A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom
By David Williams
The New Press, 2005
594 pages, $51 (hb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
"What class has most interest in the war and has made the most money by it, and sacrificed the least to maintain it?", asked a letter writer in the southern state of Georgia during the US Civil War. His answer, "the planters", went to the heart of a war that military re-enactors and orthodox historians alike rarely question in terms beyond battles and generals. In A People's History of the Civil War, however, Professor David Williams asks the questions that the common folk of the North and South were asking about exactly whose war it was.
They were entitled to ask. Six hundred thousand soldiers of the Confederate States of America in the South and the United States in the North were killed between 1861 and 1865. One in four soldiers lost their lives, primarily from disease and inadequate medical treatment. Hunger, malnutrition, clothing little better than rags, shoes (when they had them) that fell apart, frostbite, draconian military discipline and other miseries plagued the poorly, and erratically, paid soldiers.
Soldiers saw themselves as risking their lives to secure profits for stay-at-home fat cats who would not risk theirs. Williams documents the pervasive "rich man's war" attitude that permeated the enlisted men's view of the Civil War. In both the North and South, money bought exemption from conscription. The "20 slave law" in the South exempted rich planters who owned 20 or more slaves from military service.
The only currency of the poor soldiers was humanity and compassion. Private David Thompson, from New York, wrote after one battle: "Before the sunlight faded, I walked over the narrow field. All around lay the Confederate dead ... As I looked down on the poor, pinched faces, all enmity died out. There was no 'secession' in those rigid forms nor in those fixed eyes staring at the sky. Clearly it was not their war".
Desertion was endemic, as high as one in three among Union soldiers and two in three among Confederate soldiers. Primed by hardship and resentment at the inequality of sacrifice, the trigger for most deserters was pleas from their families back home to return and help with the severe economic stress. Wages lagged well behind prices in the North, whilst in the South living standards were savaged by 300% inflation, government taxes, levies and outright theft of farm produce. As starving and debt-ridden Confederate soldiers watched their properties being confiscated, planters and merchants (who preferred to invest in profitable cash crops like tobacco and cotton rather than food) raked in the dough from naked profiteering, hoarding and speculation, which priced food beyond reach.
The poor did not, however, passively suffer their privation. In the North, conscientious objectors, pacifists and anti-draft rioters held back the war effort. In the South, anti-Confederate and anti-war organisations, draft evaders and deserters were well-organised and armed — and they undermined the Confederacy through guerrilla warfare, spying for the Union, and attacks on conscription offices. Three hundred thousand southern whites joined the Union army. Southern women, in bands of hundreds and thousands, raided, axes in hand, government depots for food.
Fully one third of the South's population (its four million slaves) were never going to support a Confederacy whose "cornerstone", as the Confederate vice-president put it, was that slavery was their "natural and normal condition". Eighty per cent of the 200,000 blacks who enlisted in the Union Army after 1863 were escaped slaves from the South. They believed that the Union Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, would deliver their freedom.
Lincoln's famous Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 (which proclaimed all slaves in the rebel states free forever) was in part a solution to a human resource crisis in the army from deaths, desertion and lack of volunteers. It was a "necessary war measure", in Lincoln's words. It did, however, turn the Union Army into a force for liberation.
Wealthy Southern planters had provoked secession, fearing that a Northern-dominated Union would prevent slavery's expansion to the new western states.
Lack of enthusiasm for the war in the North and anti-secession feeling in the South, however, did not necessarily mean universal support for a war of black emancipation. In the North, many white workers feared losing wages and jobs to an influx of freed slaves whilst most white Union soldiers, says Williams, came to accept abolition only because it would shorten the war.
Williams vividly describes the myriad struggles of labouring people for economic justice, of women for rights, of soldiers for respect, of dissenters for liberty of conscience, of Native Americans for land, of African-Americans for equality, the battles of the common folk whose voices and agendas have been "literally papered over" by the mainly "white males of the power elite" who have written the history of the US Civil War.
Williams argues that it was these "common people who would largely shape the Civil War's course and outcome", rather than military and political leaders. Williams gives an excellent account of the major role that Southerners played in defeating the South, particularly the half a million Southerners, white and black, who fought for the North. An important determinant of major Confederate battlefield defeats, he argues, was the lack of civilian support for the Confederacy and its war, which translated into a loss of military will. The Confederacy faced a three-front civil war — "one against the North, another against white dissenters and yet another against black resisters". If it could not win the latter two, it could not hope to win the first.
Williams, however, underplays the role of military factors in the war's outcome. European observers with an acute interest in civil political conflict, like Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, closely followed the strategies of the military conflict, and they, unlike Williams and his "plague on both sides" philosophy, sided politically with the North.
They viewed a victory for Northern capitalism against the backward Southern Confederacy of slave owners as not only a win for human liberation (the freeing of four million slaves) but also an outcome that would best advance historical progress through uniting the working class across race lines. Marx wrote that "in the United States of America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the Black it is branded".
Williams' balance-sheet of Civil War outcomes, by contrast, is unremittingly pessimistic and denies any progressive meaning to the war. In the South, Williams writes, planters remained the ruling class, economically and politically. Slavery was swapped for new forms of economic bondage and "Jim Crow" segregation laws. North and South, the "rich man's war" merely consolidated the "aristocracy of wealth". This undeniably came to pass, but only after significant struggles during the reconstruction period that followed the war in the South, where the class interests of Southern and Northern capitalists combined in the brutal repression of newly emancipated blacks. But a victory for slavery would have been even worse, for millions of slaves and for the prospects of a US working class, structurally cleaved by race.
As a libertarian radical, rather than a Marxist, Williams's otherwise robust historical materialist methodology also downplays the importance of ideas. Williams portrays virtually all white Union soldiers and Northern workers as irredeemably racist, motivated only by economic concerns. Other Civil War historians, however, have presented equally compelling evidence that pro-emancipation convictions came to predominate, in their own right, amongst the soldiers of the Union army. Williams's history — scholarly, accessible and rich with examples of struggles over the meaning of freedom — is necessary, but not sufficient, for fully understanding the US Civil War.
From Green Left Weekly, July 26, 2006.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.