In fact, all three historians we reached told us there was no evidence to back up that assertion and plenty of reasons to suggest it does not fit the facts that are known. Proportionately, far more officers were likely to be professionals in civil life, and their age difference, about four years older than enlisted men, reflected their greater accumulated wealth. Thank you for supporting our journalism. The prevalence of slaveholding was so pervasive among Southerners who heeded the call to arms in 1861 that it became something of a joke; Glatthaar tells of an Irish-born private in a Georgia regiment who quipped to his messmates that "he bought a negro, he says, to have something to fight for.". (Maryland had to be kept in the Union by any means necessary, else the United States capital in the District of Columbia would have been completely enclosed within Confederate territory.) (The previous summers campaign on the Virginia Peninsula, where the two armies were in close proximity to one another for an extended period of time, contains a wealth of such narratives.) The fact that their paper notes frequently depicted scenes of slaves demonstrated the institution's central role and symbolic value to the Confederacy. In the navy about one-third of the officers came from slaveholding States, yet remained faithful to the Union; while one-eighth of the Union army, or 300,000 men, were contributed by the Southern States.". Walking the Gettysburg battlefield today, its easy to imagine the Union and Confederate armies dueling for control of the Pennsylvania town and its surrounding picturesque fields and rocky hills for three days in July 1863. Children of indentured servants were born free; slaves children were the property of their owners. Lee freed his slaves several years before the war was over, and considerably earlier than his Northern counterparts. However, we do know where slavery was common and where it wasnt, and the Union soldiers in question came from places where it wasnt. St. Petersburg, FL This compared favorably to the Confederacy as a whole, in which one in every twenty white persons owned slaves. "Oil pulling improves overall oral health, strengthens gums, helps prevent cavities, whitens teeth and reduces plaque. The real Biden was executed for his crimes long ago along with Clinton. IPUMS NHGIS, University of Minnesota, accessed July 15. In the eleven states that formed the Confederacy, there were in aggregate just over 1 million free households, which between them represented 316,632 slaveholdersmeaning that just under one-third of households in the Confederate States counted among its assets at least one human being. Once again, the historical record tells us their stories. May 15, 2014. Even more revealing was their attachment to slavery. Although North Carolina mustered more troops to fight for the . Many of those white families, who couldnt afford enslaved people, aspired to own slaves as a symbol of wealth and prosperity. David Mikkelson founded the site now known as snopes.com back in 1994. Addressing and correcting the many inaccuracies and misleading statements contained in that piece would require a very lengthy article, so we have chosen to tackle it here in smaller, more easily digestible chunks. Even as some enslaved men escaped North, the retreat by the Army of Northern Virginia would have been disastrous without the support of its camp servants. The data in the UofV online system can be broken down either by state or counties within a state, and make it possible to compare one data element (e.g., households) with another (slaveholders) and calculate the proportions between them. When Lees three corps of infantry, numbering roughly 70,000, crossed the Mason-Dixon Line into Pennsylvania, they encountered clear signs that they were no longer in friendly territory. ), 'The so-called "Emancipation Proclamation" of Lincoln only gave freedom to slaves in the SOUTH! Of the 462,634 Confederate soldiers captured 247,769 were paroled on the field and 25,976 died in prison. A Texas State Senate Resolution claims that most Confederate soldiers didn't own slaves. Soldier demographics for the Confederate Army are not available due to incomplete and destroyed enlistment records. TheLost Cause lament is ill-conceived, however. A quartermaster in John Bell Hoods division observed that a great many Negroes have gone to the Yankees. Union cavalry raids, such as the one led by Judson Kilpatrick at Monterey Pass on July 5, hampered the retreat of tired Confederates and resulted in additional prisoners being taken, including the camp servants attached to the Richmond Howitzers as well as Major William H. Chamberlains servant, horse, and personal equipment. The mortality rate for prisoners of war was 15.5 percent for Union soldiers and 12 percent for Confederate soldiers. It's true that in an extremely narrow sense, only a very small proportion of Confederate soldiers owned slaves in their own right. In recent years, othermuseums have popped up across the United States that present their own ideological visions as the truth,likethe Creation Museum, established in 2007, which attempts to present spiritual belief as scientific fact. Danny Lewis is a multimedia journalist working in print, radio, and illustration. Blake Masters wants to privatize Social Security. Recently, reparations