- Welcome to University Place Presents.
I'm Norman Gilliland.
April 9, 1865, Appomattox.
Robert E. Lee surrenders to Ulysses S. Grant.
It's the end of the Civil War, or is it?
How did we come to that point in American history?
What changed that day, and what didn't change?
We're going to find out from my guest today.
He's Steve Kantrowitz, professor of history
at the UW Madison.
Welcome to University Place Presents .
- Thanks, Norman. Really happy to be here.
- If we look back at the Civil War
from the vantage point of 150 years or more,
how inevitable does the outcome seem?
Do we know more now than we would've known
50 years ago or 100 years ago?
- Well, we certainly have argued about it a lot,
in the last 50 and 100 years.
There're a lot of ways of thinking about that question.
And one way is to look at the initial structural advantages
that the Union has over the Confederacy,
before shots are fired at Fort Sumter, right?
And that is to say, the Union has
an overwhelmingly larger white population,
which is what everyone assumes is gonna be
the basis of the manpower for the army.
The Union has most of the industrial capacity
of the United States, it has a significant fraction,
though not really more than half,
of the pre-war officer corps and pre-war army.
It has huge advantages.
- It has the navy, too.
- It has the navy, too, although not all of it.
But that said, the Confederacy's goal
is not to conquer the Union.
The Confederacy's goal is to retain
its territorial integrity, become an independent nation,
or in its view, remain an independent nation,
and gain international recognition,
and wait the Union out.
So, from that standpoint, a defensive war
can be operated, you know, for a long period of time.
And with enough tactical moves
out of the Confederate sphere of influence,
draw the Union away, it's possible to imagine
the Confederacy outlasting the Union.
And, indeed, that's at the cornerstone
of Confederate strategy, is doing that.
There's another way to think about that,
about that question, and that is to go
a little later in the war and identify turning points,
points where Confederate strategy seems to fail.
The failure to achieve international recognition.
The failure to really deal a significant blow to the Union
during any of its invasions, in '62 or in '63 especially.
The failure at Gettysburg in 1863 is often considered
the turning point of the war.
Battle fought deep in northern soil in Pennsylvania
and a rout, really, for the Confederacy,
chased back to the Potomac by the Union.
We can move a little farther into the War,
and this is where I think the arguments get stronger.
To Lincoln's election, re-election, in November 1864,
to the campaigns that follow, to the march to the sea,
which is taking place at that very moment,
and then to the climactic battles
of the winter and spring of 1865.
And in that moment it becomes really hard to see
how the Confederacy can survive,
how it can retain territorial integrity,
how it can continue to put armies into the field
that can fight the Union or even fight
holding actions against the Union.
And the Union has also achieved
the kind of military leadership, finally,
that can stand-up to Robert E. Lee
and the Army of Northern Virginia.
- What did the Confederacy need
to get that international acknowledgement,
recognition, that you mentioned,
and was slavery a handicap to that?
- Slavery was a huge handicap in that.
What the Confederacy needed was for the economic interest of
British mill owners and mill workers
to outweigh the anti-slavery convictions and ideology
of the British Empire.
- Which was a strong ideology wasn't it?
They had been--
- It was very, very strong. Britain--
- [Norman] intercepting the slave trade for years.
- Britain, in the 19th century,
as an empire and as a people built
a conception of themselves as the anti-slavery empire,
an an empire whose fundamental goal
was the freedom, believe it or not, of human beings.
Or a fundamental goal of that empire
was the freedom of human beings,
in which slavery, chattel slavery,
the ownership of human beings would not be tolerated,
in which the international slave trade
would not be tolerated,
in which slavery itself would not be tolerated.
Now, all kinds of other un-freedoms and oppressions
were, in fact, part of the British Empire,
but slavery was not, at least in principle.
And so the Confederates, to the degree that they believe,
that King Cotton will over-match anti-slavery,
they miscalculate, they miscalculate fairly grievously.
That miscalculation is also a material miscalculation.
Slave-produced cotton is so successful
as an industry in the late 1850s,
that, by the eve of the Civil War,
there are these giant surpluses of cotton
sitting on the docks in Liverpool and elsewhere.
And so, actually, the Confederates' attempt
to blackmail Britain into recognizing them
by embargoing cotton, fails for two reasons.
It fails because the Union blockade eventaully
prevents them from shipping it even if they wanted to.
And it fails because there's enough cotton for a while.
So there's a series of miscalculations
Southern slaveholders' need to believe
that their might made them superior fundamentally.
- Here's something we can talk about for a few days.
- Yeah (chuckles).
- Compare the unity of the North with the unity of the South.
- Yeah, so both the North and the South
are fictions, right?
From Lincoln's perspective, from a Union perspective,
or Unionist perspective I should say,
the Confederacy is a rebellion.
It's not a unified region, it's a rebellion
of political elites against an election,
against duly constituted government.
Basically looking at the results of election,
saying, "We don't like that,
"we're taking our ball and going home."
For which there's no provision in the Constitution.
And, furthermore, Lincoln and many other Northerners
believed that this didn't represent
the will of the people of the South.
That even the secession conventions,
through which the Southern states,
or 11 of the Southern states, left the Union,
were tyrannical exercises.
And to some degree that was true.
Some of those happened with
great unanimity, with great speed.
Others took a long time and happened with
the threat of arms and other kinds of undemocratic activity.
So the Confederacy goes into the War
only unified by some sense of local allegiance,
and by Lincoln's calling out of volunteers
to suppress the rebellion.
- That galvanized the South.
- Exactly.
In the same way, the Union goes into the War
mobilized by the firing on Fort Sumter.
