Hendersonian Museum: slavery

Excerpts from "The Blue and the Gray:
The Story of the Civil War
as Told By Participants,
Volume One:
The Nomination of Lincoln
to the Eve of Gettysburg"
edited by
Henry Steele Commager,
New American Library,
1950 [and 1973].

From the
Foreword
by
Douglas Southall Freeman:

"Many hands filled the storehouse
from which Henry Steele Commager
drew the treasures that appear in the fascinating
pages of this long-desired collection.

Some survivors wrote of the eighteen-sixties
because they had tarnished reputations
to re-polish or grudges to satisfy."

(p. vii)

"In a few instances,
most notably that of General Grant,
memoirs were prepared because the public
literally demanded them."

(p. vii)

"The failure of some Southern writers
to find a publisher was responsible for the private
printing of numerous books and for the allegation,
never justified, that the North would not give
Southern writers a hearing.

One forgotten phase of this had its origin in the persistent
effort of certain schoolbook publishers to procure the 'adoption'
in the South of texts on American history written in partisan spirit
for Northern readers.

This salesmanship was met repeatedly
with pleas for the establishment in Richmond,
Atlanta or New Orleans of a publishing house
that would be 'fair to the South'.

Where a response was made to this appeal,
the fruit sometimes was a text as extreme as the one
that provoked it."

(p. vii)

"A study of the disputes of the eighteen-nineties involving
rival books of this type would startle a generation that assumes
an author's non-partisan approach as a matter of course."

(p. vii)

"Nearly always there is glamour to a 'lost cause'."

(p. viii)

"Lee had a magnificence that awed his soldiers,
who seldom cheered him; when Stonewall Jackson
came in sight, riding awkwardly on a poor horse, the rebel
yell nearly always would be raised."

(p. viii)

"The North had soldiers and seamen of like appeal,
but somehow the memory of nearly all these leaders
was forgotten in the changes of population incident to the
Westward movement and to expanded immigration.

Static Southern society had longer memory."

(p. viii)

"If these ... circumstances bear out Mr. Commager's
statement regarding the excellence of some Confederate
narratives, fair play requires a Southerner to put the emphasis
on that word narratives.

There certainly is not a like superiority
in the poetry.

Thomas DeLeon remarked in his
"Four Years in Rebel Capitals" that he had accumulated
1,900 wartime poems of the South, and later added greatly to his list:
'There were battle odes, hymns, calls to arms, paeans and dirges and prayers for peace --
many of them good, few of them great; and the vast majority, alas! wretchedly poor'."

(p. ix)

"Lee remains the demigod of the South and has there a place even Washington does not hold, but where may be found a poem on Lee that anyone would wish to make a permanent part of one's mental acquisition?"

(p. ix)

"Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the 300 and more articles reproduced in this notable collection is the humor that runs through nearly all of them and particularly
through those of Southern origin."

(p. ix)

"Laughter was the medicine for most of the ills visible to the men next in line, though fear and rebellious wrath and homesickness might be gnawing at the heart."

(p. x)

"Good cheer was not unnatural in the Union Regiments after July 1863, but
its persistence until the autumn of 1864 in most of the Southern forces, and particularly in the Army of Northern Virginia, is a phenomenon of morale.

The same thing may be said of the attitude of the men toward the manifest inferiority
of Southern military equipment.

The gray-coats laughed at their wagons and their harness, their tatters and their gaping shoes.

Again and again this stirs one who opens these volumes at random and reads the first paragraph on which the eye falls: were these men mocking death as a foe long outwitted, or were they assuming a heroism they did not possess?

Were they valiant or merely pretending?

It scarcely seemed to matter where some of them were or what they were doing:
they laughed their way from Manassas to Appomattox and even through the hospitals."

(p. x)

"From its very nature, freedom was born in travail.

Ignorant men sensed this vaguely; if at all; the literate re-read William Gordon and Washington Irving and steeled themselves to like hardship.

To some of the commanders, and above all to Lee, there daily was an inspiring analogy between the struggle of the Confederacy and that of Revolutionary America under the generalship of Lee's great hero, Washington.

