This argument, a staple among those seeking to redefine the conflict as an abstract battle over states rights rather than a fight to preserve slavery, does not hold up. 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. In fact, they'd say, their ancestors had nothing at all to do with slavery. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine But there is no reason to believe that all or even a hefty minority of these white soldiers were slave owners themselves. | But theres no evidence to suggest that significant numbers of Black soldiers fought under the Confederate banner against Union soldiers. If you purchase an item through these links, we receive a commission. Most of the Confederate soldiers never owned slaves and didnt fight the battle because of slavery. The population of the Union was 18.5 million. 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. 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. Your membership is the foundation of our sustainability and resilience. Although Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland never formally seceded from the Union, they were not "Northern" states in either a geographic or a cultural sense. Specifically, we'll be assessing the statements from "the Truth about Confederate History" reproduced in the shaded box below, which claim to be separating myth from fact (while doing anything but): FACT: Entirely untrue. More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. As a crude analogy, how many PFCs and corporals in Iraq and Afghanistan today own their own homes? Integrated Public Use Microdata Series at the University of Minnesota. It also did not apply to slave states that had not seceded from the Union (Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri), to the Virginia counties that had opted to break away from that state (and were soon to be admitted to the Union as the state of West Virginia), nor to the parts of the Confederacy that were deemed to be no longer in a state of rebellion against the United States (Tennessee and lower Louisiana) because they were occupied by Union troops. She's called it a great law., Katie Hobbs voted for allowing a baby who survives an abortion that the hospital would refuse medical care and allow the baby to die on a cold metal tray.. This included men in all the Confederate states, plus Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and. 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. Yet more than one in every four volunteers that first year lived with parents who were slaveholders. Farmers comprised 48 percent of the civilian occupations in the Union. NOT in the North! As the Civil War progressed, desertion amongst Confederate soldiers infected the Confederate Army like a poisonous cancer. Most of these soldiers were farmers and the vast majority had direct contact with slavery. Ballot harvesting altered the outcome of a city council election in Yuma County, Arizona. One in every ten volunteers in 1861 did not own slaves themselves but lived in households headed by non family members who did. Kentucky and Missouri were both claimed as member states by the Confederacy and were represented in the Confederate Congress, and Maryland remained in the Union primarily because U.S. troops quickly imposed martial law and garrisoned the state to head off secession efforts. But it's simply not true in any meaningful way. We did not hear from him. Fact check:Decades-old essay about Declaration of Independence signatories is partly false, You can use statistics to demonstrate a lot of things that arent relevant or true, said Calvin Schermerhorn, a history professor at Arizona State University. Observers will note that the incidence of slaveholding was highest in agricultural lowlands, where rivers provided both transportation for bulk commodities and periodic floods that replenished the soil, and lowest in mountainous regions like Appalachia. Some eagerly awaited reunion with their own families. On the Northern side, the rose-colored myth of the Civil War is that the blue-clad Union soldiers and their brave, doomed leader, Abraham Lincoln, were fighting to free enslaved people. (Some of the slaves at White Haven eventually drifted off during the Civil War; any that remained were freed when Missouri's constitutional convention abolished slavery in January 1865.). 2023 Smithsonian Magazine 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. 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. Misinformation about the antebellum South, the Civil War, and the practice of slavery in the U.S. is rife on the Internet. The claim that only 1.6% of U.S. citizens owned slaves in 1860 is MISSING CONTEXT, based on our research. The census also reported the percentage of families that owned slaves in each state. We need your help. Compiled from the census of 1860 Copy 1, Decennial Census Official Publications - 1860. subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here. The Confederacy produced nearly all of the nation's rice which amounted to 225 million bushels. MSJE, as it is called, showcases the culture and heritage of the Jews who lived in the 13 southern states over a period spanning some three centuries: from colonial America through the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement and up to this day. Mackey is an educator, a retired U. S. Air Force officer and a former human resources manager with a global company. By the end of the first day, Confederates had achieved the upper hand as the Union army established a new defensive line south of the town, with Confederates taking up a position opposite along Seminary Ridge. Its true that not every white person in the pre-Civil War South owned slaves. Historians, though, say that statistic is hugely misleading since it both wrongly factors in the entirety of the non-slave-owning states and ignores that families owned and had power over slaves, not just one individual adult. . In 1865, Moses made the long journey back to Gettysburg with McLeods brother-in-law to bring the body home. . The Union led corn production with 400 million bushels compared to the 250 million bushels in the Confederacy and 150 million bushels in the Border States. The percentage of population that owned slaves in the south is in single digits. However, theyre not the only ones with the means or motives to revise historyoften, the vanquished tell their own versions, too. He managed to limp off the field with the help of a camp servant by the name of Jim. "Very few of them were slaveholders, probably not more than a very few thousand," McPherson told us. Danny is based in Brooklyn, NY. 