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History See other History Articles Title: Historian suggests Southerners defeated Confederacy Q & A - DAVID WILLIAMS Historian suggests Southerners defeated Confederacy Valdosta State professor pens ‘Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War’ By JIM AUCHMUTEY The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sunday, August 24, 2008 Generations of students have been taught that the South lost the Civil War because of the North’s superior industry and population. A new book suggests another reason: Southerners were largely responsible for defeating the Confederacy. In “Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War” (New Press, $27.95), historian David Williams of Valdosta State University lays out some tradition-upsetting arguments that might make the granite brow of Jefferson Davis crack on Stone Mountain. In a new book on the Civil War, Valdosta State University historian David Williams shows how the Confederacy wasn’t so much defeated by the Union as scuttled by its own disunity. MEET THE AUTHOR David Williams will discuss and sign "Bitterly Divided" at 7 p.m. Sept. 18. A Cappella Books/Opal Gallery, 484C Moreland Ave. N.E. Atlanta. 404-681-5128. www.acappellabooks.com LIVING “With this book,” wrote Publishers Weekly, “the history of the Civil War will never be the same again.” Actually, historians have long fallen into two camps in explaining the Confederacy’s demise — one stressing the Union’s advantages, the other the South’s divisions. Williams gives vivid expression to the latter view, drawing on state and local studies done primarily in the past two decades. The 49-year-old South Georgia native discussed his interpretations in an interview from Valdosta. Q: You write that most Southerners didn’t even want to leave the Union. A: That’s right. In late 1860 and early 1861, there were a series of votes on the secession question in all the slave states, and the overwhelming majority voted against it. It was only in the Deep South, from South Carolina to Texas, that there was much support for secession, and even there it was deeply divided. In Georgia, a slight majority of voters were against secession. Q: So why did Georgia secede? A: The popular vote didn’t decide the question. It chose delegates to a convention. That’s the way slaveholders wanted it, because they didn’t trust people to vote on the question directly. More than 30 delegates who had pledged to oppose secession changed their votes at the convention. Most historians think that was by design. The suspicion is that the secessionists ran two slates — one for and one supposedly against — and whichever was elected, they’d vote for secession. Q: You say the war didn’t start at Fort Sumter. A: The shooting war over secession started in the South between Southerners. There were incidents in several states. Weeks before Fort Sumter, seven Unionists were lynched in Tallahatchie County, Miss. Q: Was the inner civil war ever resolved? A: No. As a result, about 300,000 Southern whites served in the Union army. Couple that with almost 200,000 Southern blacks who served, and that combined to make almost a fourth of the total Union force. All those Southerners who fought for the North were a major reason the Confederacy was defeated. Q: In the spring of 1862, the Confederacy enacted the first draft in American history. Planters had an easy time getting out of it, didn’t they? A: Very easy. If they owned 20 or more slaves, they were pretty much excused from the draft. Some of them paid off draft officials. Early in the war, they could pay the Confederate government $500 and get out of the draft. Q: You use the phrase “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” several times. Does this history anger you? A: I don’t think it would be unfair to say that. It seems like the common folk were very much ignored and used by the planter elite. As a result, over half a million Americans died. My great-great-grandfather was almost one: John Joseph Kirkland. He was a poor farmer in Early County, no slaves. He was 33, just under draft age, and had five children at home. He went ahead and enlisted so he could get a $50 bonus. A year later, he lost a leg at the Battle of Chancellorsville. Q: One of the biggest problems for the South was a lack of food. Why? A: That does seem strange, because we think of the South as a vast agricultural region. But the planters were growing too much cotton and tobacco and not enough food. Cotton and tobacco paid more. Q: You say the Confederate army stripped the fields of much of the produce and livestock there was, leaving civilians hungry. That sounds like Sherman’s troops marching through Georgia. A: It was very much like that. Q: When they couldn’t feed their families, Southern women started food riots. There was a big one in Richmond. Were there any in Georgia? A: Every major city in Georgia had food riots. We’ve documented more than 20. In Atlanta, a woman walked into a store on Whitehall Street and drew a revolver and told the rest of the women to take what they wanted. They moved from store to store. Q: The deprivations at home led to a very high desertion rate among Confederates. How bad was it? A: By 1864, two-thirds of the Army was absent with or without leave. It got worse after that. Q: There was a sort of Underground Railroad for deserters? A: Yes. It surprised me that many Confederate deserters could count on the support of slaves to hide them and move them from one location to another. Q: How important were black Southerners in the outcome of the war? A: They were very important to undermining the Confederate war effort. When slaves heard that Abraham Lincoln had been elected, many of them thought they were free and started leaving plantations. So many eventually escaped to Union lines that they forced the issue. As other historians have said, Lincoln didn’t free the slaves; the slaves freed themselves. Q: If there was so much division in the South and it was such an important part of the Confederacy’s downfall, why isn’t this a larger part of our national memory? A: The biggest reason is regional pride. It gratified white Southerners to think the South was united during the Civil War. It gratified Northerners to believe they defeated a united South. Q: Why do you think so much Southern identity has been wrapped up in the Confederacy? We’re talking about four of the 400 years since Jamestown was settled. It seems like the tail wagged the dog — and now you tell us the tail is pretty raggedy. A: I think popular memory got wrapped up in race. Most white Southerners opposed secession, but they were also predominantly racists. After the war, they wanted to keep it a white man’s country and maintain their status over African-Americans. It became easy for Southerners to misremember what happened during the war. A lot of people whose families had opposed the Confederacy became staunch neo-Confederates after a generation or two, mainly for racist reasons. Q: Has this knowledge affected your feelings about Southern heritage? Did you have an opinion about the former Georgia flag? A: I had a graduate student who did his thesis on that. He looked into the origins of the 1956 state flag and concluded that the Confederate battle emblem was put there not to honor our ancestors but as a statement against school integration. Q: So you saw no reason to defend that flag? A: No, not in the least. Q: Have the Sons of Confederate Veterans been to see you? A: Yes. They didn’t really deny anything I had to say, but they weren’t real happy to hear it. I told them, “Well, I’m not making this up.”
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#2. To: Sam Houston (#0)
A: Very easy. If they owned 20 or more slaves, they were pretty much excused from the draft. Some of them paid off draft officials. Early in the war, they could pay the Confederate government $500 and get out of the draft. This "scholarly work" should be taken lightly, if at all. Rich man poor man? Abe let people off if they had $200 cash money and he jailed untold hundreds of Northerners for objecting to the war. This author needs to look for another line of work.
Lincoln is a curiosity to me. I'm not sure if I like or despise him. I wonder what would have happened if he had lived. Things such as the illegitimate 14th amendment come to mind. And reconstruction. I think if that he had not been murdered we would have a much clearer picture of him.
True... In 1848 he agreed with the world revolutionaries that it was a right and a duty of any people to rise up and abolish by force any government that no longer served its people. Then in 1861 he reverted to the menu of the typical politician that has power and will do anything to maintain the status quo. Crush dissent. The last straw was Abe trying to jail a Judge of the Supreme Court, that was too much.
#7. To: Cynicom (#6)
I never heard of that. I have heard about jailing dissenters but not supreme court judges.
Then in 1861 he reverted to the menu of the typical politician that has power and will do anything to maintain the status quo. Crush dissent. The last straw was Abe trying to jail a Judge of the Supreme Court, that was too much. Its hard to judge what the proper response to the southern succession would be. The Southern succession was far from totally supported. They had dubious elections to conventions. The Confederacy itself did now allow succession from their states without a fight either. So areas that wanted to be part of the US weren't allowed to join the Union. Then you have the issue of the millions of slaves who had lived in the United States for generations. We had a responsibility to liberate our countrymen from slavery.
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