Would the Confederacy have become a powerful nation if they had won the Civil War? Probably not. Their commitment to state sovereignty would have soon torn them apart.
[ This article is being expanded and moved to another site: stay tuned! ]
Ron Franklin
© 2014 Ronald E. Franklin
When the Confederate states seceded from the Union, they considered themselves, rather than the North, to be the true upholders of American liberty.
It’s always been hard for me to understand how people who fought for the right to hold other people as slaves could consider themselves defenders of liberty. But an article in the July 2, 1864 edition of the Richmond, Virginia Daily Dispatch, the most widely read newspaper in the Confederate capital, helped me understand just how different Confederate thinking was from the principles on which the US was founded.
Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson working on the Declaration of Independence
Looking ahead to the 4th of July, the writer had this to say about the “blunder” in the Declaration of Independence:
The only doctrine of the whole Declaration which the North can consistently rejoice in, is that which asserts the equality of man, and which is the solitary blunder in that great document. That all men are created equal; that they are equal politically, morally or socially; that they are equals in any other than a religious sense, is too evident an absurdity gravely to discuss.
The idea that all men (and women) are created equal is the bedrock of the American ideal. But not to the Confederates. They often made it clear that to them, the Declaration of Independence had omitted a single word, and that omission rendered it null and void as a statement of Confederate political principles.
That word was “white.” What Confederates believed, and explicitly said they believed, was not that all men are created equal, but that all white men are created equal. Everybody else, in their eyes, occupied some lower rung on the ladder of humanity.
It’s hard to believe that millions of Americans once believed that way. What’s even harder to accept is the fact that even today, some still do.
Ron Franklin
© 2014 Ronald E. Franklin
In the final months of the American Civil War, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, knew that critical information was somehow being leaked to the Union Army under General Ulysses S. Grant. He was right about the leaks, but was never able to identify their source.
That’s probably because it never occurred to him that the person who was getting information to the Federals could possibly do so.
The CIA’s image of Mary Elizabeth Bowser. Source: cia.gov
She was Mary Elizabeth Bowser, a free African American woman who was posing as a slave. Bowser infiltrated the Confederate White House as a servant known, according to some accounts, as Ellen Bond.
To Varina Davis, Jefferson Davis’s wife, Ellen Bond was not only a slave, but a not too bright, illiterate one. In reality Mary Bowser was just the opposite. Not only was she well educated, but she had a photographic memory, and could repeat verbatim whatever she read.
So, as Ellen Bond dusted Jefferson Davis’s desk, Mary Elizabeth Bowser was reading and memorizing the papers she found there. When Ellen Bond served dinner to visiting Confederate generals, Mary Elizabeth Bowser was taking quiet note of everything they talked about.
So effective was Mary Elizabeth Bowser in her espionage for the Union, she was inducted into the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Hall of Fame in 1995.
You can read the full story of how Mary Elizabeth Bowser spied for the Union right under Jefferson Davis’s nose at: Mary Elizabeth Bowser: Union Spy In The Confederate White House.
Ron Franklin
© 2014 Ronald E. Franklin
Ron Franklin
This blog is Civil War BSC: Perspectives of a Black, Southern, Christian. That background gives me a perspective that is, I believe, underrepresented in the Civil War community. I hope you’ll enjoy seeing the Civil War through my eyes.
Please read About Ron Franklin
Index to Ron Franklin’s Civil War Articles on other web sites.
White Christians in the South who supported slavery (as most did) had a problem. They were assured from practically every pulpit throughout the cotton states that slavery was an institution sanctioned by God. After all, they were taught, Abraham owned slaves and God never condemned him for it.
But somehow, for many of them, that ecclesiastical reassurance was never quite enough. For one thing, there was that inconvenient command from Jesus Himself that made forcibly keeping people who hadn’t done anything to deserve it in hopeless, never-ending bondage feel a little uncomfortable:
And just as you want men to do to you, you also do to them likewise. (Luke 6:31)
Happy Slaves
No matter how completely white Southerners may have convinced themselves that slavery was biblical, none of them ever wanted to be treated like a slave. So, in order to justify treating other people like slaves, they had to find a way to believe that however much they themselves would hate being a slave, the real slaves had no problem with it.
