1861: The Civil War Awakening

Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening; 2011, Alfred A. Knopf, 382 pp.  plus 78 pp of notes

Historian and journalist Adam Goodheart provides a well reasoned and well documented history of events immediately preceding the Civil War.  This is a must read book for Civil War aficionados.  I found the significance of events surrounding the attack on Fort Sumter to be especially enlightening as well as the South’s frustration with the 1860 census results and what those results would mean in the long term for their “peculiar institution.” 

Pg. 17: Major Anderson’s December 26, 1860 move from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter is mostly ignored in historical accounts of the period and the story usually begins four months later, when the Confederate batteries at Charleston finally opened fire.  But, in fact, this mile-long journey to Fort Sumter was the opening scene of the war to follow.  Anderson had vacated a position indefensible from a land based attack to take up a position much more defensible from any direction; Sumter was a better, not a great, position.  Now it became a problem of provisioning the garrison.  On April 6, 1861 Lincoln wisely informed Governor Pickens of South Carolina that vessels were on their way with provisions—but not arms or reinforcements—for Anderson’s men.  Furthermore, barring an attack by the Confederates, Lincoln pledged no future military reinforcement of Sumter.  Lincoln thereby forced the Confederates’ hand: either they would bow to federal authority, or they would unleash their artillery on tugboats that had come to relive the starving men, becoming aggressors in the eyes of the entire world.  And, on April 12^th they did just that.

Ironically, the Confederates’ attack on and swift victory at Fort Sumter turned out to be their worst strategic blunder of the war, indeed, it may have cost the South its independence.  It is difficult to see what the rebels would have lost if they had allowed Major Anderson and his tiny force to be provisioned and remain indefinitely.  Indeed, they could have couched their forbearance as a humanitarian gesture, a token of their peaceful intentions that might have won them allies not just in the North but also— all-importantly — among the nations of Europe.  Certainly leaving Sumter alone would have bought them more time: time to more fully organize and equip the South’s armies; time to establish all the ordinary apparatus—a postal service, a stable national currency, a judicial system—that serve to make government a stable fact rather than a speculative figment. Both to its own citizens and to the rest of the world, the Confederate States of America might have come to seem like a fait accompli.  Instead, Davis, his cabinet, and his generals had only a perfunctory discussion before deciding to shell the fort.  As Lincoln told a confidant: “They attacked Sumter—it fell, and thus, did more service than it otherwise could.”  The attack on Sumter enraged and unified the North.

  Pg. 65:  The founders of the U.S. expected slavery to be gradually and peacefully eliminated.  It was not to be.  Slaveholding had become woven so tightly into the South’s culture and economy as to be almost inextricable.  Even its foes acknowledged this.  In 1858, Lincoln himself noted in a speech that the region’s four million slaves were valued at no less than two billion dollars.  (Most recent historians have put the figure even higher.)  This was an absolutely mind-boggling sum, greater than the value of all the nation’s factories and railroads, North and South combined.  Any scheme of compensated emancipation would consume an impractically huge portion of the federal budget (then about 75 million dollars annually) for at least thirty years.  So, many Southerners fiercely opposed any limit on slavery’s expansion: their stake was not merely in their individual holdings but in the system and market as a whole. (Much like today's positions on ethanol or unlimited free use of water from aquifers by the agricultural community).

Pg. 68:  Many fantastic proposals of compromise were suggested by, supposedly, reputable people.  General Scott, for instance, laid out a detailed plan that would amicably divide the entire country into four “new Union’s,” with their capitals at Albany, New York; Columbia, South Carolina; Alton, Illinois; and some unspecified point on the Pacific coast.  Alarmingly, this was the man in charge of defending the nation’s borders.

Pg. 129:  The Corwin Amendment is a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution passed on March 2, 1861, in the form of House (Joint) Resolution. It would forbid subsequent attempts to amend the Constitution to empower the Congress to "abolish or interfere" with the "domestic institutions" of the states, including "persons held to labor or service" (a reference to slavery).

