From The Life of Johnny Reb

thea_447 · #1 11-15-2004, 01:29 PM

FROM The Life of Johnny Reb, p 15-17, by Bell Irvin Wiley, LSU Press, 1943

CHAPTER I

OFF TO THE WAR

THE man who was to be Johnny Reb was “rarin’ for a fight” in the spring of 1861. “So impatient did I become for starting,” wrote a young enthusiast from Arkansas, “that I felt like ten thousand pins were *****ing me in every part of the body, and started off a week in advance of my brothers.” 1 Countless other men throughout the South showed a similar eagerness to be off to the war. They were urged on by many different motives. Some were incited to arms by a deep-seated hatred of the North which had been accumulating from the time of their earliest recollections. Antipathy aroused by Northern opposition to admitting Missouri as a slave state had been increased by recurrent threats to levy a “tribute” on the agricultural South in the form of a high protective tariff; further aggravation had come from the attempt of Northern congressmen to bar Southerners from the fruits of the Mexican War by closing western territory to slavery. And in the fifties the Negro question came to be the highest provocation of all.

Most Southerners were convinced that Northerners were utterly un-reasonable in their attitude toward the “peculiar institution,” and in support of this opinion they advanced these charges: The Yankees refused to live up to the Federal law requiring the return of fugitive slaves; they closed their eyes to the beneficent aspects of slavery; they made heroes of such fantasies as Uncle Tom, and chose to look upon Christian slaveholders as Simon Legrees; they tolerated monsters like William Lloyd Garrison; they contributed money and support to John Brown, whose avowed purpose was the wholesale murder of Southern women and children, and when he was legally executed for his crimes they crowned his vile head with martyrdom. Yankees, moreover, were considered a race of hypocrites: While they were vilifying Southerners for enslaving blacks, they were keeping millions of white factory workers in a condition far worse than slavery; while denouncing Southern wickedness, they were advocating free love and all sorts of radicalisms. All in all, Yankee society was a godless and grasping thing.

So long as Northern Democrats worked with Southerners to hold the more radical elements in check, there was hope that the South might secure something like her just due under the Union. But in the late fifties there was wide defection among Northern Democrats on the slavery issue, and a rise to political power of the Republican Party, made up of elements deemed hostile to Southern institutions. At the head of this new party was Abraham Lincoln, a man regarded by many Southerners as the epitome of unreason and vulgarity. The election of Lincoln to the presidency seemed to spell the doom of Southern security under the Union: States’ rights would be trampled under foot tariff rates would increase beyond endurance; slavery would be restricted to the narrowest limits that fanatical abolitionists could impose, or done away with altogether.

Non-slaveholding whites of the South were told by their favorite editors and politicians that emancipation would be followed by measures to enforce social equality of the races, and the specter of their women being jostled on the street by “big black •••••••” was too fearful for contemplation. There were of course many moderates in the South, including some of the most influential planters, who wanted to give the Lincoln government a trial, even after South Carolina seceded. Not that they doubted the right of secession. The question was rather one of expediency. But Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for volunteers took the ground from under these middle-of-the-roaders.

The issue now was whether to fight with or against secessionists, and this left no choice for most Southerners. Hatred for the North received a tremendous boost from the prevailing agitation in favor of secession. The fire-eating element made up largely of country editors, preachers, lawyers, and politicians-on-the-make, was the most vocal and eloquent. Recrimination and name-calling in private conversation, in public meeting, in editorial columns, from professor’s desk and country pulpit, produced a tide of emotion in the early months of 1861 that reached all sections and all classes. Its effect is illustrated by the fulmination of an overseer on a plantation forty miles below New Orleans. On June 13, 1861, he wrote in his journal:

“This day is set a part By presedent Jefferson Davis for fasting & praying owing to the Deplorable condishion ower Southern country is In My Prayer Sincerely to God is that Every Black Republican in the Hole combined whorl Either man woman o chile that is opposed to negro slavery as it existed in the Souther confederacy shal be trubled with pestilents & calamitys of all Kinds & Dragout the Balance of there existence in misray & Degradation with scarsely food & rayment enughf to keep sole & Body togeather and 0 God I pray the to Direct a bullet or a bayonet to pirce the Hart of every northern soldier that invades southern Soile & after the Body has Rendered up its Traterish Sole gave it a trators reward a Birth In the Lake of Fires & Brimstone my honest convicksion is that Every man wome & chile that has gave aide to the abolishionist are fit Subjects for Hell I all so ask the to aide the Sothern Confedercy in maintaining Ower rites & establishing the confederate Government Believing in this case the prares from the wicked will prevailith much Amen.”