In other words, it was necessary for whites who supported slavery to believe that blacks were content to be slaves.
That’s the attitude I see reflected in an article that appeared in the January 6, 1863 issue of the Richmond Daily Dispatch:
Stonewall’s Property. –We understand that some five or six negroes, belonging to Gen. Stonewall Jackson, passed South through this city, on Saturday afternoon. In consideration of their having the distinguished honor of belonging to the great Stonewall, they were furnished with free passes on the railroad.
Stonewall Jackson
Through the thinly veiled contempt for “negroes” evident in the writer’s remarks, it’s clear he actually did think it a “distinguished honor” for enslaved people to “belong” to a Confederate hero such as Stonewall Jackson.
Even today neo-Confederates go to great lengths trying to prove that tens of thousands of black soldiers voluntarily fought for the Confederacy, although historical documentation proves the exact opposite.
I suppose the point, both in 1863 and now, is that if slaves felt honored to belong to their masters, even to the point of being willing to fight to maintain that condition, then slavery was not such an evil system after all.
As I read the Dispatch article, it made me wish modern Confederate apologists would honestly ask themselves: do you really think getting a free pass on the railroad because you belonged to a great general would make you content to be someone’s “property,” trapped in unending bondage for your entire life?
No, I didn’t think so.
Ron Franklin
See also: Why are those happy slaves shooting at us?
© 2014 Ronald E. Franklin
A militia officer is refused a commission because of divided loyalties
District of Columbia Militia in May, 1861
The early months of 1861 were a tough time for the officer corps of the U. S. Army. Many of those officers, especially those from the South or from border states, had to make a final and binding decision about where their loyalties lay. Would they honor the commitment they had made to “bear true allegiance to the United States of America, and … serve them honestly and faithfully against all their enemies or opposers whatsoever,” or would they renounce that oath to cast their lot with their native state?
Apparently there were some officers who, rather than declare forthrightly to which side they would adhere, wanted to straddle the fence as long as they could. One of these was Captain Francis B. Schaeffer.
Frank Schaeffer, a native of Baltimore, had fought honorably in the Mexican War, achieving the rank of Captain in the U. S. Army. He had left the army to try his luck in California, but returned east to take a clerkship in the Department of the Interior in Washington. As the secession crisis approached, Schaeffer also became the captain of a Maryland militia company called The National Rifles.
With the storm clouds of possible civil war gathering, Schaeffer was offered a commission as a Major in the Seventh Regiment of the District of Columbia militia. Schaeffer accepted. But when he reported to General Roger Weightman, commander of the District of Columbia militia, to receive his commission, things didn’t go the way he had anticipated.
Here’s how the New York Times of February 11, 1861 reported the encounter between Schaeffer and General Weightman:
A COMMISSION WITHHELD.
Gen. WEIGHTMAN, of the District Militia, refused a commission to Capt. SCHAEFFER, yesterday, under the following circumstances: Capt. SCHAEFFER had been notified to call at Gen. WEIGHTMAN’s office and receive his commission. When he reported himself, Gen. WEIGHTMAN inquired, “If Maryland were to secede, and you were ordered by your superior to make war on her, what would you do, Captain?” Capt. SCHAEFFER frankly responded, “Maryland, Sir, is my native State, and should I ever be in the unfortunate position you have supposed, I should resign my commission.” “Then, Captain, you cannot have it,” rejoined the General. Capt. SCHAEFFER appealed to Secretary HOLT, and protested against such a test being applied to him, which, if applied to all, he claimed, would vacate four-fifths of the commissions in the District Militia. He declared that he and his company, the Crack Rifle Corps, were ready to repel any invasion of the District from any quarter whatever, but he could say no more. The usual oath he was ready to take. Mr. HOLT sustained the action of Gen. WEIGHTMAN, and the case is now pending before the President.