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. 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. He focuses on stories with a health/science bent and has reported some of his favorite pieces from the prow of a canoe. Lee freed his slaves several years before the war was over, and considerably earlier than his Northern counterparts. Nonetheless, the 1860 census recorded only 18 slaves in all of New Jersey. But indentured servitude, by definition, came nowhere close to chattel slavery. This is particularly useful in revealing political divisions or disputes within a state, although it takes some practice with the online query system to generate maps properly. McPherson said in researching his bookFor Cause and Comrades,he read the letters of about 60 Union soldiers from slave states and he can't recall a single one who owned slaves. For real Confederates from Robert E. Lee on down, camp slaves and other enslaved workersthe entire institution of slavery, reallywere crucial to the ultimate success of the army in the field and the Confederate insurgency as a whole. Tinkler said across Appalachia, support for secession was thin at the start of the war and as time went by, resistance increased. | In the vast majority of cases, each household (termed a "family" in the 1860 document, even when the group consisted of unrelated people living in the same residence) that owned slaves had only one slaveholder listed, the head of the household. Historians, though, say that grosslyunderrepresents the extent of slavery in the U.S. before the Civil War because it includes babies, children and people in states where slavery was illegal in the calculation. They fought the battle defending their homelands againstan invading army.. 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. Slavery in Delaware nonetheless ended with the adoption of that amendment in December 1865. Needless to say, men of modest means wereless likely to own slaves. In this way, many Confederates who did not enslave people went to war to protect not only slavery but to preserve the foundation of the only way of life they knew. If it refers to the federal government, then it's still false: the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States, was initially passed by the U.S. Senate on 8 April 1864, more than a year before the end of the Civil War (although it was not ratified by the requisite number of states until December 1865). They were up to their necks in it. For many tourists, no visit to Gettysburg is complete without retracing the steps General Robert E. Lees Army of Northern Virginia, those Confederates who crossed the open fields toward the Union line on Cemetery Ridge on July 3 in what is still popularly remembered as Picketts Charge. Once safe behind where the Union lines held strong, however, few turn around and acknowledge the hundreds of enslaved people who emerged from the woods to render assistance to the tattered remnants of the retreating men. But again, those slaves belonged to Grant's father-in-law, so Grant himself had no legal authority to set them free. We strive for accuracy and fairness. Closely related to Myth #2, the idea that the vast majority of Confederate soldiers were men of modest means rather than large plantation owners is usually used to reinforce the contention that the South wouldnt have gone to war to protect slavery. And their motivation for serving isn't taken into account by the numbers, since some may have been forced into service, and others may have seen fighting as a way out of . There is a bright side to the story of the Lost Cause: after generations, it appears to be fading. The Confederate States Army, also called the Confederate Army or the Southern Army, was the military land force of the Confederate States of America (commonly referred to as the Confederacy) during the American Civil War (1861-1865), fighting against the United States forces to win the independence of the Southern states and uphold and expand the institution of slavery. "Lastly, and most importantly, why did NORTHERN States outlaw slavery only AFTER the war was over?". Nevertheless, this. The closest we can get to that figure is an estimate that 300,000 men from states that allowed slavery put on the Union blue uniform. 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. The other battles listed above all lasted more than one day. 801 3rd St. S When asked why he didn't free his slaves earlier, Grant stated "Good help is so hard to come by these days.". 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. Though most crossed the Atlantic willingly, some Irish men and womenincluding criminals as well as simply the poor and vulnerablewere sentenced to indentured servitude in Ireland, and forcibly shipped to the colonies to carry out their sentences. 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 . If other museums refuse to provide that balance, well do so. Gallagher told us that there is no breakdown of which Union soldiers came from slave-owning families. 3 at Maricopa, Arizona, polling sites. 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. . Southerners who didn't ownslavesaspired to one day become slave-owners themselves one day. Some Confederate officers wanted to enlist enslaved people earlier: Gen. Patrick Cleburne proposed enlisting African American soldiers early in 1864, but Jefferson Davis rejected the suggestion and ordered it never to be discussed again. 