American Civil War

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The American Civil War was a protracted struggle lasting from 1848 to 1876 typical of contemporary liberal movements in the White Western World.

Contrary to the secession movements in Italy and Prussia, the Confederacy's failed. In the process, Radical Republicans transformed slavery from an economic issue regarding labor and property into the perennial race issue it remains today.

Conversely, Western Europe had already transformed its White slaves into an agrarian peasant class yet retained much more of its hereditary feudal system than the Southern American Planters. Abolishing slavery however removed the major impediment to America's spectacular westward expansion while Europe could only redraw borders.

Despite these differences, bourgeoisie liberal, nationalism drove both sides of the American Civil War as well as Napoleon III, Kossuth, Mazzini, Garibaldi, the Frankfurt Parliament, Bismarck or Cavour, away from traditional aristocracies and toward a liberal capital-labor class system.

The Civil War also mythologized American military social engineering despite the failure of Reconstruction.

It was not until mid 20th Century that agricultural mechanization replaced the agricultural working classes on either continent.

Phases

The Civil War was fought in three phases.

1848-1860: guerilla war fought over the admittance of western territories as either free or slave labor states.

1860-1865: conventional War of the Rebellion fought to determine the fate of the Union and adjunct slavery.

1863-1876: guerilla war fought over restoring the franchise in the former rebel states and their economic rehabilitation.

In Europe, the Revolutions of 1848 brought about the end of the Holy Alliance which had maintained a conservative peace since Napoleon's Wars and successful independence movements from the Austrian Empire in which international intrigue played a greater role than in America's Civil War although not absent.

Background:

The Founders of America’s republic were far less comfortable with slavery than those of the British Empire. The Slave Trade Act of 1794 and the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves, 1807, terminated the foreign slave trade in the new republic. This, however, also increased the value of domestic slaves.

Between ratification of the U.S Constitution in 1789 and the War of Secession, 20 territories had became states of the Union. Kansas, Nevada and West Virginia became states during the Union pacification, West Virginia seceding from Virginia to rejoin the Union. Another 14 would follow.

The Missouri Compromise, 1820, admitted Maine as a free labor state, Missouri slave and restricted slavery beyond 36 ⁰ 30 ′ in the remaining Louisiana Purchase. Spain and France had sanctioned the practice during their tenures. The issue of slavery in the territories seemed settled.

Phase 1: Bleeding Kansas: 1848-1860:

The Mexican Cession brought the issue up again in 1848, however. The Free Soil Party formed to restrict slavery from new territories after neither Whig nor Democrat presidential candidates would commit themselves on the issue during the elections of that year.

Delegates from 9 slave labor states convened at Nashville, Tennessee, to consider secession resulting in passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and Compromise Act of 1850, requiring free labor states to cooperate in capturing runaway slaves.

The Missouri Compromise collapsed entirely upon Passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 which called out territorial plebiscites regarding slavery. Supporting "state soveriegnty" were ambitious Planters, Northern banks and investment houses.

North of the Missouri Comprise, Democratic Party “barnburners” (”Copperheads” during the war) and “Hunkers” demanded restriction of slavery as previously agreed. South of the approximating Mason Dixon Line Democrats demanded expansion, nonnegotiable.

The opposing Whig Party collapsed. Its southern constituents joined either hard line Democrats or dissidents. Northern Whigs joined either the anti-immigrant American Party or the Free Soil Party which became the anti-expansion  Republican Party in 1854 along with radical Abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison.

Leader of the  American Anti-Slavery Society  and editor of “The Liberator” Garrison had been condemning the American Constitution as evil and pro-slavery since 1844, burning copies at public events. Horace Greeley rallied his “New York Tribune” to the anti-slavery cause, publishing articles by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who also interpreted American events for Europe. Negro orator Frederick Douglas chimed in, famous for his 1852 speech, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglas split with Garrison in believing slavery was unconstitutional and that a war of Negro liberation was necessary while Garrison thought that the northern free labor states should secede from the South.