If you look at, you can look at
the most famous print of 1861 in the Union,
is this print of Fort Sumter being fired upon.
It appears first, I think,
in Harper's Weekly or Frank Leslie's magazine,
and later it gets colorized
and people have it up on their walls.
It's like a picture of the Twin Towers.
It has that kind of emotional force.
- [Norman] An attack on our country.
- [Stephen] It reminds you of
just the grievous assault on our basic principles
that's taken place, right?
- How, what shall we say, authorized
was that attack by any central authority?
Or was that a field commander making a decision on his own?
- That was South Carolina
making that decision, fundamentally.
That was South Carolina's now secessionist leadership
authorizing that activity.
You know, the Confederate government
had been established in Montgomery in February of 1861.
It would move to Richmond very quickly,
to be nearer the seat of action and nearer
to Confederate manufacturing capacity in Richmond,
and just nearer lines of communication.
But, authorized, yeah, it was authorized in some sense.
They know what they're doing; it's not an accident.
They give the job of firing the first cannon
to an old, fire-eating secessionist,
a planter intellectual named Edmund Ruffin.
60-year-old white plantation owner,
who becomes a private in a Confederate volunteer regiment.
Makes a uniform for himself and comes up to Charleston,
or comes down to Charleston I should say, from Virginia.
And is allowed to pull the string
that fires the first shot on Fort Sumter.
So it's very choreographed and not just authorized.
- It is. It is. Almost like a press event, then.
- [Stephen] Very much so.
- Well let's go forward then, April of 1865.
What are the Confederates' hopes at this point,
when so much has been destroyed,
so much has been captured by the Union?
- Yeah, the western armies of the Confederacy
have been scattered.
There are still Confederate armies in the field in the West,
but they're very small and separated from one another,
and they're being pursued
by larger Union armies and cavalry.
The remaining Confederate armies in the East
are Johnston's forces, which are in North Carolina,
and Lee's forces, the Army of North Virginia,
the most famous Confederate fighting force.
Lee's fighting force has a nominal strength of 60,000 men.
There are probably 30,000 men
in the field with him when they surrender,
which means that 30,000 of his men are AWOL, just about.
Some of them have been, some of them
are casualties at that point, but almost 30,000 men are AWOL.
The army has evaporated in the sort of cold light
of that springtime's realization
that the Confederacy was not gonna win.
- It's kind of an accelerated situation, isn't it?
The more who go AWOL, the more...
- [Stephen] We think so. - ...on top of that, who will go AWOL.
A spiraling situation.
- As you know, contemporary military sociology
would say, once unit cohesion begins to fail,
you know, it really can fail, right?
And that does seem to be what happens.
The members of Lee's army just begin
to melt away and go home,
because they're more worried about
the fate of their farmsteads and their families,
than they are about this sort of growing fiction
of the Confederacy.
Which, at this point, really is symbolically represented
by Lee's army and the flag of Lee's army.
What we think of as the Confederate flag today
is not the flag of the Confederate States of America.
- [Norman] It was a battle flag?
- Yeah, it's the battle flag
of the Army of Northern Virginia.
It's very telling for what Confederate
nationalism was and was not about.
So, there's Lee's army in Virginia
being pursued by the Army of the Potomac.
There's Johnston's forces now being harried
by Sherman's forces in North Carolina.
The hope is to link those armies up
and live to fight another day.
But by April of 1865, Petersburg, Virginia,
has fallen to the Union,
which means it's the last railroad bridgehead
connecting the capital, Richmond,
to the rest of the Confederacy.
So, once Petersburg falls, Richmond has to be evacuated.
The Confederate leadership has to leave
Richmond, which means--
- [Norman] And go where?
- And go where, exactly.
There's a very, you know, a very shrinking number
of roads and railroads that one can use
to escape the Union army.
The Confederacy is starting to look less like
some kind of territorial unit,
and more like an archipelago of loyalties.
And so it's into that maelstrom
that Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet flee,
carrying money and Confederate records
and, you know, some dozens of people and soldiers,
as they head south, trying to get away from the Union,
perhaps even to go to Cuba or somewhere else
and become a government-in-exile,
but that doesn't happen.
So when Robert E. Lee looks at the facts on the ground
and realizes that he is about to enter
into another battle with Grant's army he can't win,
he asks Grant for peace.
Grant doesn't have authority to give him peace.
Peace has to be negotiated between powers.
- [Norman] Well does that mean a ceasefire?
- So a surrender is what Grant insists on.
He wants Lee to surrender his army,
which is all he has authority to do,
and all Grant has authority to demand.
And that's what Robert E. Lee does on April 9th.
He surrenders the Army of Northern Virginia
to his adversary Ulysses S. Grant.
- [Norman] Much has been made of the terms,
the generous terms that Grant gives to Lee
and his surrendering army.
What kind of authority did Grant have,
and what kind of precedent did he have
for that kind of lenience?
- Well, military commanders in the field,
and it's something I think we'll come back to,
had a great deal of leeway when it came to
what they would and would not do.
Now, again, as it's important to stress,
Grant knew he didn't have the authority
to negotiate terms of peace between
the Union and the Confederacy,
and so whatever Lee asked for in those ways,
he knew he wouldn't and couldn't give.
But when it came to the treatment
of Confederate soldiers,
of the members of Lee's army that is, and of Lee himself,
very much within Grant's purview.
- [Norman] And so what was the precedent
for that kind of leniency?
- [Stephen] Well, there's longstanding precedent
of European, uh, European commanders
treating one another as gentlemen.
People not subject to the terms of total war,
of post-war trials and imprisonment,
and all kinds of recrimination,
but rather the terms are going to be
negotiated by the diplomats now,
but you can withdraw your armies,
go back, plant your fields, there was precedent for that.