Many another Southern soldier told himself the road was no more stony than the one that had carried his father and his grandfather at last to Yorktown.

If independence was to be the reward, patience, good cheer and the tonic of laughter would bring it all the sooner.

Those Confederates believed they were as good judges of humor as, say, of horses; and both they and their adversaries in blue regarded themselves as strategists or, at least, as competent critics of strategy.

Quick to perceive the aim of the marches they were called upon to make, they discussed by every campfire and on every riverbank the shrewdness or the blunders of the men who led them.

After the manner of youth in every land and of every era, they made heroes of the officers they admired and they denounced the martinets, but, in time, most of them learned from their discussion and, considering the paucity of their information, came to broad strategical conclusions their seniors would not have been ashamed to own.

Many of the diarists and letter writers were observant, too, and not infrequently recorded important fact no officer set down in any report.

If some of these writers let their vanity adorn their tale, the majority were of honest mind.

One somewhat renowned post-bellum lecturer who should have been an invaluable witness, progressively lost the truth of his narrative as he made it more and more dramatic and egocentric, but he did not have many fellow offenders outside the ranks of those known and branded prevaricators who bored their comrades of the U.C.V. or the G.A.R. as they told how 'they won' the battle or the war.

On the other hand, Mr. Commager quotes in these pages several veterans who wrote long after the conflict, without access to records, and yet were so astonishingly accurate that any psychologist, chancing on their memoirs, will wish he might have studied in person the mentality of the authors.

These men and women had no literary inhibitions other than those of a decency that is to be respected both for itself and for the contrasts it suggests with certain later writing on war and warriors."

(p. x and xi)

"... every man felt free to write of anything -- and considered himself as competent as free -- with the result that the source materials of the conflict are opulently numerous and almost bewilderingly democratic."

(p. xi)

"... the testimony of a boy who saw Grant once only may be preferred to that of a corps commander who conferred so often with 'Unconditional Surrender' that, in retrospect, he confused the details of the various interviews."

(p. xi and xii)

Douglas Southall Freeman
Westbourne,
Richmond, Virginia,
August 14, 1950

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From the
Introduction
by
Henry Steele Commager:

"We have fought six major wars in the last century or so [as of 1950],
and four since Appomattox, but of them all it is the Civil War that has left the strongest impression on our minds, our imagination, and our hearts."

(p. xiii)

"It has inspired more, and better, novels than any other of our wars and occasionally it excites evenHollywood to rise above mediocrity.

It has furnished our standards of patriotism, gallantry, and fortitude; it has given us our most cherished military heroes -- Lee and Jackson, Grant and Sherman, and Farragut, and a host of others, and it has given us, too, our greatest national hero and our greatest sectional one, Lincoln and Lee.

No other chapter in our history has contributed so much to our traditions and our folklore."

(p. xiii)

"...'It is well war is so terrible,
or
we should get too fond of it' ..."

[-- a quote from Robert Edward Lee]

(p. xiii)

"...'Damn the torpedoes -- full steam ahead' ..."

[a quote from Admiral David Glasgow Farragut]

(p. xiii)

"It was, in many respects, a curious war, one in which amenities were often preserved.

It could not begin until high-ranking officers of the army and navy had been permitted to resign and help organize a rebellion."

(p. xiv)

"... Northerners permitted Vallandigham to campaign openly against the war, and at the crisis of the conflict almost two million of them voted for the party that had formally pronounced the war a failure.

Journalists seemed to circulate at will, and Northern papers had correspondents in the South while Confederates got much of their information about Federal army movements from the Northern newspapers.

There was an immense amount of trading back and forth, some of it authorized or at least tolerated by the governments, and Sherman could say that Cincinnati furnished more supplies to the Confederacy than did Charleston.

Officers had been trained in the same schools and fought in the same armies and most of them knew one another or knew of one another...

There was a great deal of fraternization both among soldiers and civilians.

Pickets exchanged tobacco, food, and news; if Yankee officers did not marry Southern beauties as often as novelists imagined, there was at least some basis for the literary emphasis on romance."