Guerilla warfare erupted in territorial Kansas between “border ruffians” and anti-slavery “free staters” who set up their own constitutions, legislatures and capitals at Lecompton and Topeka, respectively. “Bleeding Kansas” resulted in 56 to possibly 200 political murders including five pro-slavery men John Brown and his gang hacked to death with broadswords in May of 1856 at Pottawatomie Creek.

500 Federal troops arrived in Topeka with artillery in July to disperse the Free State legislature. Thousands of pro-slavery men marched into Kansas that August, defeating Brown at Osawatomie. In 1857 the Supreme Court decided Dred Scott iaw the Fugitive Slave Act and a fragile peace ensued through 1861, other than John Brown’s comically failed ambush in 1859. This, however, presaged his raid on Harper’s Ferry later that year.  Kansas joined the Union as a free labor state after the Confederate states seceded along with Colorado, Nevada and Dakota Territory.

The  election of 1856 sealed the fate of the nation upon the fate of the negro. Incumbent pro-slavery Franklin Pierce lost the Democrat nomination to moderate James Buchanan who favored territorial plebiscites and won the election. Republican John Fremont opposed extending slavery but declined radical Abolition in all states. Millard Fillmore, who’d preceded Pierce in the White House, ran on the anti-immigrant “Know Nothing”, American Party ticket.

“Know Nothings” originated in Baltimore, Maryland which had become ¼ Irish immigrant by 1854, escalating street warfare between Democrat “Rip Raps” and nativist “Plug Uglies” since 1830. “Mob Town” erupted in shootout outs leading into the November elections, 1856 and disputed results. One mob fired cannon at police. .Although Know Nothing Thomas Swann won election as mayor, Fillmore’s defeat likely split away Republican votes leaving Buchanan the winner by a plurality not exceeded until 1904. Immigration would recur as violent labor and culture issues after the Civil War, much as slavery already had.

On the night of October 16^th, 1859, John Brown and 21 accomplices captured the Federal arsenal Harper’s Ferry Arsenal, Virginia. They rounded up some 60 men as hostages but surrendered after Marines breached the armory and killed 10 of Brown’s men making Brown a national celebrity.

By that time, the “underground railroad” had transferred thousands of fugitive slaves through northern territory to Canada in defiance of fugitive slave legislation. In collaboration with Frederick Douglas, Brown had intended to create an armed runaway mountain stronghold with financing by prominent Abolitionists.

Brown’s trial became a grandstand. Henry David Thoreau penned the murderer into martyrdom in “A Plea for Captain Brown”: a 9,202 word diatribe in which some form of “humanity” appears 20 times although “,,,in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not”. Brown was convicted and hung for treason, among other things. Victor Hugo portrayed the trial to Europe for the cataclysmic event was. “John Brown’s Body” became a Union war song and provided the melody for the better known “Battle Hymn of the Republic”. (Black Lives Matter presented themselves as “John Brown” activists during the George Floyd Riots in the summer of 2020.)

The election of 1860 turned upside down.  Former Whigs and Know Nothings formed the Constitutional Union Party, nominating former Tennessee Senator John Bell, determined to compromise on slavery which alienated recent Irish and German immigrants. The Republican Chicago convention nominated Abraham Lincoln, opposed to extension but eschewing Abolition in all states. Democrats remained split along the 1820 Missouri Compromise-Mason Dixon Line. Northerners nominating Stephen Douglas on plebiscite and state sovereignty. Democrats south of the “Mason Dixon Line” nominated Buchanan’s Vice President, John Breckenridge demanding unrestricted slavery. Lincoln won with 180 electoral votes opposed to his collective opponents’ 123 although he won only 39.8% of the popular vote.

By March, 1861, seven states had seceded and ratified a constitution which explicitly called out slavery and its extension into new territories. Four more states would join by June.

Five “Border States” did not secede but continued to recognize slavery and received equivocal treatment into Reconstruction.

Lincoln called up an initial 75,000 militia troops to secure Federal property in the seceding states.

South Carolina shore batteries fired on “Star of the West”, sailing to supply Federal troops in Fort Sumter, January 9 and bombarded Fort Sumter, April 12.