- [Norman] Was there precedent during the Civil War?
- Well there's lots of things, and we can talk about,
in fact a topic we should probably move to,
is to think about the terms in which soldiers
were allowed to go home during the War,
or at least not to be imprisoned.
- [Norman] It's a curious thing, isn't it?
- It is. - This concept.
We're gonna get to parole in just a minute,
but we wanna touch briefly on this march to the sea
that you mentioned earlier and Sherman.
- [Stephen] Yes, so.
Sherman's forces take Atlanta
in the very late summer and they begin
making preparations for a march across Georgia.
And there, unlike many other phases of the Civil War,
Sherman understands his task
to be the task of a Western commander,
and that is to bring the war to the population
in a way that makes it clear what the stakes are.
Not a gentlemanly war, but something more like a total war.
Now I should say, when we say total war in the 21st century,
what we think we mean is
the indiscriminate murder of civilians,
and that is not what happened on Sherman's march to the sea.
In fact, there's a pretty serious effort,
though not a totally successful one at all,
to restrict actions against civilians.
There were many actions against civilians by Sherman's army,
as there were by other armies in the field during the War.
But it is not a targeted campaign to kill civilians.
It is, however, a scorched earth policy.
They're burning barns and they're burning supplies,
and they're living off the land.
So they're not tethered to a supply chain.
They're moving across the Georgia landscape
toward the Atlantic coast,
making it clear that this is an army of victory,
and it will not take anything less than
total victory as an answer.
So when they arrive at the coast,
at Savannah, just before Christmas,
it's remarkable and important that General Sherman
arrives in this beautiful city of Savannah
and nobody burns a thing, really.
He saves the city, as he puts it,
and he has a Christmas present for President Lincoln.
Presents it to him sort of figuratively.
- A mixed blessing for the Southerners.
- Yeah, although very good if you're into, like,
the architectural history of Savannah.
- Yeah, for sure.
- So, by Christmas of 1864, Sherman and a huge army,
and then tens of thousands of camp followers,
of refugees, of former slaves, of all kinds of people,
are following his army into
coastal Georgia and South Carolina,
where there are also tens of thousands,
in fact, hundreds of thousands,
of former slaves who have been under Union occupation
and living as, more or less, free people
for two or three years,
since the Union invasion of the coast earlier in the War.
And so, Sherman arrives at the coast
with a pretty important set of decisions to make.
What to do with all these people?
He's gotta go continue fighting.
He's gotta take his army north up the coast.
He's gotta, you know, find Johnston's army,
eventually find Lee's army, hook up with Grant's army.
He's gotta a lot of work to do.
He cannot have tens of thousands of people
following his army, and he needs to do something with them.
And so he goes to the leadership on the ground in Savannah,
in the Sea Islands districts of South Carolina.
He says, "What do we do?"
He said, "Well, most of the people here
"who we need to deal with are former slaves.
"Let's ask them what we need to do."
And they convene,
under the auspices of a series of government emissaries,
they convene a number of, a dozen or more,
black ministers, who have been serving
the population of freed people on the coast.
And they bring them together, and they sit down,
Sherman, and people from the war department, and civilians,
and they sit down and they say, "What do you want?"
And what they say is,
"We want the protection of the government,
"and to help the government maintain
"ourselves and our freedom.
"We want land that we can call our own
"and the ability to farm it."
Sherman thinks about that,
the war department thinks about that,
and in January Sherman issues Special Field Order 15,
which is the basis for the slogan, "40 acres and a mule."
And it grants to the households of individual free people,
such title as the army may convey, not clear title,
such title as the army may convey,
to 40 acres of confiscated land
that had once belonged to the planters of the Sea Islands,
and surplus government draft animals to use on that land.
That's the basis of 40 acres and a mule.
And once that's set up,
the refugees who've been following Sherman's army,
and the freed people who've been farming
under other kinds of contractual arrangements on the coast
begin to settle as a black Southern yeomanry.
Really, the first substantial black Southern yeomanry
that there had been.
And then Sherman is free to take his army,
absent tens of thousands of camp followers,
pursuing Johnston, which he then proceeds to do.
- Shrewd and successful strategy.
- [Stephen] Indeed.
- But does it provide some kind of precedent
for what Grant's going to offer to Lee at Appomattox?
- [Stephen] Well, does it provide?
That's a very good question.
It's pragmatic. It's generous.
In the sense that it breaks the kind of conventional rules
of what people would imagine was possible,
certainly of what Sherman, who was not an abolitionist,
thought was imaginable before that.
That breaks the rules maybe more
than Grant's terms to Lee, I would say.
- [Norman] It certainly had a vast repercussion, didn't it,
from what you say? - It did, yeah.
- Well let's, kind of, enter a little photo gallery now.
This particular part of the Civil War.
You mentioned the march to the sea
and we have an image of that here.
And gives you some notion of the scope of it,
and the look of it.
- [Stephen] Yeah, it's been described
as a column of men spread out over
a field 30 miles wide,
moving across the Georgia landscape.
And, you know, you will,
if you travel through south Georgia,
you will hear people say,
"Sherman came through here and burned everything in sight.
"And this barn is from 1844."
(Norman and Stephen laugh)
So they didn't burn everything.
The "Gone with the Wind" version of this is overstated.
But they did bring a lot of destruction, and they meant to.
As Sherman put it, he wanted to make war so terrible
that men would sicken of it.
- [Norman] Should I ask about Atlanta and whether
that was deliberately burned or accidentally?
- If you wanna talk about it for another hour.