(p. xiv)

"There were plenty of atrocity stories, but few atrocities.

There was a good deal of pillaging and vandalism -- as in all wars -- but little of that systematic destruction we know from two world wars or from the war in Vietnam.

On the whole, civilians were safe; there were crimes against property but few against persons, and women everywhere were respected."

(p. xiv)

"Both peoples subscribed to the same moral values and observed the same standards of conduct.

Both displayed that 'decent respect to the opinions of mankind' to which Jefferson had appealed three quarters of a century earlier.

Both were convinced that the cause for which they fought was just -- and their descendants still are.

Nor did the war come to an end, psychologically or emotionally, with Appomattox.

Politicians nourished its issues; patriotic organizations cherished its memories; scholars re-fought its battles with unflagging enthusiasm.

No other war has started so many controversies and for no other do they flourish so vigorously.

Every step in the conflict, every major political decision, every campaign, almost every battle, has its own proud set of controversies, and of all the military figures only Lee stands above argument and debate.

Was the election of Lincoln a threat to the South, and was secession justified?

Was secession a revolutionary or a constitutional act, and was the war a rebellion or an international conflict?"

(p. xiv and xv)

"Could the Confederacy ever have won the war, or was defeat foredoomed; if defeat was not foredoomed what caused it?

These and a thousand other questions are still avidly debated by a generation that has already forgotten the controversies of the Spanish War and the First World War.

Nor is it by chance that the cause lost on the battlefield should be celebrated in story and in history, or that victors and vanquished alike, should exalt its heroism and cherish its leaders.

Lee is only less of a hero than Lincoln, and the Federal Army boasts no figure so glamorous as Stonewall Jackson.

Novelists have been kinder to the Confederacy than to the Union, and so, too, in our own day [1950], the moving pictures and television."

(p. xvi)

"It was, in a sense, the last of the old wars and the first of the new.

It had many of the characteristics of earlier wars -- the chivalry that animated officers and men, and the mutual esteem in which the combatants held each other, for example; the old-fashioned weapons and tactics such as sabers and cavalry charges; the woeful lack of discipline; the pitiful inadequacy of medical and hospital services, of what we would now call service and supply, of any provision for welfare and morale; the almost total absence of any proper Intelligence service or adequate staff work, and the primitive state of maps; the casual and amateur air that pervaded it all.

But it was, too, in many and interesting respects, a modern war, one that anticipated the 'total' wars of the twentieth century.

It was the first in which the whole nation was involved, and it is probable that a larger proportion of the population, North as well as South, was actually in uniform than in any previous war of modern history.

It was the first in which there was an even partial control of the economy -- this largely in the South rather than in the more fortunate North.

It was the first in which a large-scale blockade was a really effective if not indeed a decisive weapon.

It was the first in which the railroad and the telegraph played a major role.

It involved almost every known form of warfare: large-scale battles, guerilla fighting, trench warfare, sieges and investments, bold forays into enemy coastal and inland waters, blockade, privateering, surface and sub-surface naval war, the war of propaganda and of nerves."

(p. xvi and xvii)

"Every war dramatizes the ordinary and accentuates the characteristic; more than any other in which we have ever been engaged the Civil War brought out in sharp relief those qualities that we think of as distinctively American.

The American was practical, experimental, inventive, intelligent, amateurish, equalitarian, sentimental, humorous, generous and moral.

He believed that the civil was superior to the military even in war, and that privates were as good as officers, that it was wrong to begin a war or to fight in a cause that was not just, that a war should be fought according to rules, and that moral standards should obtain in war as in peace.

Most of these qualities and principles were carried over from the civil to the military arena.

Thus the war discovered a people wholly unprepared, and never willing to prepare, either materially or psychologically.

Neither side ever really organized for war; neither ever used the whole of its resources -- though the South came far closer to this than the North; neither accepted the iron discipline which modern war imposes.

The war required the subordination of the individual to the mass, of the particular to the general interest, and of the local to the central government; but both Federals and Confederates indulged their individualism in the army and out, rejected military standards and discipline, selected officers for almost any but military reasons, pursued local and state interest at the expense of the national.

