all in slavery, I'd do that. I'd do anything to win this war. The emphasis was on war, "this mighty scourge." Almost everybody realized that the various bickerings and arguments and the fire-eaters in South Carolina and the abolitionists in Massachusetts, were sort of outside of things really. All they did was cause it. The real monster of the Civil War was that it cost us God knows what all, not only in young men, blue and gray, but in the recasting of what public life was going to be like. It brought a new cynicism in to us that we've lived with ever since. We began to appreciate scamps in politics, which we hadn't really done before. It was a military action and was to be studied as such--not neglecting the causes, not neglecting the arguments of what went on, but it's always primarily combat.
Forgive the lengthy block quote, but I like to err on the side of context. And given that context, I have to say that I found this interview deeply sad and deeply predictable. I've only made my way through the first volume of Foote's trilogy. I found it to be a lot of things, but neo-Confederate apologia isn't among them. It does slight slavery, but as I recall, it does not question--as Foote does here--that slavery was the cause of the War.
There are many lies here. Some of them rather blatant--claiming that the Klan didn't "have any lynchings," is not much better [ http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6225/ ] than claiming that the South didn't "have any slaves." Other are more slippery--damning emancipation by conflating freedom with prosperity, all the while ignoring the main actor in restricting black prosperity.
But the root of this is Foote's white romanticism. In Foote's eyes, Lee is not simply an honorable man but "a noble man, noble beyond comparison." Nathan Bedford Forrest is not simply the disbander of the (presumably nonviolent) Klu Klux Klan, but "one of the most attractive men who ever walked through the pages of history." Black southerners like Harriet Tubman, Andrew Jackson Smith or Robert Smalls are met with no such laurels.
I'm looking forward to finishing Foote's trilogy. It really is an engaging read. And yet here is the bit of sadness: He gave twenty years of his life, and three volumes of important and significant words to the Civil War, but he he could never see himself in the slave. He could not get that the promise of free bread can not cope with the promise of free hands. Shelby Foote wrote The Civil War, but he never understood it. Understanding the Civil War was a luxury his whiteness could ill-afford.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.
On the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, Americans are engaged in new debates over what it was about. Southern revisionists have long tried to claim it wasn't about slavery, but rather "Northern aggression" – which is a tough sell since they seceded from the Union despite Lincoln's attempts at compromise on slavery, and then attacked the federal Fort Sumter in South Carolina. That would be Southern aggression, by any standard.
But there's still room for smart revisionism. Instead of the traditional view that finds the Civil War a great moral and political triumph, David Goldfield calls it "America's greatest failure" in his fascinating new book, "America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation." It killed a half-million Americans and devastated the South for generations, maybe through today. And while many Northern Republicans came to embrace abolishing slavery as one of the war's goals, Goldfield shows that Southerners are partly right when they say the war's main thrust was to establish Northern domination, in business and in culture. Most controversially, Goldfield argues passionately -- with strong data and argument, but not entirely convincingly -- that the Civil War was a mistake. Instead of liberating African Americans, he says, it left them subject to poverty, sharecropping and Jim Crow violence and probably retarded their progress to become free citizens.
Whether or not you accept that premise – more on that later – Goldfield shows definitively that Northern evangelical Protestants were the moral force behind the war, and once they turned it into a religious question, a matter of good v. evil, political compromise was impossible. The Second Great Awakening set its sights on purging the country of the sins of slavery, drunkenness, impiety -- as well as Catholics, particularly Irish Catholic immigrants. Better than any history I've seen, Goldfield tracks the disturbing links between abolitionism and nativism. In fact, he starts his book with the torching of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Mass., in 1834, a violent attack on Catholics which Goldfield shows was "incited" by Lyman Beecher, the father of the Beecher clan, most of whom turned out to be as anti-Irish Catholic as they were anti-slavery. To evangelical Protestant nativists, Catholicism was incompatible with democracy, because its adherents allegedly gave their loyalty to the Pope, not the president, and the religion's emphasis on obeying a hierarchy made them unfit for self-government. Also, rebellious Irish Catholics didn't show the proper discipline or deference to conform to emerging industrial America. The needs of Northern business were never far from some (though not all) abolitionists' minds.
Still, though nativism was widespread in the North, and within the Republican Party (which absorbed some old Know-Nothing and nativist Whig party remnants), abolitionism remained at the party's fringe. Most Republicans were seeking compromise, not the abolition of slavery, in the years before the war, including Abraham Lincoln. Our first Republican president didn't like slavery, and he fiercely opposed its extension to the Territories, but he also expressed doubts about African-Americans' capacity for democracy, and he opposed black suffrage. Lincoln supported the Fugitive Slave Act, which let slave-owners call on law enforcement even in free states to capture their runaway "property." (As a lawyer, he'd represented a slave owner trying to recapture a fugitive slave.)
And as a strict constitutionalist, Lincoln resisted abolitionism, because like it or not, the Constitution made room for slavery. The president disliked slavery, but his priority was the union. He famously told abolitionist Republican Horace Greeley (who later turned against Reconstruction and ran for president as a Democrat, abandoning African Americans as did too many other abolitionists): "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."
In fact, during Lincoln's 1860 presidential campaign, Republicans went so far as to argue that they were the real White Man's Party, because their commitment to keeping the Territories slave-free wasn't about the evils of slavery; it was about keeping the West white, so white families alone could enjoy the bounty of the frontier without competition (except from Indians, who would be eradicated.) Democrats insisted they were the White Man's Party, because slavery liberated white men to be the property owners and entrepreneurs God intended them to be, while an inferior race did their manual labor, for free. Most Republicans and Democrats agreed on white supremacy; they differed on the right way to maintain it.
Yet as the war went on, Lincoln came to see slavery as a moral cause, and he wouldn't entertain compromise armistice proposals that let the South keep black people in bondage. In a book with few heroes, Lincoln emerges as one over time, virtually alone as an American politician in blending compassion for slaves with compassion for white Southerners. It's popular to suggest that had Lincoln lived, Reconstruction would have been more successful. But Lincoln's pattern of compromise throughout his political career makes speculating on what he'd have done very difficult. Goldfield makes clear, though, that Lincoln wanted reconciliation with the South, not Southern humiliation. In his subdued Second Inaugural Address, he refused to blame the war on the Confederacy, or trumpet the righteousness of the Northern cause. Because the Founders legalized slavery, he believed the country, North and South, shared responsibility for it. Lincoln closed with words made more poignant by the fact that the outcome he envisioned didn't come to be (and still hasn't):
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Lincoln even proposed a plan to compensate slaveowners for their losses. That might make our blood boil today, but it was actually the way slavery had been abolished in other countries. Clearly, the Southern economy was destroyed, and families suffered hugely. Most of the war took place on Southern battlefields, destroying farms, homes, churches, businesses. A quarter of Southern men between the ages of 20 and 40 died; more than 28 million Southerners, white as well as black, fled the devastated Confederate states in the decades after the war. And while Northern wealth increased 50 percent between 1860 and 1870, the South lost 60 percent of its wealth in those years, roughly half of it human "property." Lincoln proposed legislation establishing a $400 million fund to compensate Southerners for giving up slavery, if they would recognize national sovereignty and ratify the 13th Amendment emancipating the slaves. We don't know what Southern leaders would have said; Lincoln's own cabinet nixed the idea.