The “Secretary Holt” to whom Schaeffer appealed was Joseph Holt, who had become President Buchanan’s Secretary of War when the former Secretary, John B. Floyd of Virginia, resigned and defected to the Confederacy.
Secretary of War Joseph Holt
Holt was a staunch Union man, and anti-slavery to boot. It was probably an easy call for him to back General Weightman’s declaration that a man whose first loyalty was not to the United States was not fit to be an officer in a militia that would very likely soon be called into Federal service.
I wasn’t able to find any mention of how President Buchanan handled the case (this happened during the interval between Abraham Lincoln’s election and inauguration – Buchanan was still the President). But it seems clear that Schaeffer never got his commission.
To his chagrin, Schaeffer found that divided or unclear loyalties in officers of a nation on the brink of civil war could not be tolerated. At least he had the integrity to declare, when pressed, that he was less than fully committed to the Union.
Schaeffer then went on to confirm the absolute necessity of upholding the principle that denied him a commission in the armed forces of the United States. Less than four months after that denial, he crossed the Potomac into Virginia, taking dozens of Washington residents with him, to fight for the Confederacy.
FEATURED ARTICLE: How Ulysses S. Grant Rose From Store Clerk to General
© 2014 Ronald E. Franklin
Illinois Governor Richard Yates
I was first introduced to Governor Richard Yates of Illinois as the man who gave Ulysses S. Grant his first command at the start of the Civil War. It was his appointment by Yates to be the Colonel of the 21st Illinois that put Grant on the road to becoming General-In-Chief of the entire U. S. Army, and the architect of the campaigns that finally won the war for the Union.
[ See How Ulysses S. Grant Rose From Store Clerk to General ]
So, Richard Yates played a pivotal role in the nation’s history from the beginning of the Civil War.
But he also played another role that’s much less well known, but which has great symbolic resonance not only for the Civil War era, but also for our own times. Just before leaving office in 1865, Yates signed two pardons that marked the new era that was dawning in the country.
In 1853 Illinois joined several other Northern states in enacting a “Black Code.” This law prohibited any black person from outside the state from remaining in the state for more than ten days, on pain of being imprisoned, fined $50, and deported from the state. If they couldn’t pay the fine, they could be sold into servitude for some specified period of time. I was surprised and disappointed to learn that the most influential sponsor of the legislation was John A. Logan, a Democratic politician who would become a successful Union general under Grant.
The Black Laws remained popular in Illinois throughout the war, and were only repealed in early 1865.
That’s the backdrop to an article that appeared in the April 22, 1865 edition of Harper’s Weekly. It recounted an event involving Governor Yates that took place while the Illinois Black Laws were still in effect. Here’s that article:
THE LAST OFFICIAL ACT OF GOVERNOR YATES.
A FRIEND in Illinois sends a story of Senator, late Governor, YATES of that State, which should become historical in his honor.
By the “black laws” of Illinois, lately repealed, free negroes, or, as the law expressed it, “free people of color” when found in the State were liable to arrest and sale. Under this law two persons were arrested about two years since, and convicted of the crime of being “people of color.” They were sold, one for fifty-five and the other for ninety-nine years. A prominent lawyer in the town (the names are given us) believing the law to be unconstitutional appealed the case, becoming security for costs, to the Supreme Court, which declared the law, constitutional, and that the convicted persons who had been temporarily released by the lawyer’s action should be returned to the buyers. The offenders, however, had meanwhile left the State, and the lawyer found himself liable for a large sum.
He reflected for some time, and finally repaired to Governor YATES, who was about vacating the chair. The lawyer presented his case to the Governor’s sagacity and humanity, and at the close of the interview emerged with a radiant face. Meeting a fellow lawyer who was familiar with the circumstances, he said to him, cheerfully,
“Well, it’s finished.”
“How finished?”
“The men are pardoned,” said the lawyer. “How pardoned?” asked his friend.
The lawyer looked at him for a moment while a grim smile passed over his face, and then answered,
“Pardoned for being black.”