(Norman and Stephen laugh)
We'll save that for another day.
- [Norman] You did mention parole, though,
and here's an interesting phenomenon:
It seems gentlemanly in its way and quaint today.
- Yeah, when the Civil War begins,
there's no tradition of prisoner of war camps.
There's no tradition of holding
large numbers of enemy combatants prisoner
Nobody 's set up for it. Nobody thinks it's necessary.
There's a long standing Euro-American
tradition called "parole."
Parole, you give your word.
That's what "parole" means.
And parole is a certificate that you sign.
You can see it right here.
Where you promise, that if released,
you will not fight again until you receive
formal word that you, as a paroled prisoner,
have been exchanged, on paper,
for another paroled prisoner on the other side.
Once that has happened, you're free
to rejoin your unit and fight again.
Two things can go wrong here.
One is, if you refuse to obey that,
you can be executed, if you're caught again.
They don't have to do anything nice to you again, right?
The other thing is, if the parole system breaks down,
if you're not exchanged for someone
after a certain period of time,
you need to turn yourself in to the enemy's headquarters.
- [Norman] Wow. - And the idea
of someone doing that is just surreal,
but that is what the parole system is designed around.
And the parole system worked pretty well into 1863.
It collapsed due to a combination of factors.
Chiefly, the Confederates' desperate,
their starvation for manpower.
They had recruited virtually every
able-bodied white man they could find.
- [Norman] They couldn't afford to swap one to one?
- They couldn't and particularly,
when the Union insisted the prisoner of war cartel apply to,
the parole system apply to the black soldiers as well.
Because Confederates, in principle,
could not accept that black soldiers
were legitimate combatants, they were rebellious slaves,
and needed to be treated like that.
Now they weren't, because that
would've created all kinds of other problems,
in general treated like that, but they sometimes were,
and it caused enormous problems
for the Union and the Confederacy.
- [Norman] It's remarkable to think that in 1865
Lincoln visited Richmond, or what was left of it.
- [Stephen] Yeah, so Lincoln, yeah,
Lincoln walks from the docks and
he's got sailors with him as his security detail,
these very tough guys, been serving with the Union navy.
Not people you'd want to mess with.
But mostly he's protected in defeated Richmond
by former slaves, by the now freed people of Richmond.
The Union army has entered Richmond.
This part of Virginia was covered by the
Emancipation Proclamation.
If the Union army's there, these people are free.
And they understand Lincoln as
an important engine of their liberation.
And so, between the sailors and the freed people,
Lincoln is very secure walking through,
what had up until days before, been the enemy's capital.
- That surrender at Appomattox has been, I suppose,
idealized many times, in art in particular.
- [Stephen] And this image is an idealized version of it.
This is from 20 years later. This an image from 1885.
- [Norman] Even in Grant's autobiography,
from 1883 I think, he talks about this.
And there was already some myth about
why Grant was dressed as a private and Lee dressed
in a resplendent general's uniform for the occasion.
- [Stephen] Ha. Aha.
- [Norman] And Grant kinda downplays that.
- [Stephen] Yeah, you know, there's a lot of ways
of thinking about this and certainly the Lee biographers
have a lot more to say about this than I do.
But Lee understood that he needed to represent
his surrender in a certain way.
That he did, in fact, represent Confederate power
and the moral legitimacy
of the soldiers who'd been in the field.
And he needed to represent himself in that way.
He was also a gentleman of the old school,
meaning a gentleman of the Southern slaveholding class,
of a very genteel version of that,
and he knew that presentation,
one's exterior, mattered a great deal in that world.
Much more than it did in Grant's world.
Grant comes--
- It's almost like a contradiction or,
A contrast between what Mark Twain referred to
as Sir Walter Scottism, this kind of idealized aristocracy
versus the very pragmatic industrial image that Grant had.
- Grant is kind of a man of a shopkeeper's world.
Lee is a man, Lee comes from a world
where appearance is crucial,
where if a slaveholder does not exude authority,
he doesn't stay a slaveholder very long, right?
- [Norman] Well that's true.
And it wasn't the same thing in Grant's world
before the War.
- Different stakes for sure, yes.
- [Stephen] Yeah.
- Another contrast between Abraham Lincoln
and his successor after the assassination.
- [Stephen] So Lincoln and Johnson, Lincoln and Johnson.
You know, if one were to look at
the early biographies of these men
and guess which of them was going to be
later seen as the hero of emancipation
and which as the goat,
you might have to put your money the other way around.
- [Norman] It's true on paper.
- [Stephen] You know, Lincoln, had grown up in Kentucky
and moved to Illinois,
in a moment when people were still talking
about trying to reestablish legal slavery in Illinois.
And Lincoln was very clear that he did not think
that black people were the equal of white people,
and he said so in 1858,
and he said so, in slightly more muted terms,
to a delegation of black men in the White House in 1862.
He really had been very clear that this
was a white man's Republic--
- [Norman] In favor of black emigration, wasn't he?
- [Stephen] Yes, he was, and he pursued it
on and off throughout much of the war.
Johnson, on the other hand, had positioned himself
as the foe of the Southern aristocracy.
He'd been the friend of the common white man in Tennessee.
He himself had been a slaveholder, but
And he had really positioned himself
as the kind of
white, populist Democrat of the 1850s.
In fact, he refuses to join the Confederacy.
He refuses to leave his seat in--
- [Norman] Oh really?
- Yeah, that's why he's still there,
representing Tennessee in the United States senate.
- He wouldn't acknowledge the separation.
- Nope, he's the only US Senator to refuse to leave
when the Confederate Delegation does.
He stays in the Senate.
