“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” British writer L.P. Hartley
“Being woke is like a magic moral time machine, where you judge everyone [who lived in the past] against what you would have done in 1066, and you always win. Presentism is just a way to congratulate yourself about being better than George Washington because you have a gay friend and he didn’t. But if he were alive today, he would too. And if you were alive then, you wouldn’t.” Bill Maher, TV talk show host.
I am the proud descendant of Confederate cavalrymen—and I am glad the Confederacy lost. Abraham Lincoln, shortly after his famous debates with Stephen Douglas, described slavery as a cancer. The Civil War cut that cancer out of the South and started in on a long path to healing. The war was a blessing, in that it ended slavery quickly. I’ve read that the Founding Fathers hoped to put slavery on the path to eventual extinction. Well, that was great for the Fathers, but not the slaves. No one asked THEM if they were willing to wait, in chains, for slavery to die off gradually, eventually, some day…
But, I am confident that, if I had lived in a Southern state in early 1861, I would have fought for the Confederacy. Even if I loved the Union and loathed slavery. Here are some reasons why.
I would have feared a slave insurrection. Thirty years earlier, in 1861, Nat Turner led a slave revolt that killed not only slaveowners and overseers, but white women and children, too. In October of 1859, John Brown’s aborted attempt to start a guerilla war and free slaves in Virginia, and his subsequent execution, caused a torrent of rejoicing in the North. This is from Rebel Yell, a biography of Stonewall Jackson written by S.C. Gwynne, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize:
The day he was executed, church bells had tolled in many Northern towns and cities; sermons were preached on the purity and correctness of his motives, and people all over the North prayed for the soul of this martyr to liberty…Henry David Thoreau called him a “crucified hero”…Everyone was suddenly talking about the grandeur and nobility of the man, the rightness of what he had done.
The reaction of Southerners to such Northern expressions of sympathy was horror mixed with disbelief that their brethren could possibly wish upon them the fate that Brown had planned…He had, after all, intended to arm slaves and set them free, which presumably meant setting them upon their masters, which meant that people in Connecticut and Massachusetts were now endorsing the violent deaths of white men, women and children all over the South.
Jackson, in a letter written in January 1861, said that it appeared that the “free states” were willing to “excite our slaves to servile insurrection in which our Families will be murdered without quarter or mercy.” As Nat Turner’s white victims were.
If I were a white Southerner in 1861, even if I was an abolitionist, I might have started to think that it was a bad idea to remain in a Union where residents in other states had apparently decided that MY family and I were collateral damage that THEY were willing to accept (from a safe distance, of course), in order to end slavery.
I would have realized that I was part of a community. David McCullouch, in the first episode of the landmark Civil War PBS series, said that most Union and Confederate soldiers had never gone more than a hundred miles from their homes. Most hadn’t even gone a few miles.
It wasn’t easy to just pick up and relocate in 1861. There were no planes, interstate highways or cars. You couldn’t work remotely. You needed to be part of a community, and be accepted by that community. (Unless you wanted to live as a hermit).
My great-grandfather (a Confederate cavalryman) and grandfather were subsistence farmers south of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. My mom tells me about how they needed to work with other farmers to tend their fields and harvest their crops. They sold meat and produce to local stores and restaurants to help pay their bills. If their neighbors and the community had shunned them, they would have been in a world of hurt.
In 1862 and 1863, there was intense community pressure to join the Confederate forces. Duty called! If any community perceives you as a shirker, there are consequences. I would have felt intense pressure to make the same sacrifices my friends and neighbors were making, and to not let them and my community down. If my friends and neighbors were enlisting, I probably would have felt compelled to enlist, too.
I wouldn’t have wanted to go to jail. The Confederate government instituted universal conscription in early 1862. Every white male from ages 18 to 35 was liable to serve, unless they had an exemption from military service or provided a substitute to serve in their place. Most subsistence farmers or average workers couldn’t afford a substitute and didn’t work in occupations (e.g., doctor, arms factory worker, overseer) that qualified for an exemption. Many Southern men enlisted because they didn’t want to be conscripted. (Conscripts had a poor reputation in many towns in the early years of the war. All the proper, patriotic men enlisted, don’t you know?!)
I might not have taken kindly to being invaded. Even if I’d supported the Union, I probably wouldn’t have wanted armies marching through my community and my home. Thousands of marching men and horses, even if they’re not shooting at anyone, tend to tear up the countryside and take all the food and farm animals. They cause lots of damage, even if they don’t intend to. And, in 1864, the Union Army very, very much intended to do lots of damage throughout the South. (Georgia, the Shenandoah Valley, etc…) I can imagine taking up arms to try and stop that.
Remember Shelby Foote’s antecdote from the Civil War PBS miniseries, where Union officers asked a Confederate prisoner why he was fighting the war. His response: “I’m fighting because you’re down here!”
It’s easy to dismiss Confederates as having simply fought for slavery. It’s also lazy and shallow thinking. And it’s presentism. In 1861, I would have been a product of the times I lived in, the place where I lived and the attitudes and beliefs of my community. Undoubtedly I wouldn’t have had an openly gay friend, or been an open abolitionist, in Virginia—would you have?
Donald Smith grew up in Richmond and graduated from the University of Virginia. His mother was born in a log cabin that her grandfather (a former Confederate cavalryman) built near Lexington. Family members still live there today.
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“ It is said that slavery is all we are fighting for. Even if this were true, which we deny, it is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely a pretense to establish a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.” Major General Patrick R. Cleburne
I always thought people foolish who thought 94% of Southerners would fight so that 6% of their people could keep slaves. Rebels fought because the South was invaded, and so many Southerners of Scots Irish descent, were notorious fighters, just men who wanted to be left alone, but would fight to the death to defend their homes & families. Slaves meant nothing to them.
Propaganda ain’t nothin new, comrades, & the press has always been prejudiced and crooked.
The idea is really unknowable. You are talking about what you would have done, were you an adult in 1861, having been reared in Southern culture since the 1840s, or even earlier, and all of that would have shaped you in ways we can try to imagine, but that’s about it.
Yet you are writing for an audience which has been shaped by the culture of the latter half of the twentieth and early part of the twenty-first centuries. Everything you know today is wholly different from what your ancestors knew. In 2024, slavery is universally acknowledged as evil; in 1861, it was simply the natural order of things. In 2024, we can travel across the United States, and the world; in 1861, most people never left their home state, and only rarely traveled more than 15 miles from their homes.
There’s an unconsidered part of the whole notion of ‘if I were alive in 1861,’ and that is that most people couldn’t have been. My mother was from Maine, while my father was born in Hawai’i. They only met because both of them were serving in Tokyo during the Korean War. Even if my parents could be magically transported back to 1840, a time in which I could have been of military age in 1861, there’s no way they would ever have met. My mother’s family were in America beginning in 1620, but my father’s family didn’t arrive in Mau’i until the 1870s.
Southerners fought for the South, and Northerners fought for the North, primarily because those were their homes. How many people in Massachusetts really cared about slavery, certainly to the point of being willing to die to end it?