It's also possible Lincoln might not have taken from Confederate leaders the right to vote and hold office away, while giving it to former slaves, as Congress did after his death. Again, however fair that may seem from our distant (presumed) consensus that the pro-slavery Confederacy deserved whatever it had coming, it let Southern leaders complain they'd been "disenfranchised," even though the stricture only affected a fraction of the Southern male population. It was also rank hypocrisy, as eight northern states rejected black suffrage, while forcing it on the former Confederacy. But we'll never know what Lincoln would have done; he died. Meanwhile, the view of Henry Ward Beecher, staunch anti-Catholic (and a villain in this book, if it has one) prevailed: In a speech just before Lincoln's death, he gave a sermon at Fort Sumter:
The whole guilt of this war rests upon the ambitious, educated, plotting, political leaders of the South…A day will come when God will reveal judgment and arraign at his bar these mighty miscreants…And then [they] will be whirled aloft and plunged downward forever and ever in an endless retribution."
Contrast that with Lincoln's Second Inaugural, and then try to figure out which man is the actual Christian leader.
*
Goldfield's book has been well-reviewed, because if it's sympathetic to Southern whites, it depicts the savagery of slavery and post-war white terrorism with unflinching and gut-wrenching clarity. (Literally. The book's tales of slaves' abuse and Southern white post-war savagery will make you sick.) Still, this Civil War history challenges the absolutism of the "Northerners were heroes, and Southerners were vicious, violent racists" school of history. He exposes and excoriates Southern whites' violence against black people before and after the war. But he also links the war to the pro-business evangelical Protestant crusade to eradicate native American Indians, Mexicans, Irish and German Catholic immigrants, and an emerging class of landless Northern laborers – anyone who stood in the way of their vision of clean, hard-working, business-friendly American progress. And he counts the South as a victim of that Northern evangelical crusade. Southerners were another group that simply wasn't conforming to their doctrine of "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men," as the title of Eric Foner's equally complicated and fantastic Republican Party history puts it.
Republicans were first and foremost the party of small business, an emerging class of industrialists, the nascent middle class, and anti-Catholic nativists. They despised the working class – or denied it existed. Lincoln himself talked of the emerging caste of wage-earners optimistically as "young beginners," who would work for a time, save money, then buy land and/or their own business. Republicans either couldn't imagine an America with a permanent class of laborers (like Lincoln), or they dreamed of one, but found ways to convince those workers it was all in their interest. In their defense, in the decades after the Civil War, the Horatio Alger, rags to riches story was never more true.
It's indisputable that Republican zeal for the liberation of black people was always a fringe sentiment – and even among that fringe, it was short lived. After the war, Northerners wanted to get back to business, and they did, with a vengeance. During the war, the federal government had flexed muscles of taxation, conscription and land annexation. The post-war era's emerging robber barons pointed to the Union army's successes as a justification of their march toward monopoly. "Who can buy beef the cheapest – the housewife for her family, the steward for her club or hotel, or the commissary for the army?" Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller asked. Oil and steel businesses boomed. The transcontinental railroad was completed -- as was the near-eradication of American Indians.
Goldfield shows how leading Union generals almost immediately became warriors on the frontier, bringing the zeal with which they decimated the backward South to the task of decimating backward "savages." That new crusade had direct ramifications for Southern blacks. Even when President Ulysses S. Grant tried to use the military to beat back white Southern paramilitary groups literally massacring African-Americans trying to execute basic rights, he couldn't, because soldiers were deployed out West in the new Civil War against Indians. One hero of the book, Mississippi Republican Gov. Adelbert Ames, tries to use his power to protect blacks from Southern Democratic violence, but there were no Federal soldiers left in his state to call upon, they were all on the anti-Indian front. As the state's "White Line" paramilitary group tore through Mississippi to violently intimidate black voters, Ames was forced to give up his governor's position and flee. Early in the book, Goldfield quotes a Northern newspaper editor proclaiming "We can have no peace in this country until the CATHOLICS ARE EXTERMINATED." Near the end, he finds a Birmingham News headline that reads: "We intend to beat the negro in the battle of life, and defeat means one thing: EXTERMINATION." That doesn't feel heavy handed; it's fact, and it's tragic.
Meanwhile, attacks on Irish Catholics continued. Although the famed Civil War Irish brigades fought bravely, the Organization of Union Veterans wouldn't include them – or black Union veterans, either. And if certain abolitionists hadn't already shamed themselves with their anti-Irish Catholic bias, they would later, when they dropped their concern for African Americans – and in fact, joined slavery advocates in concluding that blacks were unfit for self-government. After the war, Henry Ward Beecher began hawking watches and preaching "The Gospel of Prosperity;" he also wrote a novel whose hero was an industrious white Southerner, and whose main black character was a stupid, drunken man-child incapable of self-support. Beecher remained viciously anti-Irish Catholic and opposed to the emerging labor movement (those two things were connected, by the way, for quite a few abolitionists), arguing that the era's strikes showed that the working class was "unfit for the race of life." During the Great Railway Strike of 1877, he denounced the strikers in his loathsome "bread and water" sermon, where he thundered: "Man cannot live by bread alone but the man who cannot live on bread and water is not fit to live." A few days later he proclaimed: "If you are being reduced, go down boldly into poverty." I wonder if Scott Walker is an admirer.
Harriet Beecher Stowe moved to former Confederate Florida, became an Episcopalian, wrote a best-selling book about home decorating for women, and never again troubled herself about the (former) slaves. Abolitionist Horace Greeley gave up on Reconstruction and black rights quickly. His New York Tribune, which once crusaded against slavery, began to feature "exposes" of Reconstruction, including tales of black "corruption" and political incompetence. Even the Nation magazine, which we remember as a journal of abolitionism, soured on the experiment with black suffrage. Editor E.L. Godkin proclaimed that the "blackest" legislators were the worst, particularly in South Carolina, where blacks possessed an "average of intelligence but slightly above the level of animals."
Part of the problem was that at the same time, the North was experiencing its own political growing pains, which former egalitarians suddenly blamed on universal (male) suffrage. New York recoiled at the Boss Tweed corruption scandal of 1870. Tweed himself wasn't Irish, but some of his on-the-take top lieutenants were, and he relied on the votes of Irish Catholic immigrants – who produced votes in excess of their already large, pro-Democratic numbers, thanks to the Tammany machine, as vote fraud was rampant. The New York Times used Tweed's corruption as "an example of the Irish Catholic despotism that rules the City of New York." At the same time, the once-abolitionist paper blamed "ignorant Negroes" for South Carolina's corruption issues, which had of course predated black suffrage and would survive it.
Suddenly white Northern Republicans had a reason to sympathize with white Southern Democrats: Universal suffrage blighted both sides of the Civil War conflict. There's no better symbol of the transformation of Northern abolitionist sentiment than the work of cartoonist Thomas Nast: The pro-Union Harper's artist once graphically depicted the perfidy of Confederates and championed civil rights for slaves. But his most famous cartoon, from 1876, depicted Irish Catholics and African-Americans – two simian creatures labeled "Paddy" and "Sambo" -- as "The Ignorant Vote." Northerners had new appreciation for the South. It made the country whole: The North stood for reason, the South romance. Northern industrialists were happy to preserve the Old South in amber, a land of sweet magnolias and even sweeter women, who hadn't been "masculinized" by either labor or freedom, as Northern women were. It became a shrine to our agrarian past as worshipped by the founders, permanently left behind.
