Black Confederates at the Siege of Spanish Fort (Mobile Campaign 1865)

[matthew mckeon]

Dear Rebprof,

As always a thoughtful post.

To be sure, history is "messy" and inconsistent and complicated, since it is may up of people, who are messy and inconsistent and complicated, and change over time.

A civic religion was created in the decades following the War, a common set of attitudes that allowed the sections to reunite. The elements of the Southern myth, or "lost cause" include that the war was over some other object than slavery. The Northern myth includes the creation of a Christ like Lincoln among others. The main losers in this common mythology were African Americans, forced into Jim Crowism in the South, and more genteel de facto segregation in most places in the North.

Was the Civil War a "good war?" No war is good, but can have good results. The good result of the CW is the end of American slavery and the permanent weakening of the racist beliefs that rationalized it.

There isn't a real controversy about the role that blacks played in the Union or Confederate armies. Blacks in the Confederate army had the roles that had in the South: slaves, laborers, servants etc. Blacks in the Union forces, started at this point, but progressed to something different, and greater.

What was the Confederacy, or rather why was the Confederacy? If its armed forces included, as the SCV stated in their "fact sheet" 80000 blacks, by implication, soldiers, its a different place than if those 80000 were slaves, servants, teamsters etc.

Because people are messy, inconsistent, complicated and all that, then there are cases, which nobody has denied, of armed blacks in the CS forces. While a worthy subject for study, to claim that they were the equivalent of the 180,000 black troops fighting to end slavery is to misunderstand the actual situation.

Given the ugly instances of discrimination and racism displayed by the North and Union forces during the war years, a self-congratulationary tone is out of place. But the country was in a different, and with the benefit of hindsight, a better place after the war than before.

[RebProf]

The country could have arrived at the same place without a war. Indeed, ending slavery without a war would have left the nation in a better place because there would have been no bitterness from a useless war. This is the burden the Abolitionists have to shoulder. They demanded an immediate end to slavery without seeking a peaceful resolution. Every other western nation ended slavery without a war because their abolitionists were open to compromise. Only here did the moral absolutism of a few drive a nation into war. The argument that the ends justifies the means is a long-since discredited one and I cannot accept it as a rationalization for the conduct or the outcome of the Civil War. We did not need a war to end slavery and good leadership could have avoided a war.

If the Northern goal was a progressive (sacred?) one then their conduct of the war sullied the cause which the North promoted. But, if the North fought not to advance some uplifting cause but to defend a national self-interest then the war crimes of the Union army are understandable. Sherman's "Memoirs" say "war is cruelty, and you cannot refien it" Sherman goes on to say that God played no part in the conflict. "When preachers clamor, don't join in, but know that was, like the thunderbolt, follows its own laws and turns not aside even if the beautiful, the virtuous, and charitable stand in its path." We can recognize that the war kept the nation together but I do not think we can make an argument for the war achieving moral goals.

The notion that America is the "indespensible nation" is popular and accounts for the way in which academics and Civil War buffs tend to join in "The Battle Cry of Freedom" with such gusto. But this is a false idea. War may be a defensive necessity but it is never a civilizing exercise. It is especially true that a war in the name of morality brutalizes all. Such brutality did not, does not, and will not, leave us better off than we were before.

[unionblue]

RebProf,

I disagree.

I disagree that American slavery was about to disapear, die out, fade away or in any other way, peaceably depart from this nation. In my opinion.

I disagree that I or anyone else have invented a modern-day agenda concerning the service of blacks, free or slave, in the Confederate armed forces. The modern-day agenda I speak of is of those in this day and age who would use the service of a small number of blacks in the Confederate forces as soldiers, somehow or in someway diminishes the idea that the primary cause of the war was the South's secession over the institution of slavery. In my opinion.

I disagree that anyone on this thread, myself included, have denied that some blacks, free and slave, served as soldiers with the Confederate forces.

I disagree that the 'muddled thinking' you mention, comes from the idea of a NeoAbolitionist effort to deny the fact that blacks served in the Confederate forces or to convert the war into some mystical meaning. I am more apt to agree with Matthew's version in his above post concerning the 'sins' of both sides after the war.

I disagree that the violence and destruction that took place in the South during the war even remotely approaches what one would consider today in the catagory of war crimes. Compared with other conflicts in our own 20th century and the Hundred Years War, the Civil War can hardly compare. In my own opinion.

There are other parts of your previous two posts I disagree with, but these were the highlights. I do not feel that I have 'stood upon a hill' and claimed any moral high ground. I feel that I have simply stated historical fact on the matter of black Confederates in an overall context that gives a more accurate, complete historical view of the question. In my own opinion.

However, I agree completely with your one statement. An understanding of the war can be pursued only by abandoning the baggage of one's own agenda and confronting the reality of a complex, often condratictory, past.

Again, it is my own opinion, as a great man once said, "History is not history unless it is the truth."

Sincerely,
Unionblue

[johan_steele]

Neil & Matthew just put it far better and far more politely than I can anymore. The Lost Cause is/was just that: a Lost Cause. Those who I have seen twisting things... support the Lost Cause agenda. If Neo-abolishinist = a belief that slavery was not only wrong (and in fact inherently evil) but a central cause of Secession and the American Civil War... then I will gladly accept that label.

"I disagree that the violence and destruction that took place in the South during the war even remotely approaches what one would consider today in the catagory of war crimes. Compared with other conflicts in our own 20th century and the Hundred Years War, the Civil War can hardly compare. In my own opinion." Neil, this is not opinion but fact; especially if one is capable of actually studying history.