activist and Duke professor William Sandy Darity disputed this on Twitter. . Combining those soldiers who owned slaves with those soldiers who lived with slaveholding family members, the proportion rose to 36 percent. Although renowned Union general William T. Sherman was rather conservative on the issue of slavery (he was far from an abolitionist) and did not believe in equal rights for "negroes," there is scant evidence that he ever owned any slaves he certainly did not own "many," nor did he own any during the course of the Civil War. Slavery is an important subject to study in its total as an American institution, but the politicizing of it to support modern political agendas will not be addressed at our museum. In a world of wild talk and fake news, help us stand up for the facts. The historians we reached said the actual number of slaveholders who fought for the Union was tiny, perhaps a few thousand. However, we will address it in the context of the political, economic, social, and constitutional atmosphere of the 1860s. Kentucky and Missouri were both claimed as member states by the Confederacy and were represented in the Confederate Congress, and Maryland remained in the Union primarily because U.S. troops quickly imposed martial law and garrisoned the state to head off secession efforts. Lee went on the offensive for the following two days but failed to crack the Union defenses. That was 40 percent above the tally for all households in the Old South. More:Court clears way for removal of Confederate statue at the center of deadly Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' rally. Chemtrails are being put into the atmosphere and are trickling down into soil and water, becoming the real cause of disease., "There is no Biden presidency. Enlisted men owned less wealth, with combined levels of $1,125 for the median and $7,079 for the average, but those numbers indicated a fairly comfortable standard of living. By comparison, only one in twelve enlisted men owned slaves, but when those who lived with family slave owners were included, the ratio exceeded one in three. Each slave is listed by sex and age; names were not recorded. Joe enters into the invasion with much gusto, he noted, and is quite active in looking up hidden property.. | This figure, combined with the 36 percent who owned or whose family members owned slaves, indicated that almost one of every two 1861 recruits lived with slaveholders. Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window), Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window), Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window), Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window), Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window), https://www.history.com/news/5-myths-about-slavery. Union soldiers outnumbered Confederate soldiers by a ratio of 2 to 1. In the final tabulation, the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery. . Prior to, during and even after the War of Northern Aggression.". Early in the conflict, some of Lincolns generals helped the president understand that sending these men and women back to bondage could only help the Confederate cause. Sarah Pruitt is a writer and editor based in seacoast New Hampshire. If 300,000 Union soldiers were slave owners, it would mean that somewhere in the ballpark of three-quarters of the available slave owning men put on the Union blue. The Confederacy included the states of Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. In this retelling, the South is more Gone With the Windthan Free State of Jones,casting the Confederate soldiers as trying to preserve their cherished, chivalric way of life instead of defending plantation owners'reliance on slavery to keep the local economy going. | READ MORE. Two years later, that number had . 1800 I Street NW We rate it Pants on Fire. They viewed theinstitution of slavery asthe white supremacist foundation that theSouthern way oflife was built on. Grant also had several slaves, who were only freed after the 13th amendment in December of 1865. But, as James W. Loewen writes for The Washington Post, it certainly wasn't just the slaveholdingelite who fought to maintain slavery. Among the enlistees in 1861, slightly more than one in ten owned slaves personally. Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook. . The largest group was the Irish, followed by Germans, British, French, Poles, and Canadians. Greg @lblanconx360 replied to Daritys tweet, Yes- but in the case of SC, most of these were not large plantations like in Gone with the Wind on the coast, but were smaller farms. The chance that a few thousand slaveholders fought for the Union, rather than the 300,000 as Baldwin said, does little to keep this statement in the realm of reality. Joseph T. Glatthaar, in his magnificent study of the force that eventually became the Army of Northern Virginia, lays out the evidence. In August 1862, he famously wrote to the New York Tribune: 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.. And during the fierce early days of the war when the South was obliterating the Yankee armies! Nonetheless, the 1860 census recorded only 18 slaves in all of New Jersey. Accordingly, Lincoln had no legal authority to free all slaves everywhere, only in the "states and parts of states in which the