That's why Lincoln picks him as his running-mate in 1864.
When Lincoln runs for reelection,
he's in a tough race against George McClellan,
he's really worried about losing
a broad coalition of white Northerners
who think the war's not going very well.
There have been riots in New York City, in 1863.
When Lincoln runs for reelection in 1864,
he doesn't run as a Republican,
he runs as a Union Party candidate.
And what he does, to do that, is drop
his abolitionist running-mate from Maine, Hannibal Hamlin,
and pick up this, you know, scrappy Democrat
from Tennessee, Andrew Johnson.
It's Union Party. It's a two party ticket.
- The black soldiers were fairly easy to recruit
for the Union army?
- [Stephen] Well it took some doing.
- [Norman] Did it?
- It did take some doing..
Black men had volunteered to serve the Union
from Northern cities at secession.
So when the shots are fired at Fort Sumter,
black communities all over the North
hold indignation meetings, they volunteer their services.
In many cases, actually, those black communities
had been asking for the right to join their state militas
for a decade or more, and had been--
- [Norman] It really is based on state militias primarily,
isn't it?
- And they'd been refused and refused and refused,
and here and there a symbolic unit has been admitted,
but mostly they haven't been.
And the state where they're first,
that first opens recruiting to black men,
by federal government allows the governor of Massachusetts
to begin recruiting for a black regiment,
at the end of 1862.
- [Norman] Is that the famous 54th?
- [Stephen] The 54th Massachusetts, that's right.
So Governor John Andrew goes out into the world and says,
"OK, we need to enlist black men in the Union army.
What do we do?"
And he gets his brain-trust of white abolitionist leaders,
and they look around at each other and say,
"We better talk to the black activists."
And so the white brain-trust then
basically turns the recruiting over to the black activists,
who actually know the people on the ground who can do this.
And what the black activists discover is
there's some resistance. - [Norman] Is there?
- Not resistance because they don't support
the Union against the Confederacy,
but because they don't believe that the Union
is fighting a war of emancipation.
they don't believe it yet.
- [Norman] This is pre- or post-1863?
- This is just before the Emancipation Proclamation.
But even after the Emancipation Proclamation,
they, in fact, begin recruiting for the 54th
on the promise of equal pay and equal treatment.
And then, lo and behold, they discover they're not
going to be paid the same wages as white soldiers.
And there's actually a movement
to boycott the 54th among black activists.
It's not terribly successful.
But, you know, the 54th marches through Boston
in May of 1863, on its way to South Carolina.
And there are 1,000 men, 1,000 black men in that regiment,
about 40 of them are from the city of Boston.
- Really?
- Yeah, so many black Bostonians
feel that it's not OK to serve in a unit
that's not being offered terms of absolute equality.
Because black soldiery is going to be the ticket
to equal citizenship, and if we're being treated unequally
from the get-go, no way.
- What was the application or the use for black soldiers?
I mean, of course, they'd be in extreme, doubly dangerous
situation if they were fighting Confederates,
and certainly if they were captured,
and there were instances of that, too.
- [Stephen] Yep, massacres at Fort Pillow
and at the Crater, yeah, yeah.
- But were they ever used as, say, for fighting out west?
Which would relieve some of the pressure on the Union--
- They were. One of the first black units to be mobilized,
7th Cavalry, includes black soldiers,
and there were other units in the West,
and black units are moved to the West,
and they do a lot of garrison duty and fatigue duty.
Digging and entrenching.
And, actually, for that reason,
die of disease at higher rates than white soldiers do.
Because an army that sits
is an army that begins to die of disease.
And garrison and fatigue duty do both of those things.
- [Norman] They were on a lot of burial details, too,
which I suppose expedited that problem.
- Also a very, very dangerous line of work, yeah.
So there are a lot of black soldiers
doing that kind of work out west,
and growing number as the War goes on,
'cause recruitment does begin to build
and become very successful, and the 1st regiment, the 54th,
and its sister regiment, the 55th,
had to be recruited from all across the North,
the upper north, and Canada, but later on, individual states
are very easily recruiting regiments,
even states with as small black population
as Connecticut or Rhode Island can do it.
- [Norman] Without concern about equal pay?
- Well, they continue fighting that fight
throughout the War,
and there are pay strikes within the regiments,
occasionally there are strikes that lead to courts martial
and to executions of black soldiers.
There were some very, very difficult and ugly moments
in the history of black soldiery before the moment in late 1864,
where virtually every black soldier is finally
gets equal pay and, eventually, retroactively, equal pay.
By the end of the war, the principle of equality
has been established,
but it does take until the end of the War.
- And they are fighting out there in the West?
- They're fighting out there in the West.
- This would include the Buffalo Soldiers?
- [Stephen] Well later on, yes.
They form the core of what become
the Buffalo Soldiers later on, yep.
- One of the provisions, or by-products I guess,
of Appomattox, was there a Freedmen's Bureau?
There must've been even before that.
- [Stephen] Yeah, so the Freedmen's Bureau had been
authorized by Congress earlier, and begins facilitating
labor relationships in the occupied South,
even before Lee surrenders his army.
The Freedmen's Bureau was designed to do
a bunch of different things at once.
It was designed to model
a kind of free labor relationship
between former slaveholders and former slaves,
and to broker contracts that could
smooth over that transition,
to serve as a kind of court of, really, first resort
for both freed people and for former slaveholders,
as they negotiated those relationships.
And generally came,
because freed people treated it this way,
as the place of first resort
for grievances about their treatment,
especially treatment in places
where there were not any, or many,
US soldiers on the ground.