*
In this same period, even a couple of liberal heroes fell down too. Mark Twain and Walt Whitman both lamented the messiness of universal suffrage. Their worries, paradoxically, came out of a certain kind of populism. Whitman concluded that "the appalling dangers of universal suffrage" seemed to be empowering a rapacious post-war business class. Likewise, Twain railed against the greed of "The Gilded Age," a searing term he coined to describe the cruel era of robber barons, but he believed poor uneducated voters were letting the rich run rampant. A dinner companion reported Twain railing against "this wicked ungodly suffrage, where the vote of a man who knew nothing was as good as the vote of a man of education and industry; this endeavor to equalize what God has made unequal was a wrong and a shame." Both troubadours of democracy believed that universal suffrage was dooming democracy, as uninformed voters backed politicians who colluded with robber barons to destroy the country. Thus they concluded, Goldfield writes, "It might be prudent to restrict democracy in order to save it."
For many reasons, Northern Republicans gave up on the early goals of Reconstruction: to grant free blacks civil and economic rights. Goldfield quotes a Northerner observing a general desire to forget the war, and particular "apathy about the Negro" – shades of the "compassion fatigue" that would be diagnosed by neoconservatives 100 years later, after the Great Society. The parallels between the backlash against Reconstruction, and the backlash against Lyndon Johnson's civil rights reforms, are unmistakable and chilling. The Republican Party of the 1860s, just like the Democratic Party of the 1960s, paid dearly for championing the rights of African Americans. And both parties backed away from their commitment to addressing the economic barriers to black inclusion once they dealt with the era's pressing moral problem: In Lincoln's case, Southern slavery, in Johnson's, violent Southern suppression of black civil and voting rights. After each morally overdue reckoning, the parties suffered, and then they changed sides. Republicans were trounced after Reconstruction, as Democrats became the party of the South; 100 years later, Democrats were trounced, and Republicans became the party of the South. The Civil War is still not over.
Here is where Goldfield's scrupulously fair and heart-breaking story softens up even the most ardent civil rights advocate, to begin to sympathetically contemplate his notion that the Civil War could have been avoided, and slavery eradicated without it. As much as I love this book, and believe anyone concerned about race relations and the country's current political stalemate should read it, I couldn't quite get there. I understand Goldfield's reasoning. In an interview with Leonard Lopate, he contended that the abolition of slavery was inevitable "in a world that was hurtling toward the Industrial Revolution." I can imagine that, had a more politically creative group of politicians tried to compromise on a way out of slavery – perhaps offering to compensate slaveholders for their slaves, the way every other country that abolished slavery did – we maybe, maybe, might have avoided the Civil War.
But that's such starry-eyed conjecture, it's hard to go there. One of the most persuasive arguments for Goldfield's theory is the fact that it took another hundred years to end Jim Crow. And almost 50 years after that, African Americans still aren't completely free: the legacy of what we lamely call "structural racism," in the criminal justice system, the health care system, the housing and job market, lives on. That makes it easy, in a way, to fantasize: Hell, yeah, there had to be a way to do this in less than 150 years!
I wish. While it's possible, I just don't see the evidence in Goldfield's meticulously researched, passionately argued book. Yes, decent Southerners had doubts about slavery, and even some of those who didn't tried desperately to save the union. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens of Georgia was an old Whig friend of Abraham Lincoln's, and he didn't want war. But he couldn't compromise on slavery, not even when he met Lincoln for a secret peace summit early in 1865, as the Confederate Army lay bleeding after Sherman's march and Grant's late victories. And after the war, which perhaps made Southerners bitter in a way that foreclosed compromise, Goldfield depicts few if any ex-Confederates voicing contrition about their role in the war, as Lincoln did, let alone a desire for reconciliation – and certainly not support for equal rights for former slaves.
Still, with half a million Americans dead on Civil War battlefields, and 150 more years of bitter conflict, it's worth pondering Goldfield's challenge -- if only because it might give some modern visionary a way to see beyond our current social, racial and economic stalemate. I have no doubt about Goldfield's premise that we are still fighting the Civil War. We still need a way to end it. This book models the complicated, even contradictory, compassionate vision that might make that possible. Eventually.
Fred Rhodes, right, a wounded war hero, kept his accomplishments to himself. Department of Defense, 1944
By CHARLES M. BLOW Published: July 29, 2011
My grandfather spoke to me this week. That would’ve been unremarkable if not for the fact that he died four years ago.
I had ducked into a movie theater to escape the maddening debt-limit debacle. I chose “Captain America: The First Avenger.” Surely that would reset the patriotic optimism.
But as I watched the scenes of a fictitious integrated American Army fighting in Europe at the end of World War II, I became unsettled. Yes, I know that racial revisionism has become so common in film that it’s almost customary, so much so that moviegoers rarely balk or even blink. And even I try not to think too deeply about shallow fare. Escapism by its nature must bend away from reality. But this time I was forced to bend it back. It was personal.
The only black fighting forces on the ground in Europe during World War II were segregated, including the 92nd Infantry Division: The now famous “Buffalo Soldiers.” My grandfather, Fred D. Rhodes, was one of those soldiers.
The division was activated late in the war, more out of acquiescence to black leaders than the desire of white policy makers in the war department who doubted the battle worthiness of black soldiers. It was considered to be an experiment, one that the writer of the department’s recommendation to re-establish it would later describe as “programmed to fail from the inception.”
For one, as the historian Daniel K. Gibran has documented, the soldiers were placed under the command of a known racist who questioned their “moral attitude toward battle,” “mental toughness” and “trustworthiness,” and who remained a military segregationist until the day he died. In 1959, the commander commented in a study: “It is absurd to contend that the characteristics demonstrated by the Negroes” will not “undermine and deteriorate the white army unit into which the Negro is integrated.”
Yet they did show great toughness and character, including my grandfather. This is how his 1944 Silver Star citation recounts his bravery:
“On 16 November, while proceeding towards the front at night, Sergeant Rhodes’s motorized patrol was advanced upon near a village by a lone enemy soldier. Sergeant Rhodes jumped from the truck and as a group of enemy soldiers suddenly appeared, intent upon capturing the truck and patrol intact, he opened fire from his exposed position on the road. His fire forced the enemy to scatter while the patrol dismounted and took cover with light casualties. Sergeant Rhodes then moved toward a nearby building where, still exposed, his fire on the enemy was responsible for the successful evacuation of the wounded patrol members by newly arrived medical personnel. Sergeant Rhodes was then hit by enemy shell fragments, but in spite of his wounds he exhausted his own supply of ammunition then, obtaining an enemy automatic weapon, exhausted its supply inflicting three certain casualties on the enemy. He spent the rest of the night in a nearby field and returned, unaided, to his unit the next afternoon.”
Awesome!
Astonishingly, his and others’ efforts were not fully recognized.
My grandfather’s actions were the first among the Buffalo Soldiers to be recommended for a Distinguished Service Cross, according to surviving records. That recommendation was declined. In fact, only four enlisted soldiers from the 92nd were recommended for the service cross. They were all denied. It was given to just two black members of the unit, both officers, and only one of those officers received it during the war. The other received it nearly four decades after the war was over because of the investigative efforts of another historian.