people thereof" were in "rebellion against the United States.". Only in Delaware, a state which was far from being undeniably a "Northern" state: depending upon the criteria used, one could justifiably have pegged Delaware at the time of the Civil War as being Northern, Southern, Mid-Atlantic, or some combination thereof. Electronic voting machines didn't allow people to vote in Maricopa County, Arizona. As far as slavery goes, every museum on the war is currently obsessed with the subject. The ideology has been used to whitewash slaverys role in the Civil War for generations. "Thus," Glatthaar notes, "volunteers in 1861 were 42 percent more likely to own slaves themselves or to live with family members who owned slaves than the general population." In short, Confederate volunteers actually owned more slaves than the general population. The colonial system also offered more lenient punishment for disobedient servants than enslaved people and allowed servants to petition for early release if their masters mistreated them. The Union had 1.1 million factory workers, while the Confederacy had 111,000 and the Border States had 70,000. This is an extremely common argument among Confederate apologists, part of a larger effort to minimize or eliminate the institution of slavery as a factor in secession and the coming of the war, and thus make it possible to maintain the notion that Southern soldiers, like the Confederacy itself, were driven by the purest and noblest values to defend home and hearth. They were up to their necks in it. Slave labor was as much a part of life in the antebellum South as heat in the summer and hog-killing time in the late fall. Historians, though, say that grosslyunderrepresents the extent of slavery in the U.S. before the Civil War because it includes babies, children and people in states where slavery was illegal in the calculation. In fact, until March 1865, Confederate Army policy specifically prohibited Black people from serving as soldiers. This material may not be reproduced without permission. Slave owners remained convinced that these men would remain fiercely loyal even in the face of opportunities to escape, but this conviction would be tested throughout the Gettysburg campaign. Since none of the Northern states had rebelled against the United States, the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to them. The Union led wheat production with 100 million bushels produced in comparison to 35 million bushels in the Confederacy and 20 million bushels in the Border States. One in every ten volunteers in 1861 did not own slaves themselves but lived in households headed by non family members who did. Gallagher noted that over the fouryears of the war, the South put 800,000-900,000 men under arms. The population of the Union was 18.5 million. Some Confederate officers wanted to enlist enslaved people earlier: Gen. Patrick Cleburne proposed enlisting African American soldiers early in 1864, but Jefferson Davis rejected the suggestion and ordered it never to be discussed again. Their country. On the homefront, the Union had $234,000,000 in bank deposit and coined money or specie while the Confederacy had $74,000,000 and the Border States had $29,000,000. However, the version of history that the SCV is trying to tell is rooted in Lost Cause mythology,instead of confronting more difficult truths. Kevin M. Levin is a historian and educator based in Boston. Your California Privacy Rights / Privacy Policy. Lee's army numbered 90,000 at its strongest and was organized into state-specific regiments and brigades, with about 55 percent of its men coming from the Upper South. "Lastly, and most importantly, why did NORTHERN States outlaw slavery only AFTER the war was over?". As PBS points out, New England's economywith its textile factories and banking industrywas built on the back of Southern slave labor. This pecksniffery even went so far as to find the state of Delaware rejecting the 13th Amendment in December of 1865 and did not ratify it (13th Amendment / free the slaves) until 1901! But many of the soldiers' families owned at least one or two slaves. We are excited to tell the stories of our ancestors through their own words and deeds. Just last weekend, groundbreaking began on the site of the museum dedicated to continuing a long-discredited myth about the beginnings of the Civil War: the Myth of the Lost Cause, historian Kevin Levin writes for his blog,"Civil War Memory". They fought the battle defending their homelands against an invading army." The Lost . 