Phase Two: War of the Rebellion 1860-1865

Anticipating a short war, both sides mobilized state militias and called for volunteers. However, the first year ended in frustration. Lincoln imposed a blockade of Confederate ports with only three ships in April 1861. It grew into a fleet of 671 by war’s end. The Confederacy passed a Conscription Act in April, 1862. The Union followed in March, 1863. Both provoked widespread discontent, draft dodging and riots in New York City.. Desertion on both sides averaged from 9 to 15% annually although spiking to over 30%. Privations, ennui and futility accounted for most of it rather than cowardice. Both sides resorted to executing their own deserters but also encouraged deserters from the other. Ranks in the Confederacy became so reduced as to offer amnesty to resuscitate them. “Bounty Jumpers” exploited enlistment bonuses the Union offered.

The magnitude of the disaster became clear as  the armies engaged with weapons from which the only respite was to kill the enemy faster.  26% of the Union’s 2,672,341 troops became casualties while as many as 64% of the Confederacy’s 750,000 to 1,227,890 troops may have succumbed.

At its soulless heart were two small minded cabals who understood each other no more than the futures they portended for the nation. This, however, would not become clear until Reconstruction. Alternative possibilities manifest themselves in that, however vicious the fighting, the soldiers who fought the American Civil War famously bore far less animosity than the bankers, speculators, politicians, pundits, orators and journalists who’d started it.

But this was lost in the course of the military struggle.

After nearly two years of frustration, Lincoln issued the “Emancipation Proclamation” in January, 1863, which transformed failing Northern will into the cult crusade it remains today. It also discouraged European blockade runners and any more opportunists such as Napoleon III in Mexico even though it did not apply to the Border States loyal to the Union.

That July, the Confederacy’s last gambit failed at Gettysburg while Lincoln finally found a general in Ulysses S. Grant who understood the war as a pacification in which the Union could afford the required five casualties for every three Rebels they killed. Rather than lick their wounds in Pennsylvania, Union railroads sped divisions into southern Tennessee. General Tecumseh Sherman massed his blue column to “make Georgia howl”, scorched earth and blockade: the means by which 18.5 million Yankees with commensurate assets finally defeated the will of 5.5 million Rebels in their own territory.

In terms of total population, the South lost % 8.7 while the Union lost % 3.8 of their total populations. (One per cent is usually considered devastating especially to a political order.)

The Army of Northern Virginia fought its last battle pursuing a supply train and surrendered April 9, 1865.

President Lincoln was assassinated six days later.

Reconstruction 1863-1876:

Although Abolitionists had stiffened the war effort, they rendered any consensus on Reconstruction impossible.

“From the beginning of our history the country has been afflicted with compromise. It is by compromise that human rights have been abandoned,” roared Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. House firebrand Thaddeus Stevens demanded nothing less than to “,,, revolutionize Southern institutions, habits and manners,,,or all our blood and treasure have been spent in vain.” "Disenfranchsing Confederates was ",,,th mildeset of al punishments ever inflicted upon traitors."

Slavery, however, was essentially an economic issue regarding labor and property as were the devastated plantations while crushing the rebellion meant rewarding treason with the franchise.

Consequently, Union armies penetrating the South received little guidance regarding the mobs of freedmen crowding the columns beyond the Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862 which simply designated slaves and land war contraband liable to seizure.

Lincoln pursued compensated emancipation and deporting Negroes to little avail other than incurring the calumny of Frederick Douglas who suddenly saw more virtue in the 4th of July than Africa.

(Tsar Alexander II had emancipated Russian serfs in 1862 via subsidized loans.)

In December, 1863, President Lincoln finally issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, which permitted Rebel states to form new governments once 10% swore an oath of loyalty to the Union and abolished slavery, leaving the freedmen’s’ status ambiguous: the “ten per cent plan”.

Congress retaliated with the Wade-Davis Bill in 1864 which would have allowed male freedmen but disenfranchised anyone who could not take the “ironclad oath” to have never supported the Confederacy, which was mostly everyone else other than "scalawag" wartime dissidents and draft dodgers.

and likely extending military occupation for generations since power would have resided in freedmen and.

Lincoln vetoed the bill and won the election that year, running on a National Union ticket with Vice president Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee War Democrat of yeoman stock and the first military governor Lincoln had appointed following the capture of Nashville in 1862.