As the 1997 study “The Exclusion of Black Soldiers from the Medal of Honor in World War II” pointed out, by mid-1947 the U.S. Army had awarded 4,750 Distinguished Service Crosses and only eight, less than 0.2 percent, had gone to black soldiers and not a single black soldier had been recommended for a Medal of Honor. (Roughly 1.2 million blacks served in World War II and about 50,000 were engaged in combat.) Until 1997, World War II was the only American war in which no black soldiers had received a Medal of Honor. President Bill Clinton changed that that year [ http://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/14/us/medals-of-honor-awarded-at-last-to-black-world-war-ii-soldiers.html ] by awarding Medals of Honor to seven of the men who had been awarded the Distinguished Service Crosses, the only ones whose cases were reviewed for the upgrade. Just one of them, Joseph Vernon Baker, a lieutenant in my grandfather’s regiment, was alive to receive it.
Even when this news of the Buffalo Soldiers was making headlines in the ’90s, my grandfather never said a word. There’s no way to know why. Maybe it was the pain of risking his life abroad for a freedom that he couldn’t fully enjoy at home. Maybe it was the misery of languishing in a military hospital for many months and being discharged with a limp that would follow him to the grave. Or maybe it was simply the act of a brave soldier living out the motto of his division: “Deeds Not Words.”
Who knows? But it wasn’t until after he died that I learned of his contributions. My mother came across his discharge papers while sorting through his things and sent me a copy. On a whim, I Googled his name and division, and there he was, staring out at me from a picture I’d never seen and being extolled in books I’d never read. My heart swelled, and my skin went cold. I wanted to tell him how proud I was, but that window had closed.
It illustrates just how quickly things can fade into the fog of history if not vigilantly and accurately kept alive in the telling.
That is why the racial history of this country is not a thing to be toyed with by Hollywood. There are too many bodies at the bottom of that swamp to skim across it with such indifference. Attention must be shown. Respect must be paid.
So as “Captain America” ended and the credits began to roll, I managed a bit of a smile, the kind that turns up on the corners with a tinge of sadness. I smiled not for what I’d seen, but for what had not been shown, knowing that I would commit it to a column so that my grandfather and the many men like him would not be lost to the sanitized vision of America’s darker years.
This is my deed through words, for you, Grandpa. You’ll never be forgotten.
Julia Ann Jackson, age 102. Her photo was taken as part of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives collections. Library of Congress
By KARENNA GORE SCHIFF December 6, 2011, 9:00 pm
One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, historians have the benefit of a perspective not accessible in earlier remembrances. One interesting angle is to look at older histories of the war, tracing its place in our national consciousness and rediscovering details that take on new relevance today.
Fifty years ago, as the Civil War centennial got underway, Robert Penn Warren wrote of the struggle as if it were an ancient epic, one that “affords a dazzling array of figures, noble in proportion yet human, caught out of Time as if in a frieze, in stances so profoundly touching or powerfully mythic that they move us in a way no mere consideration of ‘historical importance’ ever could.”
It seems impossible that voices from what Warren calls our “Homeric period” could survive into the age of audio recording, yet a small number have. The perspective on the Civil War that might seem most elusive is in fact the most tangible: that of enslaved children. Thanks to the Work Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project [ http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/newdeal/fwp.html ], and the careful stewardship of the Library of Congress, voices of onetime slaves [ http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/voices/ ] who lived well into the 1930s are now just a few clicks away.
Fountain Hughes Collection of the Maryland State Archives
It is surely a figure “caught out of Time” whose voice jolts a crackling, rudimentary audiotape. Leaning into the obviously foreign recording device, he says, “My name is Fountain Hughes [ http://memory.loc.gov/service/afc/afc9999001/9990a.mp3 (audio of interview embedded)] … My grandfather belonged to Thomas Jefferson.” Hughes then begins a wily standoff with his white interviewer, Hermond Norwood, digressing into his opinions about babies wearing shoes (-22:00) and buying things “on time [credit],” decrying the Yankees throwing flour into the river (-11:10) and, finally, declaring he would shoot himself rather than go back to slavery, where “you are nothing but a dog.” (-10:00)
Who was this spry elder captured in these scratchy recordings? As Monticello’s Cinder Stanton has documented, Hughes was most likely descended from Wormley Hughes [ http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/wormley-hughes ], Monticello’s head gardener and stableman, who was a grandson of Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings. His is one of seven voices that can transport the listener to a 1930s or ‘40s front porch and, from there, to the Civil War as seen through the eyes of a child.
The Slave Narrative Project [ http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html ] emerged from a growing interest in documentary, what William Stott called a “radically democratic genre.” Documentary was particularly suited to the agenda of an administration that justified its enormous program of relief by focusing on the human dimension of social problems and holding the government — rather than jobless individuals — accountable for high unemployment. (An agenda not lost on the interview subjects, many of whom juxtaposed their contemporary social needs with their memories of slavery.)
In 1935, at F.D.R.’s request, Congress passed the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act, providing for the establishment of the Works Progress Administration, under which millions were transferred from relief rolls to government jobs. The F.W.P., headed by former newspaperman Harry Alsberg, was part of this initiative, employing writers to work on cultural projects. Reflecting a new trend towards grassroots history, Alsberg wanted the F.W.P. to have an “emphasis on folklore; the speech and mores of the common people; stress upon the contributions of minorities (like the American Negro) to the creation of a genuinely native culture; and an accent upon regional, sectional, and local characteristics.”
The idea that the federal government should sponsor a collection of memories of ex-slaves was originally forwarded by the black academic Lawrence Reddick, who submitted a proposal to the Federal Emergency Relief Administration’s director, Harry Hopkins, in 1934. But his vision — which stipulated that black writers conduct the interviews — was doomed by FERA’s lack of organization and, of course, by endemic racism.
Zora Neale Hurston Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University
Black writers, including Zora Neale Hurston (who conducted some of the earliest interviews in her native Florida) successfully pushed for a fulfillment of Reddick’s idea through the F.W.P. But personnel policies were determined by individual states, resulting in almost all white interviewers and administrators who were “extremely sensitive to local white public opinion and were reluctant to take any action that might endanger their already tenuous status in the eyes of the white community,” according to Norman Yetman, a historian of the project. This reflected the larger “gentleman’s agreement” between a Roosevelt administration rapidly winning over blacks to the Democratic Party and the white Southern politicians it could not afford to alienate.
In the end, the Slave Narrative Project consisted of approximately 2,000 interviews from over 17 states. Only 27 interviews of this vast collection were tape recorded, and of those, only a handful specifically recall the Civil War. There are many other non-audio records of slaves’ memories of the conflict; in “The Slaves’ War,” Andrew Ward has distilled all of them — W.P.A. and otherwise, written and oral — providing insightful analysis of the war through the “voices of the people it so imperfectly freed.”
