Slave Auction at Richmond, Virginia, 1856, from The Illustrated London News (Library of Congress)
I’m glad I am not a social studies teacher in Florida, because the standards adopted by the state board of education cover 216 pages and touch on a dizzying variety of topics and do so in a very matter-of-fact way. I imagine the average student will feel like the little girl who began her report on a book about dolphins with, “This book told me more about dolphins than I really wanted to know.”
The bit about slaves learning useful skills is in there, and it’s quite true. Some enslaved people in some situations were sometimes able to learn skills (carpentry, shoemaking, gardening, cooking, etc.) that sometimes allowed them to benefit their own families and sometimes even to earn a little money.
That’s an interesting fact, but it pales in comparison to the essentially brutal and exploitative nature of American black slavery. If you are going to stipulate some details and not others, you will end up with a very distorted view of history.
The standards seem determined to portray African slavery in the 13 colonies and the new nation in a larger context in which forced labor was just another aspect of life. That’s true as far as it goes, but seems to fall far short of the American exceptionalism also advocated by Florida standards.
Students should be taught that slavery was a horrible system, that it was the underlying cause of a war that nearly destroyed the Union, and that we are still living with its after-effects today. The details can be negotiated, but the big picture needs to be presented clearly.
“Playing Old Soldier” by Winslow Homer — this boy is faking it, but for many tens of thousands of Civil War soldiers, illness was all too real. (Boston Museum of Fine Arts)
Measles was typically the first disease to rip through Civil War encampments, as country boys were exposed to diseases they never saw at home. Then diarrhea and dysentery took hold as a result of rather casual sanitary arrangements. Something like ten percent of such cases in the Confederate army ended in death, and many other soldiers were left permanently weakened by persistent gastrointestinal maladies. Federal soldiers called diarrhea “the quickstep.” Malaria was also a problem, particularly along the seacoasts. Typhoid fever from bad water was a constant menace. Robert E. Lee’s army suffered a virulent outbreak of smallpox in late 1862.
On the whole, I’d guess that diarrhea was the single most prevalent disease among soldiers on both sides in the war.
Many more men, on both sides, died of disease than battle.
Is it possible that the United States could have abolished slavery in a gradual manner that would have prevented a war?
Slaves picking cotton on a plantation in Georgia, 1858.
One huge factor overwhelmed any progress towards gradual emancipation: cotton.
By 1860, the Southern states of the U.S. produced most of the cotton grown in the world. Of the 5.4 million bales of cotton produced in the U.S. in 1860, 1.6 million went to mills all over the country, most of them in New England. Some 3.8 million bales were sent abroad; the U.S. provided 77 percent of the cotton consumed by textile mills in Britain.
I can’t find a number for the value of U.S. cotton production, but plainly it was in the millions of dollars, much of which poured into the hands of the plantation owners who built those grand houses you saw in “Gone with the Wind.” Cotton profits stocked cellars with fine wines and libraries with old books from South Carolina to Texas. The upper South was less dependent on cotton but participated in the industry as well by selling surplus slaves to the booming plantations in the cotton belt.
Northern businessmen profited as well, both from the textile business and from the financing and shipping of exports.
Cotton was the world’s largest industrial enterprise, and it depended on slave labor.
Some people suggest that the abolition of slavery in the British Empire (in the West Indies and southern Africa) could have been a template for American compensated emancipation. The British government committed twenty million pounds (then worth about 100 million dollars) to buy the freedom of about 800,000 slaves. The U.S. had four million enslaved people in a more vibrant economy, so presumably the cost could have been on the order of half a billion dollars at least and possibly several times that much. The federal government at the time had total revenues of only thirty or forty million dollars a year. No such pot of gold was available.
The last serious discussion of emancipation in the South before the Civil War was in the Virginia legislature in 1832, in the wake of the Nat Turner slave uprising in 1831. There was serious interest in trying to get rid of slavery once and for all, but no one could figure out how to pay for it, and the issue was put off for another day.
Attitudes towards slavery hardened in subsequent years, with Southerners ever more committed to slavery and opposed to abolition.
It is commonplace today to suppose that slavery would have died out in due course. But experts are skeptical. Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, in their “Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery,” suggest:
“But in the southern United States, slavery continued with undiminished vigor. Indeed, in this region it became more and more deeply entrenched during the last three decades of the antebellum era. With servitude crumbling all around them, and with their peculiar institution under increasing attack from abolitionists in the North, southern politicians moved to strengthen the legal bulwarks of their system.”
” . . . There was little to encourage the view that southern slavery was on the brink of its own dissolution.”