In January, 1865, Congress ratified the 13^th Amendment abolishing slavery in all the territories and states

Military Reconstruction

By this time, the army had relocated freedmen into over 100 camps under Field Order No. 15 which distributed about 400,000 acres of confiscated land to freedmen in 40 acre plots. Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill in March 1865, extending the land redistribution policy throughout the South.

Lincoln’s assassination that April left Johnson in the lurch for policy but without Lincoln's mantle of victory.

President Johnson tried to end Reconstruction without further intrusions as Lincoln intended, appointing sympathetic governors from among old acquaintances, much as Lincoln had appointed Johnson, and ordering the Freedmen’s Bureau to cease land redistribution.

Of Yeoman stock, Johnson understood that it was the Planters, 2% of the South's population, who had owned the rich "black belt" plantation lands and the slaves which worked it, ran the state governments, passed the articles of secession and had run the Confederacy.

Planters had imposed poll taxes that spared he landed rich but underfunded public services, education and transportation, while White artisans could not compete with slaves trained on the plantations. Little of a middle class had developed from Yeoman farmers relegated to subprime land.

Revolutions in 1789, 1830 and1848 Europe had forced liberal economic and political changes upon its landed aristocracy. Yankee entrepreneurs were even farther along, having thrown off absentee British aristocrats, 1776-1781.

Comprising 85% of the Sothern population, Lincoln, Johnson and Grant understood advancing the Yeoman as important as the Negro less the Planters recreate a de facto ante-bellum status quo. On this, the Radical Republicans weren’t entirely wrong but Radicals saw Reconstruction in terms of nothing but racial equality and disenfranchising Whites as the means.

The devastated plantations offered New York City speculators lucrative investment opportunities which would finance either approach. However, staple crop production required disciplined, gang labor, which neither understood as anything but the contemporary European peasant class, rejected during the Revolution. In providing a substitute, slavery had perhaps done its worst mischief.

Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 which enfranchised the freedmen but Johnson vetoed it. (The act presaged the equal protection clause of the 14^th Amendment, proposed the same year and ratified in1868.) Congress overrode the veto only to discover that it apportioned more representatives to the former slave states than had the “Three Fifths’ clause of the Constitution. Having halted land redistribution, however, Johnson had inadvertently restored the ante-bellum Planter status. While the politicians wrangled with unintended consequences, Union armies ran into the realities.

New Orleans  was the South’s largest city with ante-bellum port connections to New York City and London. Of predominantly White pro-Union Whig merchants, bankers and professionals, half were foreign born and most of French ancestry. So were most Negroes which included Planters hoping to keep their slaves. However, a “%10 per cent plan” convention overthrew the “aristocratic” Planter class. Composed of the common classes as were radical European movements of the time, the new government promulgated progressive labor reforms, yet petitioned Congress to compensate former slave holders and advocated expelling Negroes from the entire state. The military governors were able to extend the franchise but at the expense of exacerbating contention.

Port Royal fell to the Union Navy in November 1861, whereupon the entire White population fled and the slaves, comprising %80 of the population, sacked homes and cotton gins. Then, they returned to subsistence farming their plantation plots from which wages proved no inducement to work the plantation fields. Ante-bellum slaves here had pursued their leisure after completing daily labors much like European peasants working under the corvee’. The “,,, promise of reward and advancement” failed to “,,,internalize a market orientation” as Yankee speculators expected nor replace coercion. By 1865, they were selling out in small plots.

More generally, Union armies simply enforced plantation discipline to relieve refugee predicaments but, in lieu of slavery, imposed yearly labor contracts which offered %5 of proceeds or $3 per month plus subsistence. Slaves could refuse but the army punished vagrancy and enforced compliance via a pass system. By the fall of Vicksburg, 50,000 laborers ended up on 1,5000 Louisiana plantations working for the government or contractors . At that point, contrabands from the Mississippi River area inundated army camps. Disease broke out and deaths escalated. The army leased plantations to loyal "scalawag" Southerners or, mostly, Northern "carpetbagger" speculators operating on labor contracts.

