These heroic stories of abandonment were quickly supplanted by the extraordinary steps of fealty taken by enslaved men like Moses, Dave or Kincien and became the centerpiece of the Lost Cause movement, which stressed unwavering and unquestioning obedience of slaves to their masters. The numbers varies considerably, ranging from 1 in 5 in Arkansas to 1 in 2 in Mississippi and South Carolina. The Union included the states of Maine, New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, California, Nevada, and Oregon. ". "These soldiers generally came from low slaveholding areas, such as the mountain regions of Tennessee, and small, non-slaveholding families," he said. If Confederate Major General William Dorsey Pender worried about his camp servant named Joe, he Pender did not share it in what would prove to be his final letter home to his wife. Tinkler said across Appalachia, support for secession was thin at the start of the war and as time went by, resistance increased. But Schermerhorn said even that minimizes the number of white people who benefitted from slavery. The U.S. Coast Survey map calculated the number of slaves in each county in the United States in 1860. For many Confederate officers who were separated from their servants as a result of the battle or the confusion of the retreat, disappointment awaited them, as it did Captain Waddell of the 12th Virginia, who rejoined his unit on July 8 only to learn that his servant Willis had run off with his personal baggage. More important than the transportation of personal possessions, however, Dave also conveyed the final thoughts of his master to loved ones. Lincoln was known to personally oppose slavery (which is why the South seceded after his election in 1860), but his chief goal was preserving the Union. A Texas State Senate Resolution claims that most Confederate soldiers didn't own slaves. Contrarily, Confederate General Robert E. Lee freed his slaves (which he never purchased they were inherited) in 1862! If 300,000 Union soldiers were slave owners, it would mean that somewhere in the ballpark of three-quarters of the available slave owning men put on the Union blue. Finally, in the last weeks of the conflict, the Confederate government gave in to Gen. Robert E. Lees desperate plea for more men, allowing enslaved people to enlist in exchange for some kind of post-war freedom. Very few accounts exist today of black men marching with Confederates in the heat of battle at Gettysburg. Grant also had several slaves, who were only freed after the 13th amendment in December of 1865. But it's simply not true in any meaningful way. You cansubscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here. If other museums refuse to provide that balance, well do so. The Union had 101,000 factories, while the Confederacy had 21,000 and the Border States had 9,000. Gettysburg may not have been the great turning point of the war for Lee and the Army of Northern Virginiathe army would go on to fight for close to two more yearsbut the Gettysburg campaign did signal a crisis of confidence in soldiers belief in their slaves unwavering fidelity. That, of course, is to be expected; soldiering is a young man's game, and most young men, then and now, have little in the way of personal wealth. A prominent historian accurately noted that "by the late 1850's most white Southerners viewed themselves as prisoners in their own country, condemned by what they saw as a hysterical abolition movement.". Had that happened, it is hard to see how the Confederacy would have been able to fight at all. Gallagher told us that there is no breakdown of which Union soldiers came from slave-owning families. All Rights Reserved. Data from another direction also throws Baldwins figure into question. Nonetheless, the 1860 census recorded only 18 slaves in all of New Jersey. The "Twenty Negro Law", also known as the "Twenty Slave Law" and the "Twenty Nigger Law", was a piece of legislation enacted by the Confederate Congress during the American Civil War.The law specifically exempted from Confederate military service one white man for every twenty slaves owned on a Confederate plantation, or for two or more plantations within five miles of each other that . The UofV system also makes it possible to generate maps that show graphically the proportion of slaveholding households in a given county. . At the time, however, Southerners had no problem claiming the protection of slavery as the cause of their break with the Union. . We can only take this as a rough guide for several reasons in the course of the war, young men would be killed, others would come of age, and later in the war, the Confederates broadened the age of conscription to span from 17 to 50 years old. Looking at the letters written by Confederate leaders and in their declarations of secession from the Union makes it clear that preserving slavery was central to their reasons for trying to split off into their own country in the wake of the 1860 election. By comparison, only one in twelve enlisted men owned slaves, but when those who lived with family slave owners were included, the ratio exceeded one in three. The data from the 1860 census show that if Baldwin were correct, an overwhelming fraction of all of the young men from slave-owning families across the Deep South and beyond would needed to have broken with their communities and fought for the Union. (Some of the former Confederate states did eventually ratify the 13th Amendment after its passage by Congress, because they were required to do so as a post-war condition of regaining federal representation. The owners were not getting rich. If it refers to individual states, then it is false: all the Northern states (again, with the arguable exception of Delaware) had abolished slavery well before the start of the Civil War. Am I right?. The other battles listed above all lasted more than one day. South Carolinians in Lieutenant General James Longstreets First Corps witnessed the women