Of course, the W.P.A. narratives are dubious historical sources for a comprehensive study of slavery or the war. For one thing, almost all the interviewers [ http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/voices/vfsbio.html ] were white, and many of them lived in the same community as their subjects. Fountain Hughes is “Uncle Fountain” to Norwood. “Didn’t Daddy get you that divorce,” John Henry Faulk asks Harriet (“Aunt Hat”) Smith [ http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/S?ammem/afcesnbib:@field%28AUTHOR+@od1%28Smith,+Harriet+%29%29 (audio of interview embedded)] in Hempsted, Tex., in 1941, and then, after asking her opinion of a minister, “He’s a good friend of mine, I was just wondering what you thought of him. (-2:26, Part 4 of 4)
Although some interviewers do attempt to draw their subjects out on the darker side of slavery, many more of them ask leading questions: “They treat you pretty good?” To which the answers too easily follow: “Yes sir, they treat me nice, they treat me nice as they could treat me,” Alice Gaston told Robert Sorkin in Gee’s Bend, Ala., in 1941. “No,” replied Harriet Smith [ http://memory.loc.gov/service/afc/afc9999001/5091b.mp3 ] when asked if there were any “quarrels or fusses” between the races, and then qualified that answer in a way seemingly calculated to exonerate present company: “Well, the people that killed my husband and his brother were poor white folks.” (-9:00, Part 4 of 4)
Regardless of the personal connection between interviewer and subject, the atmosphere of the New Deal South was hardly conducive to honest expression regarding race relations from blacks. The subjects of these interviews had lived through the worst years of lynching, which still loomed large, and faced the force of the law if they stepped over the color line. “These aren’t good times for a Negro man to be proud, step too high,” Sherwood Anderson wrote in The Nation in 1930, “There are a lot of white men out of work. They won’t be wanting to see a big, proud black man getting along. They’ll be lynchings now.” After a total of 10 confirmed lynchings in 1928 and seven in 1929, the number rose to 21 in 1930. Adherence to racial subordination was a matter of survival in the Jim Crow south of the F.W.P.
Some white Southerners warned that the project itself might be out of line. Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, a New Dealer, was incensed after a F.W.P. social event in Washington where Ellen S. Woodward, a white woman from his state, had been exposed to the presence of blacks. In a speech recorded in the Congressional Record, he attacked the project for thus offending “the flower of Mississippi womanhood,” adding that “if this had happened in Mississippi, long before the sounds of revelry had died, the perpetrator of this crime would be hanging from the highest magnolia tree.” The slaves were “imperfectly freed” indeed.
This goes a long way to explain why expressions of resentment towards Yankee soldiers dominate the subjects’ responses to questions about the Civil War: they instantly established camaraderie with the interviewers. Fountain Hughes describes Yankees destroying his master’s plantation (11:00) and concludes that it is better not to discuss the war: “I don’t like to talk about it. It makes people feel bad.” (-11:15)
In reality, slaves began to seek out and embrace the Union army as soon as it became clear that, despite previous deference to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the general policy was not to turn them away. The Army of the Tennessee, the first to penetrate the deep South, struggled with what to do with the “Negroes coming by the wagon loads,” as Grant wrote in November 1862. “Humanity forbade allowing them to starve.”
However, some slaves’ disapproval of the Northern army was genuine. Ward writes of “astonishing empathy” for masters and mistresses and documents touching and deeply humane instances of slaves acting beyond the constraints of bondage, like carrying their masters’ bodies over long distances to be buried at home. Furthermore, in the immediate human context of war, slaves’ interests overlapped with those of slaveholders; they wanted to protect food and livestock from incoming troops not only because they had been ordered to, but because their own sustenance was at stake. Not to mention the fact that, however cruel and twisted, intimate family bonds existed between black and white throughout the South. Adam Goodheart points out that at the dawn of the war, mixed-race slaves were more likely to join the Confederate effort (technically, the Confederacy never accepted them as enlisted troops but gladly put them to work): ”Human nature is a complicated thing.”
Another reason to question the narratives’ completeness, is the fact that the subjects were old. First, the perspective of children is often skewed from adult reality, not only developmentally, but also because in most cases parents tried to shield their children from perilous truths. “Adult slaves rarely took their own offspring into their confidence,” explains Ward, “as a matter of self protection” against whites who would try to get information from them.
Second, those who lived that long were most likely not those who personally lived through the worst brutality of the slavery. And third, the recollection of something that happened some 70 years before might have faded to suit a more gentle life narrative. Anyone interviewed about the past contends not only with the awareness of what they want the interviewer to hear, but also with their own self-image.
Finally, there is evidence that some of the most damning recollections of ex-slaves were edited or censored by state administrators. General editor George Rawick suspected as much when he received a small number of narratives from one of the largest slave states, Mississippi. “I surmised,” he wrote, “either that the project had been deliberately curtailed by those who did not want such material in existence or that the bulk of the material had never been sent to the national offices of the Federal Writer’s Project in Washington, as they should have been, and might still be somewhere in Mississippi. Both guesses turned out to be correct.”
All of that said, there are glittering moments of candor in these narratives, and the effect of hearing rather than seeing or reading is a heightened contact with history. There is a priceless intimacy to tuning into the cadence and tone of someone recounting childhood memories punctuated by overseers and Yankees, surreptitious mistresses and cannon shots in the distance. Alice Gaston [audio of interview embedded] recalls the Federal army arriving on her plantation: “I can remember when the Yankees come through and they carried my father … Missus told me not say anything. They all hiding in the woods and I didn’t tell them anything.” Samuel Polite [ http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/voices/nameP.html ], speaking in Gullah dialect in St. Helena Island, SC, remembers his cruel overseer — “the devil” — making his mother plow, and Northern troops telling him to run away: “The Yankees come across on the old Giddy Main. They tell us to run away up in Bonrad.”
Harriet Smith’s soft, melodic voice conjures up the image of her as a girl, sitting atop a white fence watching the troops go by, surprised by the sight of “colored soldiers in droves,” and filled with wonder when a black orphan girl neighbor (who had had her arm cut off while operating a molasses mill) ran off with one of them. (-:55) (Part 2 of 4, -4:00) Approximately 300,000 black men would serve in the Union army (and thousands would also join the Confederate effort, including Fountain Hughes’s father, who was killed at Gettysburg) but the sight was particularly shocking to all Southerners in the early days of the war.
Wallace Quarterman Library of Congress
The extraordinary recording of Zora Neale Hurston (among others) interviewing Wallace Quarterman [audio of interview embedded] in St. Simon’s Island, GA, in 1935 focuses on the war’s aftermath, “after the sword was down.” His Gullah dialect is beautiful to hear but difficult to understand. However, one portion [ http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/afcesn:@field%28DOCID+afc9999001t0341a%29 ] of it is transcribed, including the words to a song about the Civil War.
These narratives are as poetic as they are complex, tendentious and subtle; they spotlight the voices of those who had the most at stake in the war and lived to see it from the longest view. Voices like Fountain’s (who died July 4, 1957) add considerable dimension to Robert Penn Warren’s Homeric frieze.
Scholars of the ‘60s looked to the Civil War for an understanding of the American epic, while New Dealers looked to it in search of hidden, grass-roots narratives, capturing the last vestiges of a great American oral tradition. In the Internet age, we can experience it all as a sort of oral kaleidoscope, with both races remembering and reflecting each other through their own lenses. As Hurston would later write in “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
Sources: Library of Congress: Voices From Slavery [ http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/voices/index.html ]; William Stott, “Documentary Expression and Thirties America”; Jerre Mangione, “The Dream and the Deal”; Charles L. Perdue, Jr., introduction, “Weevils in the Wheat”; George Rawick, general editor, “The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography”; Norman Yetman, “Voices From Slavery”; Andrew Ward, “The Slave’s War”; Harvard Sitkoff, “A New Deal for Blacks”; Stephen Woodworth, “Nothing But Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861-1865?; Adam Goodheart, “1861, The Civil War Awakening”; John W. Blassingame, “Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems,” The Journal of Southern History Vol. XLI, No. 4 (Nov 1975) “Conversation with Cinder Stanton,” September 7, 2011; http://www2.monticello.org/gettingword/index.html
Karenna Gore Schiff is the author of “Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Changed Modern America.”