This was the last official act of Governor YATES, and Illinois has done wisely in bidding him go up higher.
I fully agree with Harper’s that Governor Yates’ last act in office does him honor.
In light of the growing list of unarmed young black men who have been shot and killed by police, or even by citizens armed with pistols and “stand your ground” immunity, I think we could use a Governor Yates today.
The crime of “being black” is apparently still on the books.
Ron Franklin
© 2014 Ronald E. Franklin
Were there significant numbers of black troops who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War? Many today who identify with the “Lost Cause” interpretation of Southern history believe there were.
Yet, the historical record is clear that if there were any black soldiers fighting on the Southern side, the Confederates themselves didn’t know about it.
By the start of 1865, many high-ranking Confederates recognized that their armies had lost so many men that, unless something changed, they were on the brink of losing their fight for independence. They began to quietly suggest that slaves should be enrolled in Southern armies, and given (or at least promised) their freedom if they fought well. Robert E. Lee, the most trusted voice in the South at the time, publicly advocated that course as an absolute necessity if the Confederacy was to stave off imminent military defeat.
Public reaction to the talk of having blacks fight for the Confederacy showed clearly that nobody in the South, even at that late point in the war, thought there were black troops already in the ranks. And for most secessionists, putting arms into the hands of slaves, thus elevating their status to some level of equality with whites, would be a denial of the very grounds upon which they seceded in the first place [see What Confederates Said Caused the Civil War]. They would rather go down fighting to keep blacks slaves and nothing more, than win independence at the cost of radically changing the social relationship between blacks and whites.
That absolute unwillingness to even contemplate the use of blacks as Confederate soldiers was the subject of an editorial in the January 13, 1865 issue of the Charleston Mercury newspaper. South Carolina had been the instigator of secession before being joined by other slave-holding states. Calling the very concept of employing blacks as soldiers “lunacy,” the Mercury wanted to make it clear that South Carolina would never accept that idea, no matter what her compatriot states did.
The Charleston Mercury, January 13, 1865
Lunacy.
The wild talk prevalent in the official and the semi-official organs at Richmond grates harshly upon the ear of South Carolina. It is still more grievous to her to hear the same unmanly proposition from those in authority in the old State of Virginia…
In 1860 South Carolina seceded along from the old union of States. Her people, in Convention assembled, invited the slaveholding States (none others) of the old Union to join her in erecting a separate Government of Slave States, for the protection of their common interests. All of the slave States, with the exception of Maryland and Kentucky, responded to her invitation. The Southern Confederacy of slave States was formed.
It was on account of encroachments upon the institution of slavery by the sectional majority of the old Union, that South Carolina seceded from that Union. It is not at this late day, after the loss of thirty thousand of her best and bravest men in battle, that she will suffer it to be bartered away; or ground between the upper and nether mill stones, by the madness of Congress, or the counsels of shallow men elsewhere.
By the compact we made with Virginia and the other States of this Confederacy, South Carolina will stand to the bitter end of destruction. By that compact she intends to stand or to fall. Neither Congress, nor certain make shift men in Virginia, can force upon her their mad schemes of weakness and surrender. She stands upon her institutions–and there she will fall in their defence. We want no Confederate Government without our institutions. And we will have none.–Sink or swim, live or die, we stand by them, and are fighting for them this day. That is the ground of our fight–it is well that all should understand it at once. Thousands and tens of thousands of the bravest men, and the best blood of this State, fighting in the ranks, have left their bones whitening on the bleak hills of Virginia in this cause. We are fighting for our system of civilization–not for buncomb, or for Jeff. Davis. We intend to fight for that, or nothing…
The soldiers of South Carolina will not fight beside a [the “N” word] — to talk of emancipation is to disband our army. We are free men, and we chose to fight for ourselves–we want no slaves to fight for us. Skulkers, money lenders, money makers, and blood-suckers, alone will tolerate the idea. It is the man who won’t fight himself, who wants his N- to fight for him, and to take his place in the ranks.