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. But, as James W. Loewen writes for The Washington Post, it certainly wasn't just the slaveholdingelite who fought to maintain slavery. 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. 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. We dont know where Baldwin got his number, but it could be tied to an 1889 book written by Thomas Seaman Townsend, a private historian with a passion for recording the role of soldiers from New York in the Civil War. 'U.S. More than half the officers in 1861 owned slaves, and none of them lived with family members who were slaveholders. For example, the patriarch of a family might have been counted as the slave owner in the census, but other members of the household had authority to commit violence with impunity on enslaved people, he said. (In fact, only a small percentage of the population did. "', The only evidence that Union general (and later United States President) Ulysses S. Grant ever owned any slaves is a document he signed in 1859 that emancipated "my Negro man William" (i.e, William Jones), whom Grant stated in the document he had purchased from Frederick Dent (his father-in-law). "William T. Sherman had many slaves that served him until well after the war was over and did not free them until late in 1865.". Lees decision to bring his army north into free states in early May, following his victory at Chancellorsville, was fraught with danger given the dramatic shift in Union policy; his soldiers rear guard, the support staff of enslaved labor, were at risk of emancipation. Townsend doesnt say which "Southern" states he had in mind. From 1854 to 1859 Grant managed his father-in-law's farm, White Haven, where a number of slaves lived and worked. Chick-fil-A donates another $1.8 million to anti-LGBTQ groups, backtracking on its promise not to. Your Privacy Rights Greg @lblanconx360 replied to Daritys tweet, Yes- but in the case of SC, most of these were not large plantations like in Gone with the Wind on the coast, but were smaller farms. A second, separate schedule records the name of each slaveholder and lists the slave he or she owns. That contrasted starkly with the 24.9. 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. 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. Two years later, that number had not changed dramatically for the Union Army but had dropped to about 200,000 for the Confederate Army. magnificent study of the force that eventually became the Army of Northern Virginia. Updated: June 23, 2020 | Original: May 3, 2016. A Texas State Senate Resolution claims that most Confederate soldiers didn't own slaves. It was not about slavery, these advocates say, but about the right to secede from the Union. Based on 1860 Census results, 49 percent of Mississippi households owned slaves at the start of the Civil War, and. In the Border States there were 2.5 million free inhabitants and 500,000 enslaved people. Danny Lewis Hidden property served as a reference to the escaped slaves already living in southern Pennsylvania; orders had been handed down throughout the Confederate army to capture and return this property to the South. Kathy Hochul wants quarantine camps and imprisonment if youre suspected of having a disease. Black Confederate soldiers likely represented less than 1 percent of Southern black men of military age during that period, and less than 1 percent of Confederate soldiers. When you search for context the context very quickly arrives in terms of what was actually going on.. Once again, the historical record tells us their stories. Slavery played no role it the coming of the war, they say; how could it, when less than two percent (four percent, five percent) actually owned slaves? However, the version of history that the SCV is trying to tell is rooted in Lost Cause mythology,instead of confronting more difficult truths. In the official declaration of the causes of their secession in December 1860, South Carolinas delegates cited an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery. According to them, the Northern interference with the return of fugitive slaves was violating their constitutional obligations; they also complained that some states in New England tolerated abolitionist societies and allowed Black men to vote. As their shattered command fell back following their repulse, scores of camp slaves made their way out from the cover and protection of the woods in search of their owners and to assist the wounded. About the only periods in his life when he could conceivably have owned slaves would have been between 1840-46, when he was a U.S. Army officer stationed in Southern states (Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina), and 1859, when he was the superintendent of Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy (now Louisiana State University). In 1860, nearly 20% of households in seceding states owned slaves, he said. Not exactly. So while a slave owner was only counted once, other people and businesses, including railroad companies, could benefit from slavery as well, Schermerhorn said. With the inclusion of those who resided in nonfamily slaveholding households, the direct exposure to bondage among enlisted personnel was four of every nine. Whats the truth? With the exception of rice and tobacco, the Union had a clear agricultural advantage. Joseph T. Glatthaar, in his magnificent study of the force that eventually became the Army of Northern Virginia, lays out the evidence. . However, we will address it in the context of the political, economic, social, and constitutional atmosphere of the 1860s. Those were Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and Kentucky. Some likely anticipated the brutal punishment that accompanied their recapture (or punishment that might be meted out to family members in their absence), while others worried about how they might be treated once behind Union lines. ". 