- [Norman] Was there any kind of a political consideration
in the Union army and its commanders to maintain
the black and white armies in such a way
that the casualties would be proportionate.
In other words, not to put black units
in particular harm's way?
- [Stephen] There is a variety of different calculuses
about that.
On the one hand,
there are abolitionists and pro-emancipation politicians
and generals who really want black troops
to have the opportunity to demonstrate
their fighting ability,
and that explains why the 54th ends up in front
at Fort Wagner in '63, in the summer of 1863.
- [Norman] There were heavy casualties.
- Very heavy casualties.
The cynics would say it proves
a black man can stop a bullet as good as a white man.
Others might say it demonstrated their courage under fire
in a way that made it more difficult for naysayers to say,
"They won't fight. They'll run.
"They'll fold under pressure."
'Cause that clearly wasn't anymore the case
for black soldiers than it was for white soldiers.
Of course, the fighting record of the black regiments
is just as mixed as the fighting regiment,
fighting record of the white regiments.
So it doesn't do to create a picture of undue heroism here,
but it's a pretty equal fighting record.
- [Norman] Were they used, black soldiers,
in the occupation of the South after the War?
- [Stephen] They were.
They made up a very large, disproportionately large,
proportion of the Union army by the end of the War
because they rotated in relatively late in the War,
had volunteered in very large numbers.
The enlistment rate among black Northeners is much bigger
than the enlistment rate among white Northeners.
It's about 75% of eligible black men served the Union army.
The rate for white soldiers is much less than that.
- [Norman] Remarkable.
The rate for black soldiers serving, mostly as volunteers,
actually is almost the same rate
as the rate of Confederates under a draft.
So what this means is that by the end of the War,
there are 100,000 black men in the field.
That's a very large proportion
of the Union forces in the field,
relative to the black population of the North,
which is just a couple of percent.
So what it means is that there are a lot of black troops
doing occupation duty in the early months of the peace.
- [Norman] Did occupation duty
include such things as suppressing the Ku Klux Klan?
- [Stephen] Well it would eventually mean that, yeah.
The Klan is formed in the 1st winter after the surrender
and becomes a major force on the landscape by 1866.
Its national leader is the former Confederate general
Nathan Bedford Forrest, the man
whose troops committed the massacre at Fort Pillow. - [Norman] At Fort Pillow.
- [Stephen] Who had himself been a slave trader
before the War, who for a variety of reasons,
this is the right organization for him,
and he's the right man for the organization.
But the Ku Klux Klan is the largest,
but by no means the only,
white paramilitary force on the ground
in the South in the early years after the War.
There are lots of more local organizations
and regional organizations that do the same work.
And basically what they constitute is
an anti-occupation force,
that is a force trying to undo the work
that the Freedmen's Bureau
and the federal army that supports it are trying to do.
To reestablish a hierarchy of social and political
and especially labor arrangements,
that force black people into a subordinate position
in the society and the economy.
Which of course means preventing them from voting,
but in 1865 and '66, that's not an issue yet.
It will become an issue,
and the Klan will get involved in that, but early on,
it's very, very clear:
the Klan is about trying to recreate, as far as possible,
the economic and social hierarchies
that had existed before the Confederate surrender.
- [Norman] Is there any kind of an extended,
I'll call it a propaganda machine in the South
after the War has ended,
to speak out against the Freedmen's Bureau,
to speak out against the occupation forces?
- Sure, although under occupation
it's difficult to, you know, publish a newspaper
that's calling for rebellion against Union authority.
Remember, this is hard for us to remember,
because we're so used to thinking
of Appomattox as the end of the War,
but Appomattox was only the surrender of Lee's army.
And even after the final Confederate armies
had surrendered a couple of moths later,
I think Stan Watie's Confederate Cherokee brigades
surrenders in June,
and I think that's the final Confederate army to surrender,
although a military historian may correct me.
- [Norman] Sure, Kirby Smith out there in Texas.
- OK, OK.
But the Union forces on the ground
didn't think that they were at peace.
They knew that they were an occupying force.
They knew that they were still working under the war power.
And Andrew Johnson, as bad a reputation as he has,
and deserves for his later opposition
to all forms of reconstruction and black citizenship,
Andrew Johnson understands,
at least in the first six to eight, maybe 12 months,
of his presidency, that the Confederacy
is only provisionally defeated,
and that defeat needs to be ratified on the ground
by a significant occupation that secures
the peace in a meaningful way.,
and establishes the terms for it.
- Well, from a political standpoint, though, I mean,
freedom of speech, even in the defeated South,
1st Amendment and all that,
possible to put out an editorial or an editorial cartoon
when you're saying something to the effect of well,
"Congress is against us," or "The President is against us."
"Vote for this, vote for that."
- [Stephen] There are such things.
It's much harder to do that in the occupied,
in former Confederacy,
in the occupied former slave states,
than it is to do in the North.
In the North, there are all kinds
of vitriolic, open attacks against
the Republicans, against Lincoln while he's alive,
against Johnson, against the Radicals in Congress,
when they're alive, and those attacks
take the Freedmen's bureau head on,
create arguments that say, you know,
"If you're a white man in Pennsylvania
"and you vote for the Republicans,
"look what you're voting for.
"You're voting for a free lunch for the freed men
"and more taxes for the white working man."
I mean really the same kind of zero-sum politics
of racial antipathy that we could find in the 21st century.
You know, previewed and tried out
in the North in 1866.
And that's the beginning of a kind of national politics,
a backlash against slave emancipation,
that I would argue we're still living with.
- We have quite the image here
that kind of smacks of, oh I don't know,
something from Roman antiquity or something
in the scale of it.
- [Stephen] Yeah, so this is called "Mustering Out."