Ohio Republican Representative Thomas Corwin offered the amendment in an attempt to forestall the secession of Southern states.  However, the newly formed Confederate States of America was committed to independence and so it ignored the Corwin Amendment.  It is interesting that this proposed amendment is still pending before the state legislatures for ratification, because Congress submitted it to the state legislatures without a deadline. Since the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery was adopted in 1865, the Corwin Amendment becomes a moot point.

Pg. 122:  Fredrick Law Olmstead (designer of Central Park) published a widely read series of articles and books recounting his experiences as a native New Englander traveling through the slave states.  What mostly disturbed him were the habits that slavery bred among whites, “habits which, in the North, belong only to bullies and ruffians.”  In Charleston, he found “police machinery, such as you never find in towns under free government: citadels, sentries, passports, grape-shotted cannon, and daily public whippings.” Southern whites, he said, ridiculed the very idea of democracy.  Their brutally hierarchical society, oppressive to poor whites as well as blacks, made the ruling class not just arrogant and backward but indolent, lacking all of the practical industry and capacity for personal observation and reflection” that many Northerners cultivated. (Any man with 20 or more slaves did not have to serve in the Confederate army).

Pg. 159:  In the entire country east of the Mississippi, the United States Army numbered fewer than four thousand men—several thousand fewer than the rebel forces at Charleston alone.  Most of the national military was stationed in forts along the trails of the Far West and the Pacific coast.  In all, the troops totaled just over seventeen thousand enlisted men and officers, many of whom could be expected to defect to the South once hostilities began.  Yet, although it is often said today that half the U.S. Army resigned in 1861 to join the Confederacy, this is untrue.  Very few enlisted men in peacetime came from the South.  Only twenty-six privates out of all sixteen thousand ended up defecting to the rebels—compared to more than three hundred out of the thousand or so men in the officer corps.

Pg. 222:  Maintaining control of the legislature, or at least staying even, had become the engine behind the great game of compromise between the slave and non-slave states.  By late 1850s, however, the game had seemed to tilt decisively toward the North.  Eighteen sixty was a federal census year, and the results had begun coming in early that autumn—with exquisitely poor timing, as far as Southern paranoia was concerned.  Preliminary figures confirmed that immigration and westward expansion were shifting the country’s centers of population and balance of power.  Since the last count, in 1850, the North’s population had increased an astonishing 41 percent, while the South’s had grown only 27 percent.  States like Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois would each be gaining multiple seats in Congress; Virginia, South Carolina, and Tennessee would be losing some.  The statistical center of national population had shifted for the first time not only west of the original thirteen states but also from slave territory into free: from Virginia to Ohio. 

Pg. 320:  Lincoln told Hay that “I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us of proving that popular government is not an absurdity.  We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose.  If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”  (This was in 1861, long before his speech at Gettysburg in 1863).

Pg. 359:  Indeed, secession would render democracy’s survival impossible, not just in the Northern states but, ironically, in the Southern ones, too: what besides force could keep Virginia or Louisiana in the Confederacy as soon as they found themselves in the minority on some important national issue?

Pg. 341:  Although it was the position of the U.S. government to not disturb the institution of slavery where it already was entrenched, the position of General Butler to keep slaves as contraband began to prevail alongside the official position of not disturbing the peculiar institution.  After all, if slaves were being used to erect barricades, position guns, etc., they were surely contraband of war.  Within weeks after the first contrabands arrival at Fortress Monroe, slaves were reported flocking to the Union lines just about anywhere there were Union lines: in northern Virginia, along the James, on the Mississippi, in Florida.  A veritable exodus even from loyal slave states such as Maryland was said to be taking place. 

Pg. 344:   A telling fact: the price of slaves was already dropping precipitously.  By mid-1861 it had fallen to half or even a third of what it had been the year before.  The “property” that slave-holders were fighting for was now not only less reliable (you never knew when it might run off in the night) but less valuable.