How the Nineteenth Century Shaped Who We are Now (Part five: The Civil War, part 1)

 It is impossible to encapsulate the American Civil War in one blog post. I will undoubtedly end up with two or three, maybe more, one of them a personal perspective. This war shaped every aspect of American life and still does today. It is essential to have a good working knowledge of the Civil War in order to understand the United States today.

To start with, the United States. Shelby Foote, the Southern author who has become somewhat out of favor lately, stated in the Ken Burns series “The Civil War” (itself somewhat dated in its assessment of Robert E Lee and his legacy) that before the war people said that “the United States ARE” but after the war they said “the United States IS.” His thought was that the war’s aftermath gave a sense of the unity of the nation that it didn’t have before.

How can I describe a war that took approximately 630,000 American lives on both sides? How? With a total population of 31 million that comes to two percent of the population. Put that into today’s population and you come up with a staggering 6.6 million people. The decisive Battle of Gettysburg, with 51,000 casualties on both sides, would amount to well over half a million losses in today's population. It is impossible to overstate the impact of this loss. Almost all families were touched by the war on either side. The phrase “the empty chair” became a common way of expressing the inexpressible loss of a loved one.

There’s no point in rehearsing the history of the war. I could fill the volume of our entire house floor to ceiling with books written about it and still need more space. What we can think about, however, is the major themes of the period and its lasting effects on our society today.

To start with, race.

African Americans at the time were overwhelmingly in slavery. A small percentage were not but most were. White Americans always made a connection between people of African descent and slavery. The two went together. The hypocrisy of the North was that we felt we were not culpable in slavery yet we were. Our textile mills churned out coarse cloth from southern cotton that was sent back down south to clothe slaves.  Lots of money was made. We won’t even talk about the money that was made in the slave trade in New England prior to the abolishment of the slave trade.

The war still affects views of race today. The stereotypes of black men as lazy and shiftless go back to the era of slavery when black men resisted their captivity by doing as little as possible and still getting by. It wasn’t laziness. It was resistance.

Black women have sometimes been stereotyped as being more sexually aggressive than black men. This is another view that goes back to the time of slavery. Black women in slavery were regularly subjected to rape by their overseers and masters. They weren’t looking for sex. They were brutally raped.

White Americans, especially in the South, felt that they were doing Africans and their descendants a favor by enslaving them by bringing them Christianity and civilization. The two were inseparable in their minds. They drew the line, however, at teaching them how to read. Frederick Douglass and countless other enslaved people violated state laws and societal conventions by secretly learning to read. Who would think that reading was a subversive activity?

People in the North had a range of views about slavery. Some felt it was justified. Some were uneasy about bringing up the subject when talking with people from the South. And, of course, a good many were adamantly opposed to it but had different solutions to the problem.

The South and the North had differently based economies. In the North, industry was more prominent. Still, most people lived in small towns and worked on farms, but in cities industry was king. Foundries turned out products in cast iron, railroads crisscrossed the landscape, and deep pockets financed new ventures. This was easily converted to war production once the war started. In the South, on the other hand, there was some industry in the cities, but not as much as in the North, and therefore it did not form as large a part of the economic base. The foundation of the economy was cotton, and that was by nature a rural enterprise, an enterprise that cost countless lives.

White Southern society saw itself as more genteel as the money grubbing North, of course if you looked the other way in reference to slavery.

Northerners were not exactly sure what to do with escaped slaves once the war started. They coined the term “contraband” to refer to them. Frederick Douglass agitated for years to allow for black regiments in the Union Army. It eventually happened although it was far from perfect. They were paid less and often did not see battle, instead doing hard labor such as building temporary roads and tearing up railroads. They saw battle to an extent, and this increased as the war went on and the supply of soldiers became strained.

I guess that’s enough for now. It’s complicated. More soon.