Robert Smalls and the Planter, from Harper’s Weekly Library of Congress
By BLAIN ROBERTS and ETHAN J. KYTLE May 12, 2012, 5:45 pm
As elite Charlestonians slept unaware in the lavish mansions of the Confederacy’s spiritual capital, a slave — a mulatto man trusted by both his owners and employers — executed a daring plot that struck at the core of the white Southern imagination.
In the early morning of Tuesday, May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls, the wheelman of the Planter, commandeered the former cotton steamer turned Confederate supply boat. His plan: to sail through the harbor, beyond Confederate fortifications, to the Union blockade — to freedom. On board were the rest of the enslaved crew and nearly a dozen other bondspeople, including Smalls’s wife and two children.
He and his co-conspirators had certainly planned their mission well. As Smalls had predicted, the Planter’s white officers, tired from a week’s absence from the city, ignored Confederate naval policy requiring that one officer stay with the ship and went ashore for the evening. Smalls also took to heart a remark made by one of his fellow crewman — “Boy, you look jes like de captain” — and donned the white skipper’s naval jacket and trademark straw hat. Aided by the disguise and the dusky light of the early morning, Smalls gambled that he could pass for the officer once the Planter reached Fort Sumter, which would have to grant the boat permission to leave the harbor.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, was Smalls’s knowledge of his trade and the waters of Charleston Harbor. A skilled sailor since childhood, Smalls had spent the past few years working on boats that served the city’s bustling port, passing on a portion of his pay to his permissive master. In the summer of 1861, he had accepted a job aboard the Planter, which had been commissioned by the Confederacy to help defend Charleston. He thus knew the signals the boat would have to use to pass Fort Sumter, and he knew where the mines were, since he himself had laid them.
Still, it was an audacious undertaking. Should they be caught, Smalls acknowledged to his wife, the outcome was assured. “I shall be shot,” he stated matter-of-factly.
But the plan worked. The sentinel at Fort Sumter answered the ship’s signal with the cry, “Pass the Planter,” and Smalls and his crew barreled ahead toward the Union blockade. The ship announced its friendly intentions by removing the Confederate flag for a white bed sheet. Realizing they had made it, the slaves on board, according to the captain of the Union ship Onward, flocked to the deck, “some dancing, some singing, whistling, jumping; and others stood looking toward Fort Sumter, and muttering all sorts of maledictions against it.” Upon meeting the captain, Smalls revealed that freedom had not been his only goal. “I thought the Planter,” he wryly offered, “might be of some use to Uncle Abe.”
Smalls’s feat caught Northerners and Southerners off guard. In the North, Smalls was hailed as a hero, and his courageous scheme spoke to one of the most pressing policy debates of the war, persuading some reluctant Northerners that blacks would indeed don a blue uniform and fight for their liberty. A Pennsylvania Congressman argued that the incident proved that blacks had “enterprise, energy, and capacity, and may be trusted to go it alone.” It was no surprise, then, that Union General David Hunter, who advocated arming former slaves, sent Smalls as part of a delegation to convince President Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton of the wisdom of this course later that summer.
But in the Confederacy, the story was a bitter pill to swallow. “Our community was intensely agitated Tuesday morning,” reported the Charleston Daily Courier on May 14. Smalls had deprived the upstart nation of precious commodities — 17 former bondspeople and a gunboat that Smalls claimed was worth $30,000 — while providing the Union Navy with essential intelligence about the waterways surrounding Charleston. More generally, the Planter incident offered an unsettling answer to a question that Southern slaveholders had been wrestling with for much of the 19th century: Were slaves faithful servants or enemies in their midst?
Many Old South planters labored under the delusion that slavery was a domestic institution governed by familial rather than market values. Positing themselves as benevolent patriarchs, they claimed to provide for the material and spiritual needs of their “black family” just as they did for their “white family.” “God in his good Providence has brought these heathen to our very doors,” insisted a writer in the Southern Quarterly Review in 1848. “In our dwellings … devolve upon us obligations and duties as solemn and responsible as those we owe to our children.”
A curious admixture of Christian stewardship, white supremacy and self-interest, this paternalist ethos promised to pay moral and practical dividends for Southern society. Since humanely treated slaves were healthier, lived longer and thus produced far more rice, cotton, sugar and tobacco, planters could attend to the Christian responsibility to guide their uncivilized charges as they lined their pockets.
And as the abolitionist chorus grew louder in the 1830s, paternalism also made for good sectional propaganda. Southern politicians and theorists like James Henry Hammond and George Fitzhugh contrasted the cold calculus of the free-market North with the tender bonds that knit together the plantation South. Although few paternalists practiced what they preached — slave families, for instance, were regularly broken up at the auction block — many nonetheless held fast to the notion that their slaves were loyal members of their plantation family.
Yet to a second group of slaveholders, this was utter nonsense. Paternalism, they argued, was a poor substitute for a firm hand when it came to managing the enslaved. When slaves disobeyed, ran away or threatened rebellion, these anti-paternalists pointed the finger at indulgent masters, who gave their slaves too many liberties and privileges, and evangelical missionaries, who sought to nurture Christian faith by teaching the enslaved to read and write.
In Charleston, for example, free black and enslaved members of the city’s African Methodist Episcopal congregation had plotted a slave uprising in 1822. James Hamilton Jr., the city attendant and future governor of South Carolina, blamed the “misguided benevolence” of local slaveholders for the thwarted uprising, led by Denmark Vesey. He noted that its “ringleaders” were among “the most humanely treated negroes in the city.” In response to the Vesey scare, the state cracked down on the few liberties afforded free blacks and slaves. In the meantime, Charleston shored up its defenses against insurrection, beginning work on the Citadel, a formidable arsenal in the center of the city, which would eventually become the home of the South Carolina Military Academy.
Nevertheless, paternalism remained a powerful influence in Charleston and across the South through the Civil War. Southerners ruled their slaveholding society through force and coercion on the one hand, and indulgence and negotiation on the other. A paternalist faith in slave loyalty was nowhere more evident than in the white crew’s decision to leave Smalls and his enslaved colleagues on the Planter while they went ashore for the evening.
Smalls’s escape, like countless less famous episodes over the course of the war, undoubtedly dispelled many masters’ illusions about the devotion of their human chattel. Yet even after thousands of slaves ran away behind Union lines, and thousands more followed Smalls into armed service against the Confederacy, some slaveholders remained blinded by the paternalist ethos. In May 1865, just months after black Charlestonians had paraded through the streets of the city celebrating their liberation, a local planter named Henry William Ravenel wrote of his slaves, “As they always been faithful and attached to us, and have been raised as family servants, and have all of them been in our family for several generations, there is a feeling towards them somewhat like that of a father.”
Robert Smalls, for his part, remained an enemy in the midst of the planter class. A Union pilot and captain for the duration of the war, he helped found the Republican Party in South Carolina in 1867 and served as a state senator and United States congressman. In the process, he became a key player in Reconstruction, the short-lived experiment in bi-racial democracy that former planters across the South viewed as an abomination second only to emancipation. And in a twist that must have made even the most die-hard paternalist take notice, Smalls bought the home of his former master, moving his real family into the very place where his so-called white family had once resided.