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. They swam in it, and no amount of willful denial can change that. Lieutenant Sidney Carters wounding at Gettysburg cut his life short, but before his death he requested that his camp slave, Dave, take everything he had and bring it home, where each item would be offered as a parting gift to his family members. As one reader wrote in aletter to the editor to the Columbia Daily Heraldin response to Powell's article,"Maury County is at a crucial point in its economic development. In the navy about one-third of the officers came from slaveholding States, yet remained faithful to the Union; while one-eighth of the Union army, or 300,000 men, were contributed by the Southern States.". To avoid confusion as to the source of the factual errors, and to prevent any misunderstanding about Levin's credentials, we have removed the pragraph. Blake Masters wants to privatize Social Security. A small number signed up for training, but theres no evidence they saw action before the wars end. The largest group was the Irish, followed by Germans, British, French, Poles, and Canadians. A rich mans war, but a poor mans fight became the cry of many southerners of modest means.". The purpose of the museum is to tell the story of the Confederate Soldier, Sailor, and Marine and it will provide facts for everyone to make their own mind up about the war. Virginia had the largest population of enslaved African Americans of any state in the Confederacy, and those slaves responded to the American Civil War (1861-1865) in a variety of ways. The regiments quartermaster reassured the family that the colonels items, including spyglasses, watch, toothbrush, and various memoranda books plus $59, were all safe under Kinciens care. When asked why he didn't free his slaves earlier, Grant stated "Good help is so hard to come by these days. The Confederate Congress played a role in that. 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. Since none of the Northern states had rebelled against the United States, the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to them. T he presidential election of 1860 deepened a growing chasm between divided Kentuckians. Many Northern civilians owned slaves. In Mississippi, 49 percent of families owned slaves, and in South Carolina, 46 percent did. HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate. Well provide these facts and allow the individual the opportunity to make up their mind as to what they believe.". The Confederacy led tobacco production with 225 million pounds compared to 110 million pounds produced in the Border States and 50 million pounds produced in the Union. New York Gov. Once released, they joined Union regiments or found their way to towns and cities across the North looking for work. By the time the war ended in 1865, about 180,000 Black men had served as soldiers in the U.S. Army. You don't have to talk to a Confederate apologist long before before you'll be told that only a tiny fraction of butternuts owned slaves. The first thing we did was reach out to Baldwin to learn his source. Chuck Baldwin, a fundamentalist pastor and columnist, made this case in a recent essay that appeared on his website and many others, including a fan page for Fox News Megyn Kelly. It records basic data about the free population, including names, sex, approximate age, occupation and value of real and personal property of each person in a household. In September of 1861, the U.S. Coast Survey published a . Four years later Burgwyns body was reinterred in Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina. Children of indentured servants were born free; slaves children were the property of their owners. Lee's army numbered 90,000 at its strongest and was organized into state-specific regiments and brigades, with about 55 percent of its men coming from the Upper South. A Note to our Readers "Designed to help secure plantation districts against slave revolts, this exemption policy inspired much class-based opposition to the Confederacy. Become a member! Of the 462,634 Confederate soldiers captured 247,769 were paroled on the field and 25,976 died in prison. It is not certain how many foreigners fought for the Confederacy, but the number seems to be in the tens of thousands. Danny Lewis is a multimedia journalist working in print, radio, and illustration. Many of them labored as cooks, butchers, blacksmiths and hospital attendants, and thousands of enslaved men accompanied Confederate officers as their camp slaves, or body servants. "Do you not realize that when Lincoln signed his (Emancipation) proclamation, there were over 300,000 slaveholders who were fighting in the Union army?" As the Confederate army reorganized in the weeks following the campaign, the thin ranks of many regiments were magnified by the absence of its enslaved. Jefferson Davis was their President. Joe enters into the invasion with much gusto, he noted, and is quite active in looking up hidden property.. #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. Enslaved and free black people provided even more labor than usual for Virginia farms when 89 percent of eligible white men served in Confederate armies. | READ MORE. 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. Download the official NPS app before your next visit. History has been skewed, and many times in society today many people try to make those soldiers out to be something they are not, said Tennessee state senator and SCV member Joey Hensley said at the groundbreaking, Powell reports. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! The U.S. had 395,216 slaveholders at that time, so about 1.4% of free people were classified as slave owners in the 1860 census, according to data archived by the Integrated Public Use.
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