of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, appeal to their enslaved servants to run off and seize their freedom. To adherents of the Lost Cause,a term coined as early as 1866,the Confederacy fought to uphold the supposed virtues of the antebellum South, advancedby leaders who were "exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry, defeated by the Union armies not through superior military skill, but by overwhelming force," according to the site Civil War Journeys. Ballot harvesting altered the outcome of a city council election in Yuma County, Arizona. In July 1861, the two armies were nearly equal in strength with less than 200,000 soldiers on each side; however at the peak of troop strength in 1863, Union soldiers outnumbered Confederate soldiers by a ratio of 2 to 1. For the men from the Confederate states, Tinkler said the pattern is clear. The state of New Jersey was something of an outlier. Needless to say, men of modest means wereless likely to own slaves. When asked why he didn't free his slaves earlier, Grant stated "Good help is so hard to come by these days.". "Healthy pilots are suffering from myocarditis and dropping dead on flights because of the COVID-19 vaccines. Just as the firing ceased late on July 2, Confederate artillerist Edward Porter Alexander was pleasantly surprised to see his servant Charley on my spare horse Meg & with very affectionate greetings & a good haversack of rations. Alexander recalled, Negro servants hunting for their masters were a feature of the landscape that night.. On March 13, 1865, the Confederate Congress passed a law to allow black men to serve in combat roles, with the provision "that nothing in this act shall be construed to authorize a change in the relation which said slaves shall bear toward their owners," i.e. Lees failure to dislodge the Union army from its position led him to order one final assault on the afternoon of July 3, utilizing the men under the command of Generals George Pickett and James Johnston Pettigrew. The Union had 20,000 miles of railroad compared to 9,000 in the Confederacy and 1,700 in the Border States. In 1863, more than 6,000 accompanied the 71,000 soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania. "In October 1862, Congress amended the Conscription Act with what became known as the Twenty Negro Law, a provision that exempted from the draft one white man of military age on plantations with at least 20 slaves," Tinkler wrote. Where it was still legal, slavery was far more widespread than the number in the post indicates, they said. Of the 462,634 Confederate soldiers captured 247,769 were paroled on the field and 25,976 died in prison. Across America, 60 percent to 75 percent of high-school history teachers believe and teach that the South seceded for state's rights, said Jim Loewen, author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me:. Custis' will stipulated that all of his slaves were to be freed within five years: " upon the legacies to my four granddaughters being paid, then I give freedom to my slaves, the said slaves to be emancipated by my executor in such manner as he deems expedient and proper, the said emancipation to be accomplished in not exceeding five years from the time of my decease." The approximately $3.5 million, 18,500-square-foot museum in Elm Springs, Tennessee, has been in the works for eight years and will also serve as anadministrative space for membersthe Sons of Confederate Veterans, the organization spearheading the project, Jay Powell reports for the Columbia Daily Herald. The user who posted the original tweet and the Facebook user who shared it on July 11 did not respond to requests for comment. Viral post gets it wrong about extent of slavery in 1860, Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States. In this retelling, the South is more Gone With the Windthan Free State of Jones,casting the Confederate soldiers as trying to preserve their cherished, chivalric way of life instead of defending plantation owners'reliance on slavery to keep the local economy going. Blake Masters wants to privatize Social Security. All of the Northern states, with a single arguable exception, had (by law or by practice) ended slavery within their borders long before the Civil War began. Fact Check: What Percentage Of White Southerners Owned Slaves. When it comes to reparations, one of the consistent arguments against them is that there were actually not very many white slave owners in the U.S. I encourage readers to consider if our concept of 'Old South Charm' relies on the racist mythology of the Lost Cause, will that not hinder Maury Countys 'New South Progress' in the 21st century?". Thus, volunteers in 1861 were 42 percent more likely to own slaves themselves or to live with family members who owned slaves than the general population. As far as slavery goes, every museum on the war is currently obsessed with the subject. Using total population as a reference point also includes babies and children, for example, said Stephanie McCurry, history professor at Columbia University. In September of 1861, the U.S. Coast Survey published a . Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook. The 1860 census shows that in the states that would soon secede from the Union, an average of more than 32 percent of white families owned enslaved people. The colonial system also offered more lenient punishment for disobedient servants than enslaved people and allowed servants to petition for early release if their masters mistreated them. (The previous summers campaign on the Virginia Peninsula, where the two armies were in close proximity to one another for an extended period of time, contains a wealth of such narratives.) As historian and public librarian Liam Hoganwrote: There is unanimous agreement, based on overwhelming evidence, that the Irish were never subjected to perpetual, hereditary slavery in the colonies, based on notions of race. The enduring myth of Irish slavery, which most often surfaces today in service of Irish nationalist and white supremacist causes, has roots in the 17th and 18th centuries when Irish laborers were derogatorily called white slaves. The phrase would later be employed as propaganda by the slave-owning South about the industrialized North, along with (false) claims that life was far harder for immigrant factory workers than for enslaved people. Kevin M. Levin They were up to their necks in it. This statement is somewhat ambiguous. Those inaccuracies have since been corrected. Conversely, the Proclamation highlighted even further the degree to which the Confederate Army represented a force of enslavement. That distinction might make no difference to Baldwins argument, but it makes a big difference in the underlying math. 1800 I Street NW A rich mans war, but a poor mans fight became the cry of many southerners of modest means.". Download the official NPS app before your next visit. He was torn like many soldiers were of their loyalty to their State vs their Country. Jefferson Davis was their President. But historians say the bigger issue is that measuring slaveholders as a percent of the total population is misleading because slavery was illegal in most states by that point. They fought the battle defending their homelands against an invading army." The Lost . On March 14, 1865 the Confederate military . #FHTE In 1860, 1% of white southern families owned 200 or more human beings, but in states of the Confederacy, at least 20% owned at least one and in Ms and SC ran as high as fifty percent." Darity cited a chart and research by U.S. civil war expert Al Mackey to back up his statement. Just last weekend, groundbreaking began on the site of the museum dedicated to continuing a long-discredited myth about the beginnings of the Civil War: the Myth of the Lost Cause, historian Kevin Levin writes for his blog,"Civil War Memory". Casting the Confederacy as a honorable force standing strongagainst Northern aggressorsis a willful misreading of the historical truth that the institution of slavery was at the core of the Civil War, as George Washington University professorJames Oliver Horton reiteratesin a National Park Service history. For slaveholder and nonslaveholder alike, slavery lay at the heart of the Confederate nation. Some states had far more slave owners (46 percent of families in South Carolina, 49 percent in Mississippi) while some had far fewer (20 percent of families in Arkansas). Absent the body, news that a soldier had been comforted in his final hours and had prepared himself for death reassured family members that their loved one experienced what 19th-century Americans understood as a Good Death.. A quartermaster in John Bell Hoods division observed that a great many Negroes have gone to the Yankees. Union cavalry raids, such as the one led by Judson Kilpatrick at Monterey Pass on July 5, hampered the retreat of tired Confederates and resulted in additional prisoners being taken, including the camp servants attached to the Richmond Howitzers as well as Major William H. Chamberlains servant, horse, and personal equipment. No credible documentation records Grant as having said such a thing, and he was only ever in a position to emancipate a single slave, which he did back in 1859. The data in the UofV online system can be broken down either by state or counties within a state, and make it possible to compare one data element (e.g., households) with another (slaveholders) and calculate the proportions between them. 'U.S. For one thing, it was temporary; all but the most serious felons were freed at the end of their contracts. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine In 1860, slavery was still legal in 15 of the 33 U.S. states, and slaves represented nearly a third of the population in those slaveholding states. New York Gov. Camp slaves like Moses who, for whatever reason, were committed to their owners made do with the limited resources available and resigned themselves in the end to passing on their owners parting words to their grieving families. A museum must present facts to visitors, which may even challenge their own beliefs, so that they will want to go do their own research. We wont tell people what to believe, but we will challenge them on what they think they know. Most importantly, servitude wasnt hereditary. It is not certain how many foreigners fought for the Confederacy, but the number seems to be in the tens of thousands. Those were Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and Kentucky. 526, designating April as Texas Confederate History and Heritage Month. Not exactly. That contrasted starkly with the 24.9. This figure, combined with the 36 percent who owned or whose family members owned slaves, indicated that almost one of every two 1861 recruits lived with slaveholders. All of them agree on these approximate totals: White Union soldiers from Confederate states -- 75,000-100,000, White Union soldiers from slaveholding Union states -- 200,000, So, in round figures, it is reasonably accurate to say that 300,000 white men from slaveholding states fought on the Union side. Others have refuted Daritys claim, denying that slaves enriched their white owners. Many Northern civilians owned slaves. All were home to substantial pro-Confederate elements and contributed significant numbers of troops to the Confederate side during the Civil War. Their country. 