The war required organization and efficiency, but both sides conducted the war with monumental inefficiency -- witness the shambles of conscription, or of the procurement of ordinance or of finances.

The war required the husbanding of resources, but both sides wasted their resources, human and material -- witness the medical services, or desertion, or the indulgence of business as usual, especially in the North.

The Americans were an educated, informed, self-reliant and resourceful people, and the Civil War armies probably boasted the highest level of intelligence of any armies in modern history up to that time.

It took foreigners to remark this quality, however; Americans themselves took it for granted.

Everyone, as both Dicey and Trollope remarked in wonder, read newspapers, followed political debates, and had opinions on the war, slavery, politics, and everything else; almost everyone -- as an editor knows -- kept a diary or a journal."

(p. xvii and xviii)

"Thus the conduct of the war confounded both the critics and the prophets.

It was thought a people as unmilitary as the Americans could not fight a long war, or would not -- but they did.

It was thought that an agricultural South could not produce the materiel of war, but no single Southern defeat could be ascribed to lack of arms or equipment.

It was supposed that neither side could finance a major war, but both managed somehow, and though Confederate finances were a shambles the North emerged from the conflict richer than she had entered it."

(p. xviii)

"The Americans were a good-natured people, easygoing and careless, and in a curious sense these qualities carried over even into war.

Lincoln set the tone here, for the North -- Lincoln, who somehow managed to mitigate the wrath of war and his own melancholy with his humor, and who never referred to the Confederates as rebels; and Lee for the South, Lee, who always called the enemy 'those people.'

Relations between the two armies were often good-natured: the very names the combatants had for each other, Johnny Reb and Billy Yank, testified to this.

Only occasionally were relations between these enemies who so deeply respected each other exacerbated by official policy or by the prejudices of an officer.

The soldiers themselves -- boys for the most part, for it was a boys' war -- were high-spirited and amiable, and endured endless discomforts and privations with good humor."

(p. xviii and xix)

"There was bitterness enough in the war, especially for the South and for the women of the South, but probably no other great civil war was attended by so little bitterness during the conflict, and no other recorded so many acts of kindness and civility between enemies; certainly no other was so magnanimously concluded.

Read over, for example, that moving account of the surrender at Appomattox by Joshua Chamberlain:

            'Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood; men whom
            neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness
            could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished,
            but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us
            together as no other bond; -- was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a
            Union so tested and assured? ... How could we help falling on our knees, all of us
            together, and praying God to pity and forgive us all!'

The Americans thought themselves a moral people and carried their ordinary moral standards over into the conduct of war.

They thought aggressive warfare wrong -- except against Indians -- and the war could not get under way until Beauregard had fired on Fort Sumter; Southerners insisted that the firing was self-defense against Yankee aggression.

Every war is barbarous, but -- the conduct of Sherman, Hunter, and Sheridan to the contrary notwithstanding -- there was less barbarism in the Civil than in most other wars,
certainly less than our own current wars.

Both peoples, as Lincoln observed, read the same Bible and prayed to the same God; both armies were devout; leaders on both sides managed to convince themselves that they stood at Armageddon and battled for the Lord.

When the end came there was no vengeance and no bloodshed; this was probably the only instance in modern history where rebellion was crushed without punishing its leaders."

(p. xix and xx)

"Through our great good fortune," said Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes -- and he spoke for his whole generation -- "in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.

It was given us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing."

(p. xx and xxi)

"From the three hundred-odd narratives which are presented here there will emerge, I hope, a picture of the war that is authentic, coherent, and interesting."

(p. xxi)

"Only those who have worked in the rich fields of Civil War history know how apparently inexhaustible the material is, and how unorganized."

(p. xxi)

"Almost everyone could write, and almost everyone, it seems, did.

Surely no other chapter of modern history has been so faithfully or so elaborately recorded by ordinary men and women; in the American Civil War Everyman was, indeed, his own historian."

(p. xxi)

"The war was not all fighting; it was public opinion, it was the draft, it was prison and hospital, ordinance and supplies, politics and elections, religion, and even play."