*
Sources: Charleston Daily Courier, May 14, 1862; Edward A. Miller, Jr., “Gullah Statesman: Robert Smalls from Slavery to Congress, 1839-1915”; Philip Dray, “Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen”; Andrew Billingsley, “Yearning to Breathe Free: Robert Smalls of South Carolina and His Families”; Okon E. Uya, “From Slavery to Public Service: Robert Smalls, 1839-1915”; Lacy Ford, “Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South”; Kenneth M. Stampp, “The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South”; Norrece T. Jones Jr., “Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave: Mechanisms of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina”; Douglas R. Egerton, “He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey”; “Religious Instruction of Slaves: Twelfth Annual Report of the Liberty County Association for the Instruction of Slaves, 1847,” Southern Quarterly Review 14 (July 1848); Liberator, Sept. 12, 1862.
Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle are assistant professors of history at California State University, Fresno and the authors of the forthcoming “Searching for Slavery in the Cradle of the Confederacy.”
The above drawing, depicting the Maryland encounter, accompanied the publication of William Still's mammoth compendium of primary sources, The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narrative, Letters etc.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates Nov 2 2012, 9:12 PM ET
On Christmas Eve 1855, Barnaby Grigsby and his Mary Elizabeth, Emily Foster and her intended Frank Wazner, along with two other slaves, took their masters best team of horses and his carriage, packed it knives and guns, and fled slavery. Grigsby and Elizabeth were married. Wazner and Foster were engaged.
The party suffered from hunger and exposure during the journey and were, by William Still's lights, in ill humor when they found themselves set upon by a group of patrollers:
The spokesman amongst the fugitives, affecting no ordinary amount of dignity, told their assailants plainly, that "no gentleman would interfere with persons riding along civilly"--not allowing it to be supposed that they were slaves, of course. These "gentlemen," however, were not willing to accept this account of the travelers, as their very decided steps indicated. Having the law on their side, they were for compelling the fugitives to surrender without further parley.
At this juncture, the fugitives verily believing that the time had arrived for the practical use of their pistols and dirks, pulled them out of their concealment--the young women as well as the young men--and declared they would not be "taken!" One of the white men raised his gun, pointing the muzzle directly towards one of the young women, with the threat that he would "shoot," etc.
"Shoot! shoot!! shoot!!!" she exclaimed, with a double barrelled pistol in one hand and a long dirk knife in the other, utterly unterrified and fully ready for a death struggle. The male leader of the fugitives by this time had "pulled back the hammers" of his "pistols," and was about to fire! Their adversaries seeing the weapons, and the unflinching determination on the part of the runaways to stand their ground, "spill blood, kill, or die," rather than be "taken," very prudently "sidled over to the other side of the road," leaving at least four of the victors to travel on their way.
At this moment the four in the carriage lost sight of the two on horseback. Soon after the separation they heard firing, but what the result was, they knew not. They were fearful, however, that their companions had been captured....
The two were indeed captured. I encourage you to read through Still's files [ http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15263/15263-h/15263-h.htm#fwanzer ] as he girds his own account of the escape with newspaper articles. But I also want to focus on the result of the young lady leaping from the wagon "with a double barrelled pistol in one hand and long dirk in the other" daring the patroller to shoot her down:
In Syracuse, Frank (the leader), who was engaged to Emily, concluded that the knot might as well be tied on the U.G.R.R., although penniless, as to delay the matter a single day longer. Doubtless, the bravery, struggles, and trials of Emily throughout the journey, had, in his estimation, added not a little to her charms. Thus after consulting with her on the matter, her approval was soon obtained, she being too prudent and wise to refuse the hand of one who had proved himself so true a friend to Freedom, as well as so devoted to her. The twain were accordingly made one at the U.G.R.R. Station, in Syracuse, by Superintendent--Rev. J.W. Loguen. After this joyful event, they proceeded to Toronto, and were there gladly received by the Ladies' Society for aiding colored refugees.
Sharp-eyed readers will note the presence of J.W. Loguen--our old friend Jarm Logue [ http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2012/10/the-hyperlinked-ballad-of-jarm-logue/263425/ ]. I want to emphasize that it is not uncommon to see black women in this sort of aggressive, violent and self-assertive role. The first thing is that slavery was, itself, violent, gender regardless. There are numerous reports of slave-mistresses inflicting terrible brutality on their charges (especially children.) So there's no real reason to expect black women, whatever the 19th century mores might be, to be much different in their willingness to go for the guns, then men.
And there's also this--undermined "traditional" gender roles. It's very hard to claim to "the man of the house" when you are not. This creates room for broader agency among black women. So its nothing to hear about Harriet Tubman threatening to shoot black men who are scared to finish the journey to freedom. It make sense to hear William Parker's wife, in the midst of the Christiana rebellion, grabbing a corn-cutter and threatening to "cut off the head of the first one who should attempt to give up." There's no real "ladyhood" under slavery. And I bet that even after slavery, the ladyhood that emerges is something different. I don't think it's a mistake that Harriet Tubman is the first woman--of any color--credited with leading an American military raid [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_at_Combahee_Ferry ].
I need to be clear here--slavery no more "ended" black male chauvinism, than the integration of the military ended racism in the Army. But as with the military, the presence of death tends to turn bigotries into expensive luxuries. And even after the immediate danger fades something remains--so much that Frank Wazner would find himself attracted to a woman who willingly acted within the sphere of male power.
Next year, the country will begin observing the sesquicentennial of the bloodiest war in U.S. history -- the Civil War. But the question of how to remember that war sometimes seems as contentious as the war itself was. On Oct. 20, The Post reported that in Virginia, fourth-grade students received textbooks telling them that thousands of African Americans fought in Confederate armies [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/19/AR2010101907974.html ] during the Civil War. The textbook's author, who is not a historian, found that false claim repeated so many times on the Internet that she assumed it had to be true.
She thereby helped propagate one of the most pernicious and energetically propagated myths about the Civil War. According to that myth, anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 Southern blacks -- both free and enslaved -- served voluntarily, loyally, consistently and as fully fledged combatants in the South. Most of those who make these claims do it to bolster another, bigger myth -- that most Southern blacks supported the Confederacy.
As a matter of fact, one of Jefferson Davis's generals did advise him to emancipate and arm slaves at the start of the war. But Davis vehemently rejected that advice. It "would revolt and disgust the whole South," he snapped. During the first few years of the war, some others repeated this suggestion. Each time, Richmond slapped it down. Not only would no slaves be enlisted; no one who was not certifiably white, whether slave or free, would be permitted to become a Confederate soldier.
And the Confederacy's policy of excluding blacks from its armed forces was effective. John Beauchamp Jones, a high-level assistant to the secretary of war, scoffed at rumors that the Confederacy had units made up of slaves. "This is utterly untrue," he wrote in his diary. "We have no armed slaves to fight for us." Asked to double-check, Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon confirmed that "No slaves have been employed by the Government except as cooks or nurses in hospitals and for labor."
Why were the leaders so stubborn on this point? Because they were fighting to preserve African American slavery and the racial creed that justified it. Slavery's defenders insisted that blacks were inferior to whites -- uniquely suited to dull, arduous labor but incapable of assuming the responsibilities of free people, citizens or soldiers. As Seddon explained, since the Confederacy had taken that stand both before "the North and before the world," it could "not allow the employment as armed soldiers of negroes." Putting blacks into gray uniforms would be seen as a confession that this ideology was a lie. Even more practically, the Confederacy worried about what black troops would do with their weapons. At the very least they feared (in the words of Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin) that black Confederate soldiers would desert to the enemy "in mass."