801 3rd St. S Your California Privacy Rights / Privacy Policy. The ocean is "flat" and "contained" by land features that jut up from a flat (not spherical) earth. They werent, at least not initially; they were fighting to hold the nation together. We need your help. In fact, they'd say, their ancestors had nothing at all to do with slavery. He has become an expert on the U.S. Civil War and writes a blog called Student of the American Civil War., Policing, Enforcement, and Justice (Information Forthcoming), Media Communications: Narratives of Inequality, DITE Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics, Hank & Billye Suber Aaron Young Scholars Summer Research Institute, The Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University, NEW NSF GRANT AWARDED TO COOK CENTER RESEARCHERS FOR COVID-19 PROJECT, From administrators to animals, heres who you need to know at Duke. However, those slaves had been purchased by Julia's father, Frederick F. Dent, and there is no record of his ever having transferred ownership of them to Julia without such a transfer, neither Julia nor her husband Ulysses would have had legal authority to free them. In addition, since publishing the story, Mike Landree, the executive director of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, responded to the story, and we asked him a few questions about the museum. It's true that in an extremely narrow sense, only a very small proportion of Confederate soldiers owned slaves in their own right. Enslaved workers constituted the backbone of the Confederate war effort. The population of the Union was 18.5 million. Mackey is an educator, a retired U. S. Air Force officer and a former human resources manager with a global company. The 642,427 total Union casualties have been divided accordingly: The 483,026 total Confederate casualties have been divided accordingly: Of the 211,411 Union soldiers captured 16,668 were paroled on the field and 30,218 died in prison. The map of Virginia, in particular, goes a long way to explaining the breakup of that state during the war. The documentary 2,000 Mules proves Democrats cheated on the 2020 elections., Immigrants illegally in the country are treated better than military veterans., Kari Lake has gone on the record saying she supports Arizona's complete abortion ban. They were fighting for survival as cotton and tobacco prices were on a roller coaster.. In the final tabulation, the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery. Accordingly, Lincoln had no legal authority to free all slaves everywhere, only in the "states and parts of states in which the people thereof" were in "rebellion against the United States.". He focuses on stories with a health/science bent and has reported some of his favorite pieces from the prow of a canoe. We found only one biography (out of many) that supported the notion that Sherman ever owned slaves, and that work merely stated, without elaboration, that Sherman "had a slave" at some point during the former period (a wording that allows for the possibility that Sherman rented or was tended to by a slave for a while rather than actually owning one). Below is a condensedexcerpt from his e-mail: "Thank you for reaching out to us and I am glad to provide some additional information. From 1854 to 1859 Grant managed his father-in-law's farm, White Haven, where a number of slaves lived and worked. It is true that slavery was not unique to the South: Both during the colonial era and after independence, slavery existed in areas that now comprise what we consider "Northern" states. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine Smithsonian magazine participates in affiliate link advertising programs. This mythical narrative, which dates only to the mid-1970s, would be completely unrecognizable to the enlisted men and officers in the Army of Northern Virginia. Cookie Policy This compared favorably to the Confederacy as a whole, in which one in every twenty white persons owned slaves. On the homefront, the Union had $234,000,000 in bank deposit and coined money or specie while the Confederacy had $74,000,000 and the Border States had $29,000,000. Vance said nothing about the attack on Paul Pelosi. So you can stop basing your hate for an entire race for the actions of a mere 1.6%, the 2019 Twitter post says. As PBS points out, New England's economywith its textile factories and banking industrywas built on the back of Southern slave labor. Only in Delaware, a state which was far from being undeniably a "Northern" state: depending upon the criteria used, one could justifiably have pegged Delaware at the time of the Civil War as being Northern, Southern, Mid-Atlantic, or some combination thereof. Advertising Notice Sarah Pruitt is a writer and editor based in seacoast New Hampshire. By the time the war ended in 1865, about 180,000 Black men had served as soldiers in the U.S. Army. Since none of the Northern states had rebelled against the United States, the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to them. It was neither a law passed by Congress nor the equivalent of a constitutional amendment, with the power to free slaves everywhere throughout the United States (and former states then in the Confederacy); it was an executive order issued as a wartime measure by President Lincoln, based on his constitutional authority as commander in chief of the armed forces. Misinformation about the antebellum South, the Civil War, and the practice of slavery in the U.S. is rife on the Internet. In recent years, othermuseums have popped up across the United States that present their own ideological visions as the truth,likethe Creation Museum, established in 2007, which attempts to present spiritual belief as scientific fact. (In fact, only a small percentage of the population did. The nations 1860 census counted a bit under 1.6 million men of military age (18-45) in slaveholding states. Become a member! But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. It is often stated that Grant's wife, Julia Boggs Dent, "owned four slaves," and Julia herself identified four "servants" whom she claimed "belonged" to her up until the end of 1862. A number of rebels passed by until a young man of benevolent expression attempted to locate a surgeon. However, theyre not the only ones with the means or motives to revise historyoften, the vanquished tell their own versions, too. In fact, all three historians we reached told us there was no evidence to back up that assertion and plenty of reasons to suggest it does not fit the facts that are known.
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