Put that man in the ranks. And do it at once. Control your armies–put men of capacity in command, re-establish confidence–enforce thorough discipline–and there will be found men enough, and brave men enough to defeat a dozen Sherman’s. Falter and hack at the root of the Confederacy–our institutions–our civilization–and you kill the cause as dead as a boiled crab…
Will Virginia stand by us as of old in this rugged pathway? We will not fail her in the shadow of a hair. But South Carolina will fight upon no other platform, than that she laid down in 1860.
After much debate, in March of 1865 some slaves were finally put into training, and allowed to parade around the streets of Richmond. But it was much too little and much too late. The war was over before the experiment of putting black Confederates into combat could be tried. No organized body of black troops ever fought for the Confederacy.
Ron Franklin
© 2014 Ronald E. Franklin
As I was reading Shelby Foote’s account of the battle of Gettysburg (Civil War, A Narrative, Vol. 2), I was struck by his description of the death of Confederate Major General Dorsey Pender.
[T]here still was Pender, whose division was to the Third Corps what Hood’s and Johnson’s were to the First and Second, the hardest-hitting and fiercest of the three. And yet Pender was not there after all: not Pender in person.
Like Heth and Hood, at about the same time yesterday and earlier today, he had been unhorsed by a casual fragment of shell while riding his line to inspect and steady his men for their possible share in the attack then rolling northward. The wound in his leg, though ugly enough, was not thought to be very serious, or at any rate not fatal. But it was. Two weeks later the leg was taken off, infection having set in during the long ambulance ride back to Virginia, and he did not survive the amputation.
“Tell my wife I do not fear to die ” the twenty-nine-year-old North Carolinian said in the course of his suffering, which was intense. “I can confidently resign my soul to God, trusting in the atonement of our Lord Jesus Christ. My only regret is to leave her and our children.”
Confederate Maj. Gen. William Dorsey Pender
No tears for rebels!
Normally I shed no tears when I read of the battle death of a Confederate officer. To my mind, these were men who willingly involved themselves a cause that Ulysses S. Grant called “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”
Grant likely was thinking mostly of the “cause” of tearing apart the United States in order to establish a separate Southern nation. But inextricably interwoven into the cause of Confederate independence was the underlying motivation of protecting the institution of slavery.
[See What Confederates Said Caused the Civil War]
And no man who willingly engaged himself in civil war on the side that had the perpetuation of human slavery as a clearly articulated war aim has any claim on my respect or sympathy.
So, ordinarily I would have passed right by the account of Pender being mortally wounded at Gettysburg with hardly a second thought.
But what about a brother in Christ?
Then I read what Pender said has he lay dying.
I can confidently resign my soul to God, trusting in the atonement of our Lord Jesus Christ.
For me, that changed everything!
With that one statement William Dorsey Pender was transformed in my mind from a man who was devoted to maintaining the worst kind of oppression one human being can visit on another, into a brother in Christ who died proclaiming his unshakeable faith in his Savior – and mine.
Suddenly Dorsey Pender became a real person to me, and not just a symbol of an evil with which our nation is still bedeviled to this day. I had to acknowledge him as, quite literally, a member of my own spiritual family. I can no longer simply dismiss his life – and death – with the judgment, unexpressed but hidden in the recesses of my heart, “he got what he deserved.”
Was Dorsey Pender evil because his cause was evil?
So, now I have to work my way through the question of just how I am to look upon this man who made a choice, in resigning his U. S. Army commission and casting his lot with the Confederacy, that I believe was not just unwise, but in a very real sense, evil. Yet, Christ commands:
Judge not, that you be not judged. Matthew 7:1
Christ’s command is clear: I have no right to make moral judgments on Dorsey Pender as a human being, no matter how wrong I think he was in the choices he made.
I don’t think I’ll ever be willing to laud Pender for the excellent record he compiled in fighting for an evil cause. And I do judge his cause as evil. But can I also judge the man as evil because he fought for it? Can I withhold my sympathy from him and his devastated wife, and a child who would never know his father, because I hate what the man stood for?