Tragically, absent a rather unlikely and sudden change of heart on the part of thousands of slave owners, there was probably no peaceful and harmonious solution to the problem of American chattel slavery. It was a problem from hell.
How did U.S. manage to hold an election in 1864 during the civil war? And better yet, how does any country hold an election during wartime?
Soldiers from Pennsylvania voting at their camp in Virginia in 1864.
The war zone was in the South. Northern states experienced little disruption of normal activities (except for specific, short-term events such as Lee’s raid into Maryland and Pennsylvania in 1863). State governments had no trouble keeping to the normal political schedule. The only really new factor was the “soldier vote,” how to handle voting by thousands of men who were away from home in the Union Army. Whole regiments were furloughed to allow then to go home and vote. As you can see in the picture above, some states organized what we would now call absentee voting by providing ballots and ballot boxes to regiments from their states that were in the field.
By the fall of 1864, things were looking up for the Union, and the soldiers, by and large, wanted to see the war through. The soldiers mostly spurned the Democratic nominee, former general George McClellan, and voted for Lincoln.
Given that hardtack was devised as a highly durable cereal and source of starch, can you use it to thicken soups and stews?
Civil War soldiers with hardtack.
Hardtack was developed simply as a durable form of bread. The baking process drove out any moisture that could result in mold or spoilage. This has been known since antiquity.
In the American Civil War, soldiers found that the best thing to do with their hardtack was to smash it under a musket butt and put it in the soup or coffee. Federal soldiers might make “skillygalee” by “soaking the hardtack in cold water and then browning them on pork fat and seasoning to taste.” (From “The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union,” by Bell Irvin Wiley, 1952.) Yum!
Hardtack was called pilot bread on ships, and the name is applied to the equivalent modern product. A variety of this was sold in New England for many years but it is most popular today in Alaska.
And apparently hardtack will be in our future. On “The Mandalorian,” they have “travel biscuits.”
In the 1860 USA election, why was Lincoln absent from the ballot in ten slave states? Why was this allowed? Was this vote suppression?
Southern Democratic ticket in Virginia, 1860. The national Democratic ticket actually won the state, although very narrowly. (Courtesy Museum of the Confederacy
This “broadside” or handbill showed the the Southern Democratic ticket of 1860 in Virginia — note the list of electors, who were prominent men in their communities. On the other hand, there were no Republican electors in ten of eleven Southern states, Virginia being the only exception. (But I can’t find a handbill for them!)
The Republican Party was quite new, having been founded only six years before, in 1854. It was specifically an anti-slavery party. The 1860 platform rather grudgingly acknowledged the legality of slavery in the states where it existed. But it strongly opposed any extension of slavery into the territories, and furiously denounced enforcement of the fugitive slave laws.
This was not a platform calculated to win support in the South.
The Republican Party essentially did not exist in the South. No committee, no followers, no nothing, in the Southern states.
At the end of the Civil War, was slavery completely abolished in the US?
Slavery in the United States was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment, which was passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified as of December 6, 1865.
AMENDMENT XIII
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Passed by Congress January 31, 1865. Ratified December 6, 1865.
Courtesy National Archives.
The final vote on the Thirteenth Amendment in the House of Representatives was celebrated with an uproarious celebration on the House floor, as shown in this contemporary engraving and also depicted in the movie “Lincoln.”
Some people argue over what “slavery” is. In context, it clearly meant chattel slavery of persons of African descent, a point made by the Supreme Court in Butler v. Perry, 1916, in which it ruled that states and localities could continue the ancient practice of requiring able-bodied men to get out and work on the roads:
Did the United states civil war armies, both the North and the South, really execute deserters when they caught them?
Desertion was certainly the most frequent offense for which capital punishment was possible in both armies. The picture above shows what sometimes happened to a deserter — he sat on a coffin, faced a firing squad, and was shot. (From “Hard Tack and Coffee: Soldier’s Life in the Civil War,” by John D. Billings, originally published 1888.)
However, the death penalty was rarely imposed. According to the renowned historian Bell Irvin Wiley:
In the Union’s Army of the Potomac, between July 1 and November 30, 1863, “592 men were tried for desertion, 291 were found guilty, 80 received capital sentences, and 21 were eventually shot.” In the same period, 2,000 deserters were returned to their regiments. (“The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union,” Louisiana University Press, 1998.)
On the Confederate side, mostly Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, in the last six month of the war, 245 men were convicted of desertion, and 70 were sentenced to be executed; 31 of these sentences were set aside in a general amnesty of February 1865. (“The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy,” Louisiana State University Press, 1991.)
Richard Lobb 