This is a very, very beautiful drawing.
It's actually a pencil drawing, a sketch,
that gets turned into an engraving
and I think is published in Harper's
and a number of other places right after the war.
And it's an image
that conjures up the dignity, and the power,
and the victory of black military force,
and weds it, literally weds it in this case,
to black domesticity liberated from slavery.
So the black family unleashed from slavery
through black men's force of arms,
and implicitly, at least,
women's activity on the home front.
Their prominence in this image suggests, you know,
that prominence as well.
- [Norman] Were slaves in the South, obviously,
although there were some in the North, too, of course,
before the Emancipation Proclamation
and after, technically, but were slaves legally married?
What sort of domestic arrangements did they have?
- So slavery, the law of slavery
is antithetical to marriage, right?
Because marriage, in the 19th century especially,
creates certain kind of property relationships
and responsibilities between a husband and a wife,
a very unequal set of responsibilities,
Coverture, the principle the husband
owns his wife's wages, owns his children's wages,
in some sense, in a limited way,
not for criminal purposes, owns his family.
Now obviously, a slave who is the property of another person
cannot own anything legally,
especially cannot own another person
who is themselves a slave.
So when there are, there are many, many, many
marriages among slaves
and many slaves earnestly considered themselves
to be married.
It may even be that their owners consider them to be married
and marry them or have a minister marry them,
but marriage has no legal force, no legal force whatsoever.
There are efforts in some,
in Louisiana, and a few other places,
to ameliorate slavery by giving
those marriages some legal force and saying
that married slaves can't be separated
from one another by sale,
but those moves are completely impossible to sustain
'cause the economics of slavery
require that slaves be separated from one another
all the time.
- So after the War, were any of these things
kind of settled out in terms of the paperwork?
- [Stephen] So one of the first things
that the Union occupation is interested in establishing,
and the freed people themselves are interested in establishing,
is solemnizing unions that had previously been,
lacked the force of law.
And so what the Union forces come in and do
is create a kind of bureaucratic form
that allows people to say,
"We have been married in our own eyes since X,
"these children are our children."
And, therefore, what do you do?
Retroactively create bonds of kinship
that are bonds of inheritance.
So property can be exchanged, right?
So property has clear movement, right?
- [Norman] Yes, you need that as a legal basis--
- [Stephen] Absolutely, you need the legal foundation
for property, I mean, and that's what
marriage and inheritance had always provided,
and now former slaves are very eager
to be part of that regime as well.
- Were there kind of national conventions
of the Freedmen's Bureau and freed slaves?
Did it become a national force?
- [Stephen] Yeah, so black Northerners
had been meeting in conventions since at least 1830.
they'd been holding regional,
Northern national conventions they called them,
but they were really mostly of Northerners.
- [Norman] Here's one here,
I guess, or is this a slightly later one?
- [Stephen] This is later, this is actually 1865
or '66, I think.
There are a number of conventions in
that are state conventions and national conventions,
but in 1864, in Syracuse, they convene the first
really, truly national convention,
because it not only includes delegates from states
where slavery's been outlawed already,
but delegates from states that are under Union occupation
or under only partial Union occupation.
So in 1864 in Syracuse, you have delegates
from North Carolina, delegates from Virginia,
delegates from Louisiana,
and by 1865 and on into the late 1860s and '70s,
you get a national black convention movement
that includes African Americans, men and now women also,
from all over the United States,
coming together to talk about the issues
that are central to their concern.
- Were there instances in which a former slaveowner
would actually get in touch with his slave and say,
"You know, why don't you come back
"and I'll pay you this time around?"
- Well yeah, and if I may I'd like to read you one,
'cause it's one of my favorite documents.
In the summer of 1865, a former slaveholder in Tennessee,
named Colonel PH Anderson, wrote to his former slave
Jordan Anderson to say words to the effect of
"Will you please come back? I need you for the harvest.
"You can have your freedom and wages."
And Jordan Anderson writes a long letter,
not a very long letter, but a letter worth lingering over,
back to his old master: "Dayton, Ohio, August 7th, 1865.
"To my old master, Colonel PH Anderson,
"Big Spring, Tennessee.
"Sir, I got your letter and was glad to find
"you had not forgotten Jordan,
"and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again
"promising to do better for me than anybody else can.
"I have often felt uneasy about you.
"I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this,
"for harboring Rebs they found at your house.
"I suppose they never heard about your going
"to Colonel Martin's to kill the Union soldier
"that was left by his Company in their stable.
"Although you shot at me twice before I left you,
"I did not want to hear of your being hurt
"and I'm glad you are still living.
"It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again
"and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Alan,
"Esther and Green and Lee.
"Give my love to them all and tell them I hope we will meet
"in the better world, if not in this.
"I would've gone back to see you when I was working
"the Nashville hospital, but one of the neighbors told me
"Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got the chance.
"I want to know particularly what the good chance is
"you propose to give me.
"I'm doing tolerably well here.
"I get $25 a month, with vittles and clothing,
"have a comfortable home for Mandy,
"the folks here call her Mrs. Anderson,
"and the children, Millie, Jane, and Grundy
"go to school and are learning well.
"The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher.
"They go to Sunday school,
"and Mandy and me go to church regularly.
"We are kindly treated.
"Sometimes we overhear others saying,
"The colored people were slaves down in Tennessee.
"The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks,
"but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee
"to belong to Colonel Anderson."
And here we hear Anderson, Jordan, switch registers here.
"Many darkies would've been proud as I used to was
"to call you master," and he switches back.
"Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me,
"I will be able to better decide
"whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.
"As to my freedom, which you say I can have,
"there's nothing to be gained on that score.