Finally, approaching military defeat forced Jefferson Davis to reverse course and support the black troops idea at the end of 1864. At that point, he faced fierce resistance from white Southerners who continued to insist that blacks would make only poor or disloyal soldiers. Davis now had to argue that black soldiers might yet fight effectively for the South. Tellingly, however, in trying to make that case, neither he nor his allies ever pointed proudly to the record of any of the black units (or even individuals) who purveyors of the modern myth claim were already in the field.
After months of heated debate, a severely watered-down version of this proposal became Confederate law in March of 1865. Gen. Richard S. Ewell assumed responsibility for implementing it, and Confederate officials and journalists confidently predicted the enlistment of thousands. But the actual results proved bitterly disappointing. A dwarf company or two of black hospital workers was attached to a unit of a local Richmond home guard just a few weeks before the war's end. The regular Confederate army apparently managed to recruit another 40 to 60 men -- men whom it drilled, fed, and housed at military prison facilities under the watchful eyes of military police and wardens -- reflecting how little confidence the government and army had in the loyalty of their last-minute recruits.
This strikingly unsuccessful last-ditch effort, furthermore, constituted the sole exception to the Confederacy's steadfast refusal to employ African American soldiers. As Gen. Ewell's longtime aide-de-camp, Maj. George Campbell Brown, later affirmed, the handful of black soldiers mustered in Richmond in 1865 were "the first and only black troops used on our side."
The writer is a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This column is adapted from a piece that appeared in the Fredericksburg, Va., Free Lance-Star in September.
ecently the news was full of the fact that VA’s fourth grade history textbook described large numbers of black men serving in uniform for the confederacy [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/19/AR2010101907974.html ]. The claim is these slaves were loyal to their masters and fought to preserve slavery. This is simply absurd: it’s wishful thinking.
It’s true that late in the war, Confederate politicians and editors began talking about the possibility of arming slaves. This editorial, from a Jackson Mississippi newspaper in late 1863, is typical:
“We are forced by the necessity of our condition to take a step which is revolting to every sentiment of pride and to every principle that governed our institutions before the war..we can make them fight better than the Yankees are able to do. Masters and overseers can marshal them for battle by the same authority and habit of obedience with which they are marshaled to labor“1
On thing to notice here is that even though this editor seems to favor enlisting slaves, he never imagines they will freely choose to fight: they will have to be forced.
Did some slaves fight for the Confederacy? Well, consider that the Confederate Congress completely banned the enlistment of slaves until March 16, 1865. Lee surrendered three weeks later. They only considered enlisting slaves as a desperate necessity, and even then:
“Referring particularly to the employment of negroes as soldiers [Mississippi Congressman H.C.] Chambers said that he was “ashamed to debate the question. All nature cries out against it. The negro was ordained to slavery by the Almighty. Emancipation would be the destruction of our political and social system. God forbid that this Trojan horse should be introduced among us.” [John] Goode of Virginia was opposed to the suggested use of the negroes because it was “a confession of weakness to the enemy”; because he thought “it would end in abolition”; and because it was ‘degrading to our men.’” 2
Even though General Lee in January 1865 requested that the CSA Congress enlist slaves, they still resisted the idea. Howell Cobb of Georgia in January of 1865 called the use of negroes as soldiers “the most pernicious idea that has been suggested since the war began,” continuing, “you cannot make soldiers of slaves or slaves of soldiers.… The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.“3
So even in November of 1864, when the rebel army was starving, and in desperate straits, the CSA congress still opposed enlisting slaves, and it was not legal to do so until March of 1865.
So where does the claim of black Confederate soldiers come from?
Well, when Richmond fell the Union Army did find some partial companies of slaves who were training as soldiers–the exact number is unclear, 200 at most, says David Blight.4
The single biggest source for this, though, is very startling and worth looking at. Northern Dr. Lewis H. Steiner witnessed the Confederate capture of Frederick, MD in 1862. Steiner wrote “Over 3,000 Negroes must be included in this number [of Confederate troops]. These were clad in all kinds of uniforms, not only in cast-off or captured United States uniforms, but in coats with Southern buttons, State buttons, etc. These were shabby, but not shabbier or seedier than those worn by white men in the rebel ranks. Most of the Negroes had arms, rifles, muskets, sabers, bowie-knives, dirks, etc.….and were manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederate Army.“5
People who want to believe that loyal slaves fought for the Confederacy take this very strong account, and assume that it represents the average number of black soldiers in the Confederate Army, and conclude that as many as 50,000 black men fought for the confederacy! 6
There are all sorts of problems with this. A: was Steiner right about the number? B: was he right that he saw soldiers, and not slaves in support units? C: can you extrapolate what he saw to apply to the rest of the Confederate Army D: what was Steiner’s agenda?
Steiner’s account, which can be read on Google Books [ http://books.google.com/books?id=5Hc4BqSNlIQC&pg=PA20&lpg=PA20&dq=Lewis+H.+Steiner+frederick+negro&source=bl&ots=5yB9v6pCRN&sig=vlLFIyYAvA_DXZkmHrUzbjW8Khc&hl=en&ei=cEHATMTvKsGqlAeP0OHNCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false ], is worth examining. Steiner was a partisan: a dedicated Yankee, his account of the Confederate Army is clearly designed to ridicule and belittle. He mocks the CSA soldiers for being dirty and ill smelling. He writes, of the black soldiers: “The fact was patent, and rather interesting when considered in connection with the horror rebels express at the suggestion of black soldiers being employed for the National defence.” Was he reporting an accurate number, or trying to mock the CSA and its Army? It’s also worth noting that Steiner’s account describes Howell Cobb, quoted above, as marching into Frederick with this column of 3000 black troops–the same Howell Cobb who would write, less than three years later: “you cannot make soldiers of slaves or slaves of soldiers.… The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” Can Steiner be right?
Meanwhile, none of the other accounts from the occupation of Frederick support this observation. None of the confederate soldiers who were at Fredrick write about black Confederate soldiers–in fact, as Chandra Manning points out, white CSA soldiers were for the most part strongly opposed to using slaves in the Army. And again, there’s the fact that the govt. of the CSA forbid the enlistment of slaves in 1862, when Frederick fell.
There are no accounts from natives of Frederick of describing 3000 armed black men in town. There are very few accounts from northern soldiers of black troops in arms for the CSA. And keep in mind Civil War battles were heavily covered by reporters. Frederick is not far from Washington. There are no contemporary accounts from reporters of large numbers of armed black soldiers in the CSA.
So we have a case of one source–Steiner–being taken as gospel and then enlarged to the point where it has turned into 50,ooo black soldiers, approximately 1/3 the total CSA Army in 1865.
It’s a case of wish fulfillment. People want to believe in black Confederates, and they reuse to let historical evidence stand in their way. It’s possible some black men fought for the confederacy: it’s a big country, there are a lot of people in it with a lot of motives. It’s very likely some slaves and possibly free blacks served in support positions and as servants. Nostalgia, after the war, might remember that service as soldiering. To turn it into a large scale phenomenon of black men fighting for the Confederacy, you have to ignore the facts.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