What I’m having to face is the fact that, as much as I’d like to despise the men who voluntarily fought for the Confederacy, as a Christian, I can’t. “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone…” (John 8:7)
Ron Franklin
Long before the Germans and Japanese used radio to broadcast propaganda in WW2, the American military tried a more primitive method during the Civil War.
Anyone who has watched their share of old World War II movies is familiar with the way the Japanese attempted to use propaganda to demoralize Americans fighting in the Pacific. “Tokyo Rose” became notorious (undeservedly so – see below*) for radio broadcasts featuring messages designed to sow disenchantment among the GIs.
Siege and capture of Vicksburg
But the Japanese were far from the first to use propaganda directed at enemy soldiers as a tool of war. In fact, one of the first propaganda “broadcasts” actually occurred in the Civil War. It was during the siege by Union forces under General Ulysses S. Grant of the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, Mississippi. An account printed in The Richmond Daily Dispatch of August 5, 1863 tells the story.
A Civil War effort at “broadcasting” propaganda to enemy soldiers
A Southern newspaper correspondent who was in Vicksburg at the time of its surrender was given a copy of a circular printed by the U. S. Navy fleet that was participating in the siege.
On the orders of Admiral David Dixon Porter, the commander of the fleet, 300 of these flyers had been stuffed into a bombshell, which was then fired into Vicksburg. The intent was that when the bombshell exploded it would scatter the flyers, which would then be picked up and read by the Confederate soldiers defending the city. Here’s the message the circulars carried:
TO OUR FRIENDS IN VICKSBURG!
June 28th, 1863: Cave in, boys, and save your lives, which are considered of no value by your officers. There is no hope for relief for you. Sherman with 60,000 men is chasing Joe Johnston. Grant with 90,000 men environs Vicksburg. You can’t escape in these boats, that game is blocked on you. The 12,000 men under McCulloch, on whom you depend to help you out, are retreating back to Harrisburg, well whipped, even Col. H., who hopes to escape in his fast six (6) oared whale boat, can’t come it. Not one soldier of you will be heard of, as connected with the siege of Vicksburg, while your officers will all be spoken of as heroes. Your present form of Government crushes out the hopes of every poor man, distinction is kept for the aristocracy of the South. You have better friends on this side than on that, the friends of freedom.
(signed) Liberty.
A creative effort that was doomed to failure
Unfortunately, this ingenious attempt at propaganda woefully failed to achieve its aim. In fact, it’s doubtful it was ever read at all in Vicksburg; the newspaper correspondent obtained his copy not in the city, but from a U. S. naval officer after the fortress surrendered to General Grant on July 4, 1863.
Beside the inefficiency of the method chosen to “broadcast” the message, there was a more fundamental obstacle that stood in the way of the effectiveness of the plan.
Diarist Dora Miller records that in the wake of the surrender of the city, her lawyer husband was employed by Confederate officers to help make out paroles for the captured prisoners of war. Although she lived through the siege in Vicksburg, Miller was a Northern woman with pro-Union sympathies. She professed herself stunned at what her husband discovered in the course of his work:
“I am surprised and mortified,” she wrote in her diary, “to find that two-thirds of all the men who have signed made their mark; they cannot write. I never thought were was so much ignorance in the South.”
So, even if the propaganda flyers had been successfully rained down on Vicksburg, most Confederate soldiers wouldn’t have been able to read them.
* You can read why “Tokyo Rose” didn’t deserve her infamy at:
The Persecution of Iva Toguri D’Aquino as Tokyo Rose
Here are some of my articles about the siege of Vicksburg:
The Fall Of Vicksburg: Turning Point Of The Civil War
Jefferson Davis Loses His Plantation in the Battle of Vicksburg
150 Years After the Battle, Vicksburg Celebrates the 4th of July
Civil War Siege of Vicksburg Forces Civilians To Hide In Caves
Battle of Vicksburg Facts: The Newspaper Printed on Wallpaper
Ron Franklin