"I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost Marshal
"General of the Department in Nashville.
"Mandy says she'd be afraid to go back without some proof
"you were sincerely disposed to treat us justly and kindly,
"and we've concluded to test your sincerity
"by asking you to send us our wages
"for the time we served you.
"This will make us forget and forgive old scores,
"and rely on your justice and friendship in the future.
"I served you faithfully for 32 years, and Mandy 20.
"At $25 a month for me and two dollars a week for Mandy,
"our earnings would amount to $11,680.
"Add to this the interest for the time our wages
"has been kept back, and deduct what you paid
"for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me,
"and pulling a tooth for Mandy,
"and the balance will show what we are, in justice,
"entitled to.
"Please send the money by Adams Express
"in care of V Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio.
"If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past,
"we can have little faith in your promises in the future.
"We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes
"to the wrongs which you and your fathers
"have done to me and my fathers,
"making us toil for you for generations without recompense.
"Here I draw my wages every Saturday night,
"but in Tennessee there was never any payday
"for the Negroes,
"any more than for the horses and cows."
And here he quotes the Bible.
"Surely there will be a day of reckoning
"for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.
"In answering this letter, please state
"if there would be any safety for my Millie and Jane,
"who are now grown-up and both good-looking girls.
"You know how it was with Matilda and Catherine.
"I would rather stay here and starve and die
"if it comes to that than have my girls brought to shame
"by the violence and wickedness of their young masters.
"You will also please state if there have been any school
"opened for the colored children in your neighborhood.
"The great desire of my life now is to give my children
"an education and have them form virtuous habits.
"PS, say Howdy to George Carter
"and thank him for taking the pistol from you
"when you were shooting at me.
"Your old servant, Jordan Anderson."
- That is a remarkable letter
with many currents and undercurrents in it.
The thing that maybe fascinates me above all,
is that it still exists, that the recipient saved it.
- [Stephen] So there's a slightly different story to that
it turns out.
There is a real Jordan Anderson.
We saw a picture of him. And a real Amanda Anderson.
They really did, they were the property
of PH Anderson in Big Springs, Tennessee.
And they did write a letter to him in August 1865.
That letter probably was sent to him,
but where it appeared was in the Cincinnati Commercial.
So V Winters, who was an abolitionist lawyer,
the V Winters referred to in the letter,
sent the letter to a local newspaper in Ohio.
It was reprinted in the Cincinnati paper,
then reprinted in the New York Tribune,
and so now we have it, reprinted,
became widely circulated in this moment in 1865,
and that's why we have it.
It's caused some people to doubt the authenticity of the letter,
but actually a very fine historian named Roy Finkenbine
has actually gone back, is writing a book
about Jordan Anderson now,
and virtually everything in here can be authenticated.
- [Norman] Really? - Yeah.
- So that is the letter as written.
- It's for real, yeah.
- It has these incredible, as you say,
shifts of tone and voice,
and irony, and then sarcasm, and sincerity.
It's just very powerful.
- The drama of the emancipation
often leads us to paint it in monochromatic tones, right?
To treat it as a kind of good and evil, black and white,
the forces of the rebel alliance
and the imperial stormtroopers, right?
But, in fact, what we're looking at
is a world of the same complexity as ours,
and people who lived in a variety of registers,
and a variety of ways, including former slaves.
- [Norman] Did the Civil War bring about an overall,
not just a black-and-white awareness,
but any kind of a sense that there should be
kind of an inclusive society, in general,
including all races.
- There was a moment
among some Americans in the late 1860s,
when emancipation had been achieved
and reconstruction was moving forward,
when the principle of equal citizenship
had first been enacted into law with the Civil Rights Act,
and then become part of the Constitution
with the 14th Amendment,
when it began to seem as though universal humanity,
universal citizenship, universal suffrage,
even including for women, unbelievably,
might be the order of the day.
And it was possible to imagine such a thing.
- [Norman] Well this has got a sense of inclusiveness here.
- [Stephen] Uncle Sam's Thanksgiving dinner.
Come one, come all, free and equal.
But this is really the high tide of that,
the moment when the 14th Amendment
has just entered the Constitution,
the 15th Amendment is about to be ratified,
the 1st black men are entering the halls of Congress,
you know, really a moment when it seems
like anything is possible.
Very quickly, this moment would shut down.
This moment, in fact, in many ways was already shutting down
as it was happening.
But very quickly the countervailing forces
would squash this moment,
would really smother it in its cradle in many ways,
and leave us with a much more complicated
and conflictual world that we live in today.
- [Norman] Well it's intriguing that
even in the defeated South, pretty quickly,
politicians reintegrated into Congress,
into the national political scene,
got control quickly enough to turn things around.
Yeah, and in some places so quickly
that nothing, that no reconstruction
in Virginia, for example, or Georgia, really.
In other places, the weight of the black population
is so enormous, in South Carolina and Mississippi,
that, coupled with sustained federal occupation,
and sometimes re-occupation to fight the Klan,
or Klan-like forces, reconstruction could go on
all the way into the middle-late 1870s.
Reconstruction didn't have force
throughout those states in those years, really.
There were garrisons in the capitals,
and a few garrisons around the states,
and in the orbit of those garrisons
there was some semblance of democracy.
But outside of those areas, really the rule of,
the rule of white men and, more specifically,
the rule of white men of property,
became the order of the day.
[Norman] - Steve Kantrowitz, thank you for sharing
some insights into the road to Appomattox
and the road past Appomattox, too.
- [Stephen] It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
- I'm Norman Gilliland and I hope you'll join me
the next time around for a University Place Presents .