(p. xxii)

"There are considerably more Union than Confederate narratives -- quite naturally, considering the relative numbers involved and the mechanics and economy of publishing."

(p. xxii)

"I could not put in everything: I could not even put in everything that was important. That is part of the story. The other part is that many of the things that interest us most did not appear to interest the generation that fought the war -- or that read about it."

(p. xxiii)

"It would be naive for me, or for the reader, to suppose that the accounts here reproduced are in every case authentic, or that even the most authentic are wholly reliable.

Most of those who claimed to be participants undoubtedly were so, but it would strain our imagination to suppose that all of our reporters actually witnessed everything they described.

As every student of evidence knows, people do not always see what they think they see and they do not remember what they saw.

There are doubtless many instances where soldiers, writing fifteen or twenty years after the event, deluded themselves, as well as their readers.

They embroidered on their original stories; they incorporated into their accounts not only what they had experienced but what they had heard or read elsewhere; they went back and consulted official records and doctored their manuscripts.

Soldiers whose companies did not actually get into a battle appear, in written recollections, in the thick of it; hangers-on, who have entertained their friends with the gossip of the capital for years, remember through the haze of time that they themselves directed great affairs of state.

All this is a commonplace of historical criticism, and there is no wholly effective safeguard against it.

Diaries, journals, and letters are obviously to be preferred to later recollections, but there is no guarantee that diaries and letters conform to the strictest standards of accuracy and objectivity, or that they come to us untouched by the editorial pen, while many volumes of reminiscences, otherwise suspect for age, are based on diaries and letters and have claims on our confidence.

Official reports are doubtless more reliable than merely personal accounts, but even official reports were often written months after the event and colored by imagination or wishful thinking, and there is no sound reason for supposing that the average officer, writing an official report, really knew the whole of what he was writing about.

We must keep in mind, too, that the Civil War was a far more casual affair than more recent wars.

There was no proper organization for keeping records or for writing history.

Even the most elementary facts are in dispute, and the statistical picture is a chaos.

We do not know the numbers of those who fought on either side, or of those who took part in particular battles, or of casualties, and Confederate figures in these fields are mostly guesswork."

(p. xxiii and xxiv)

"With the most elementary facts of the war in this state of confusion it is perhaps excessive to strain overmuch at discrepancies in accounts of the conduct of a company or a regiment in a particular battle."

(p. xxiv and xxv)

"That authors themselves, or editors -- often devoted wives or daughters -- have sometimes tinkered with the text is, however, painfully clear.

There is no protection against this, and nothing to be done about it short of going back to the original manuscript where that is available; ordinarily it is not available

And this leads me to a more important matter.

Not only have I not presumed to correct spelling or punctuation, I have not attempted to correct factual statements or misstatements.

To have done so would have involved both me and the reader in a wilderness of controversy.

There are, after all, hundreds of histories that attempt to set the facts straight.

Careful readers will therefore note many glaring errors in these accounts.

Almost every soldier, for example, consistently exaggerated enemy strength, and enemy losses, and two accounts of the same battle will confidently submit wholly inconsistent statistical information.

The reader must keep in mind that our contributors are not writing as scholarly historians.

They are giving their story from their own point of view -- a point of view at once circumscribed and biased.

They are not only limited in their knowledge; they are often ignorant, prejudiced, and vain.

Sometimes they are on the defensive; sometimes they are repeating rumor and gossip; sometimes they are yielding to the temptation of the purple passage; sometimes they are trying to make a good impression on the folks back home, or on posterity.

The reader is warned: they are not always to be trusted

But there are some consolations and some safeguards.

As we give both Federal and Confederate accounts the errors often cancel out.

The vainglorious give themselves away, and so too the ignorant and the timid, while those who write with an eye on the verdict of history proclaim that fact in every line."

(p. xxv and xxvi)

Henry Steele Commager
Williamsville, Vermont
August, 1950
Amherst, Massachusetts
February, 1971

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Tuesday, October 25, 2011

49. Frederick Douglass -- In His Own Words (On The Hypocrisy of the Slave Holders)

48. On the American Civil War -- A surprisingly "Casual" Affair