727-821-9494, When President AbrahamLincoln signed his Emancipation Proclamation, "there were over 300,000 slaveholders who were fighting in the Union army. The 642,427 total Union casualties have been divided accordingly: The 483,026 total Confederate casualties have been divided accordingly: Of the 211,411 Union soldiers captured 16,668 were paroled on the field and 30,218 died in prison. Absent the body, news that a soldier had been comforted in his final hours and had prepared himself for death reassured family members that their loved one experienced what 19th-century Americans understood as a Good Death.. In 1863, more than 6,000 accompanied the 71,000 soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania. These declarationsoften cited Lincoln's statement that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,"Ta-Nehisi Coates writes for The Atlantic. Smithsonian magazine participates in affiliate link advertising programs. For many tourists, no visit to Gettysburg is complete without retracing the steps General Robert E. Lees Army of Northern Virginia, those Confederates who crossed the open fields toward the Union line on Cemetery Ridge on July 3 in what is still popularly remembered as Picketts Charge. Once safe behind where the Union lines held strong, however, few turn around and acknowledge the hundreds of enslaved people who emerged from the woods to render assistance to the tattered remnants of the retreating men. The battle that commenced west and north of Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, expanded gradually as the two armies shifted units along the roads leading to the small town. They accompanied the Army of Northern Virginia in its two invasions of the North, in the Antietam Campaign of 1862, and the Gettysburg Campaign of the following year. To avoid confusion as to the source of the factual errors, and to prevent any misunderstanding about Levin's credentials, we have removed the pragraph. When the war began, slavery was legal in four Union states. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine Enslaved workers constituted the backbone of the Confederate war effort. | READ MORE. Stephanie McCurry, history professor at Columbia University. Particularly horses: the Union had twice that of the Confederacy, 3.4 million to the CSA's 1.7. Virginia had the largest population of enslaved African Americans of any state in the Confederacy, and those slaves responded to the American Civil War (1861-1865) in a variety of ways. It is not certain how many foreigners fought for the Confederacy, but the number seems to be in the tens of thousands. Farmers comprised 69 percent of the civilian occupations in the Confederacy. Some eagerly awaited reunion with their own families. It wasnt, she said. For slaveholder and nonslaveholder alike, slavery lay at the heart of the Confederate nation. Baldwin wrote. Editor's Note, November 8, 2016: Due to errors in the reporting in the original source, we misstated the official name of the museum, its square footage, and its estimated construction cost. They swam in it, and no amount of willful denial can change that. Two years later, that number had not changed dramatically for the Union Army but had dropped to about 200,000 for the Confederate Army. And their motivation for serving isn't taken into account by the numbers, since some may have been forced into service, and others may have seen fighting as a way out of . A number of rebels passed by until a young man of benevolent expression attempted to locate a surgeon. Contrarily, Confederate General Robert E. Lee freed his slaves (which he never purchased they were inherited) in 1862! (Some of the slaves at White Haven eventually drifted off during the Civil War; any that remained were freed when Missouri's constitutional convention abolished slavery in January 1865.). A small number signed up for training, but theres no evidence they saw action before the wars end. Advertising Notice As long as the Southern slave states remained in the Union, their aggregate Congressional representation was sufficient in number to block the passage or ratification of any law or constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. With the inclusion of those who resided in nonfamily slaveholding households, the direct exposure to bondage among enlisted personnel was four of every nine. While Joe Glatthaar undoubtedly had a small regiment of graduate assistants to help with cross-indexing Confederate muster rolls and the 1860 U.S. Census, there are some basic tools now available online that will allow anyone to at least get a general sense of the validity of his numbers. NOT in the North! Kevin M. Levin 526, designating April as Texas Confederate History and Heritage Month. Fortunately, one of the leading Civil War historians, James McPherson at Princeton University, knows Townsends work and told us that he included the Confederate states, plus Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and Kentucky. More than half the officers in 1861 owned slaves, and none of them lived with family members who were slaveholders. We found only one biography (out of many) that supported the notion that Sherman ever owned slaves, and that work merely stated, without elaboration, that Sherman "had a slave" at some point during the former period (a wording that allows for the possibility that Sherman rented or was tended to by a slave for a while rather than actually owning one). Others included mechanics, 24 percent; laborers, 16 percent; commercial, 5 percent; miscellaneous, 4 percent; and professional occupations, 3 percent. In addition, the essential ideology of white supremacy that served as a rationale for slavery made it extremely difficultand terrifyingfor white Southerners to imagine life alongside a Black majority population that was not in bondage. In the Border States there were 2.5 million free inhabitants and 500,000 enslaved people. In 1860, slavery was still legal in 15 of the 33 U.S. states, and slaves represented nearly a third of the population in those slaveholding states. But the general scale shows how Baldwins figure stretches belief.