Congress attempted to take charge in March, 1867, passing the Command of the Army and Tenure of Office Acts which required the Commander in Chief to channel his orders through the amenable Ulysses Grant and protected him in office along with Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, who opposed Johnson’s lenient policy. Johnson dismissed Stanton within the letter of the law but Grant surrendered the office when Congress challenged his appointment and then impeached Johnson in what turned into political theatre since policy wasn’t relevant but had everything to do with it.

Ben Wade, who would succeed Johnson, was sufficiently Radical on Reconstruction but was also pro-labor on high tariffs and soft money, rendering him odious as Johnson’s for different reasons.

Despite Johnson’s appointees however, Republicans began dominating Southern conventions by May while just what Johnson had been impeached for eluded Stevens and Sumner as well as Johnson’s defense. Finally acquitting Johnson by a single vote discredited both sides and Grant emerged the de facto winner. The Republican nomination for president in 1868 was his.

With Johnson finished, Democrats picked the colorless Horatio Seymour, New York’s wartime governor who’d addressed draft rioters as “my friends”. Demanding repayment of the war debt in “sound money” rather than the greenback script Lincoln had printed sufficed for New York City financiers, none the less. Race, however, was the critical issue. Even Rothschild’s August Belmont understood that. So did Seymour’s running mate, Frank Blair. Calling out Darwin’s, “Origin of the Species” much as race realists have ever since its publication, 1859, Blair would use the army, if need be, to disperse Southern Republicans and restore White rule.

Although a War Democrat, Grant had enforced Emancipation and raised Black troops which pleased Radical Republicans although he’d also faithfully executed Johnson’s policy which pleased moderates. More than anything, Grant shared Lincoln’s mantle of victory and determination to reconcile. He’d fought alongside Confederate officers in the War with Mexico. Grant’s failing was to underestimate the financiers who’d seen slavery in the territories as investment opportunity and nothing else as anything else ever since. Paradoxically, it was Blair who lined up investors behind Grant, threatening another war. “Let us have peace” had the golden ring but it was Grant who’d use the army.

Southern Republicans weren’t all they appeared. Negroes and Scalawags were fiat Republicans but without the Yeomen, not a majority. White voter suppression backed by Negro troops proved a witless substitute for the political acuity required to run the rapids of upcountry Unionism, retrenched plantation parishes, Scalawags and Carpetbaggers, freedmen and freemen, spoils and legitimate economic interests. Republicans had won elections but filled statehouses with opportunists sitting upon bayonet constitutions. Renunciation of slavery and secession had not been concession enough which, as Johnson feared, drove the humiliated Yeoman back to the Planters and into another fight for the states’ rights.

Indeed, having forced Negro suffrage upon the South, Congress left the issue to state conventions in the North: another iteration of the Emancipation Proclamation’s double standard.

(Foner, 341-5  ) Southern Democrats withheld employment and credit while social clubs turned into political militias intimidating Republicans of both races. Johnson appointees declined to intervene. Republicans abandoned their campaigns in Georgia and Louisiana and betrayed pro-Union Whites elsewhere, pandering to the Negro. Grant won all but eight states but only 53% of the popular vote with Texas, Virginia and Mississippi excluded. Grant’s first legislation, the Public Credit Act, pledged to repay war debt in gold

(Fonber, 347-8) Southern state houses turned on their Scalawag and Negro constituents, offering economic reforms and white rule which proved lame. Others conspired with Democrats, impeached Reconstruction governors amidst fistfights and walkouts while others impeached house appointees in retaliation. ‘We must keep together, scalawags, carpetbaggers and niggers,”

Republicans couldn’t do much for plantation laborers who, in turn, insisted upon subsistence farming land they didn’t own nor restore order for the Planters who owned it, free labor contracts notwithstanding.

(Foner 425-  )

By 1870, the Ku Klux Klan, Knights of the White Camilla and White Brotherhood were firmly entrenched in every Southern as the partisan arm of the southern Democrat Party operating under regional Planter authorities for the common goal of liquidating Republican Reconstruction governments. Violence was directed at Republican leaders indiscriminant of race as well as parades, rallies and other political events including. Restoring order superseded became more the concern than it was in 1865.